I'm Glad About You(3)

Beside the memory of this plenty, the one platter of Brie, Swiss, crackers, and seedless grapes that Lisa had bought at a deli two blocks away looked exactly like what it was—lame. It was already finished off a mere thirty-five minutes after the first guests had arrived; the piranhas had swept it clean and moved on to the consumption of more wine and booze, of which there was a river.

Lisa picked up the empty platter and held it over her head. “Go back and talk to Seth,” she ordered Alison.

“We didn’t like each other, Lisa,” Alison said clearly, hoping this would put an end to the discussion.

“You talked to him for three minutes! You have to try harder, I mean it. I’ve been in New York a lot longer than you and I know what’s out there. Trust me. He’s the only guy in the room smarter than you.” Having delivered this pronouncement with definitive finality, she sailed off into her minuscule kitchen.

He’s not smarter than me, Alison said to herself. Which, she admitted in her proud and lonely heart, was the problem.





two





“NO, HE DOESN’T have a temperature but he’s been extremely fussy for five days, it’s been five days and his nose is running nonstop,” the determined woman announced. She clutched a miserable two-year-old on her knee and talked over the kid’s head impatiently, like he was some kind of unmanageable ventriloquist’s dummy, although he was really quite patient, Kyle noticed. Not listless, just tired. Slightly heightened color in the cheeks but no tears or frustration, no fussiness whatsoever. “I saw Dr. Grisholm last week and he said that it was a virus and there’s nothing anyone can do for a virus but this has been going on much too long and he needs an antibiotic. I don’t know why you people can’t just prescribe that stuff over the phone, it’s not going to hurt anybody and we need it and I’ll tell you I know you make us come down here to pick up the prescription just so you can charge us for the office visit and it’s ridiculous, the way you are gouging us when all we need is an antibiotic! He’s sick! He’s really sick! And I’m tired of all this messing around with the insurance company. If there was someone to complain to I would, I would really complain but, well, you’ve fixed that, haven’t you, no one is even allowed to have an opinion without being charged for it.”

Kyle reached out his hands with a gentle confidence, holding them open toward the child with a simple gesture. “May I?” The bottle-blonde mother was only too willing to get the kid off her lap. She handed him over abruptly. The baby looked up with mournful brown eyes as Kyle swung him through the air with a breezy lift—that always made them grin or giggle, no matter how bad they felt—and set him on the edge of the stainless steel counter, rather than the examining table. They liked that too.

“Is that safe?” the dreary mother asked.

“It is when you have a big boy, like Joseph, who’s not reeeeally sick,” Kyle observed, ruffling the kid’s curls easily, like he was some kind of pet dog. He floated his fingers under both sides of the boy’s jaw, palpating the glands so gently the kid thought he was being petted. The little boy looked up at Kyle with contented adoration while Kyle carefully wiped his nose with a Kleenex. “Let’s just take a peek into your brain here, Joseph, just for the heck of it,” he said.

“I don’t care what you do ‘just for the heck of it,’” the mother snapped, refusing to fall for the young doctor’s charms. “As long as I get a prescription.”

Kyle cupped his left hand around the child’s chin, to hold his head steady, while he gently inserted the otoscope into the tiny ear. It took only seconds to record the tinge of pink around the drum and the suggestion of a clear discharge; it wasn’t much but it did put forward the possibility that the cold might be moving into the ears, and he might in fact assuage the woman with a scrip for Zithromax without completely compromising his principles. Even as the thought passed through his consciousness, he regretted the impulse. There was no question that antibiotics were still rampantly overprescribed in children, they rarely did any good, and the consequences both immediately, in terms of diarrhea and other digestive disorders, and in the long run—ever more refined strains of bacterial infection which increasingly resisted these previously effective treatments—were not insubstantial.

“Has he been pulling at his ears?” Kyle asked, hoping the hideous mother might provide him with more reason to just do what she wanted, so that he could be done with this.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Why can’t you tell if he even has an ear infection? Isn’t that what that thing is for?”

The woman was awful, no question. That didn’t mean he could do something his medical training warned him would be potentially damaging to her child.

“There’s some indication of a slight infection but honestly I’m not convinced this is bacterial,” he started, cautious. “Unless it develops further there’s really no indication that an antibiotic is going to do anything more than give him a stomachache, on top of the cold. I’m inclined to agree with Dr. Grisholm; it’s probably viral. In a couple of days I think you’ll start to see some improvement.”

The horrible mother didn’t go for it. He had known she wouldn’t. “I came down here,” she informed him, her voice rising. “I came all the way down here and all you can do is tell me he’s sick? That’s ludicrous. And you know I’m going to be charged for this, there will be a copay, or a deductible, and I didn’t want to come anyway, I said, ‘Just give me the prescription!’ And your nurse—whatever her name is, on the phone, she was the one who insisted he had to be seen by a doctor and now I came all the way down here to be charged for nothing? Are you kidding me? I mean, seriously, are you kidding me?”