I'm Glad About You(4)
“I’m giving you my best advice,” Kyle began again.
“Your best advice is not what I want,” she informed him. She took a step forward, reaching out to snatch her child back from Kyle’s now-suspect care. Startled by the suddenness of her move, he took a step backward and relinquished the boy without argument. “I want to see another doctor,” the woman announced. “I want another doctor!”
She had not yet made it out the door, but her voice was loud and had already breached the privacy of the examination room. Kyle knew that she was well within her rights to ask for a third or even fourth opinion on this matter, and that as soon as she had stepped out into the hallway with her impatience and her complaints, the nurses and aides on shift would scurry about and do her bidding, avoiding his gaze as they bowed to the patient’s right to usurp his authority. He also knew there were two other doctors present in the building who would have little trouble issuing a scrip for Zithromax, which is the easiest thing in the world, without even examining the child.
“Could someone help me here?” she yelled. It was excruciating, watching her swing that kid to her shoulder just roughly enough to startle tears and a wail of anxiety out of him. She tossed a contemptuous gaze back at Kyle, as if to accuse him of making her child cry, and turned the doorknob uselessly, while she struggled to bend over and pick up her purse, a brown-and-black designer sack which clearly cost a fortune while simultaneously looking like knocked-off sophomoric junk. He had known girls in college who carried bags like that, from which experience he also knew that women who carried designer bags were not to be messed with. In addition, he was aware that if he didn’t issue the prescription and someone else did, the office manager, Linda, would make note of it in the daily report she emailed to the local headquarters of the HMO which administrated their practice. And then that report would worm its way through seventeen levels of health care bureaucracy, before winding up as a reprimand in the file they kept on him and examined every six months when his performance came up for review.
The kid was wailing. The horrible mother was hissing a long string of complaints under her breath as she struggled with the kid, the designer bag, and the doorknob. It wasn’t worth the headache. “I’m happy to give you a prescription, if that’s what you want,” Kyle said, without inflection. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a pen. “I just wanted to make sure you understood the drawbacks.”
“I understand the drawbacks for you, if I don’t get that prescription,” she snapped back. He stopped, pen in midair, and stared at her. If he was going to be bullied into writing a scrip against his better judgment, he was not going to let her be hateful about it. They stared at each other for the briefest of instants before she smiled tightly and nodded. “Sorry. I am just really on my last nerve. You know how it is when your kid is sick! Just everything wears you out.”
“Of course,” he said, pulling out the prescription pad and scribbling silently. He ripped the top page off and handed it to her. She took it with little grace, but then, he offered it with none. With his left hand he reached behind him and opened the door for her with the careless ease of a magician. The casual gesture revealed her wild struggle with the doorknob for what it was: cheap drama.
Completely fried, and it was only two o’clock. His shift went until seven. Most of the young patients of Pediatrics West were brought in by women like this one, upper-middle-class suburbanites who didn’t have the good grace to be thankful for the money and the schools and the parks and the half-acre lots every single house stood on, much less the immediate access to health care anytime some kid looked sideways, or sneezed. The whole northwestern suburban sprawl around Cincinnati was a veritable slap in the face to Betty Friedan and the seminal revelations of The Feminine Mystique. It was 2012, and these women were perfectly happy to have their husbands run off to high-paying jobs halfway across town, leaving them bored and alone with children whom they didn’t like and who didn’t particularly like them back. As long as the money came in and they didn’t have to do anything for it aside from wiping noses and making lunch, they were content in a kind of nasty, she-devil way. Again Kyle felt a pang of guilt as soon as the snarling judgment flitted through his consciousness—there were plenty of women whom he knew personally who were vastly more caring than this harridan—but he had little time with which to berate himself for the quick spite of his exhausted brain. In the waiting room, the bedraggled crowd of infected kids was stacking up. He had to stop thinking and move on.
“Kyle?” A voice behind him shook him out of his tailspin and he turned, the gentle, practiced smile which was his physician’s calling card at the ready. The woman who stood before him returned it with a good-natured sincerity which shamed him in its innocence. “I thought that was you! Do you work here?”
“Mrs. Moore, hello!” Kyle felt a fast and fierce jolt in his heart, which he quickly moved past as he shook her hand with his best presentation of calm competence. “Yes, I’m doing my pediatrics residency here. What, what are you doing here?” He looked around quickly to see if she was somehow attached to any of the sick children—or the young mothers—in the waiting room but she laughed and shook her head. “Howard has been having some trouble with kidney stones, and he is really in a lot of pain; it’s been horrible, he can’t keep the painkillers down, he just vomits up everything,” she said, assuming like everyone that any doctor must be interested in the most intimate facts of even a near-stranger’s health. “He’s been seeing Dr. Drake, in the urologist’s office down the hall, but he couldn’t even get out of bed this morning, so I had to bring in the urine sample.”