Doc in the Box

by Elaine Viets

  “I admit Charlie gutted Milt’s office with the sensitivity of a starving sewer rat,” I said. “Even took the guy’s Waterman pen. And I’ve never forgotten what Hattie Harrigan tried to do to me when I broke my elbow. What a sweetheart she was. Called all my sources while I was laid up and said she was taking over my column. Fortunately, an outraged source called me, and I called you.”

  “And I nipped that ambitious little twerp’s takeover in the bud. Columnist!” Georgia snorted. “My ass.”

  It was one reason why I helped cover up her illness now. She’d helped me when I’d needed it most. I was not going to lose her. Both my parents were dead. My grandparents, too. I’d already lost the one man I loved. But I wouldn’t lose the one woman I cared about. If I had to drag her out of the grave with my bare hands, I was not going to let her die.

  So far, Georgia had successfully kept her bout with cancer hidden from the Gazette staff. She always wore boxy gray suits, so it was hard to tell if she’d lost weight. She preferred expensive blouses in seriously ugly colors like mustard, and they made her look kind of unhealthy, anyway. She’d had her partial mastectomy and axillary lymph node dissection during her vacation, so nobody paid any attention to her absence. The chemo was making her queasy already, so she kept a supply of Hefty bags in her bottom desk drawer in case she barfed without warning, along with a huge bottle of Percocet for the pain.

  “How did you do today?” I asked. “Did you need the Percocet?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I didn’t realize what an advantage it was to sit through a Gazette meeting drugged. Should have done it years ago.”

  That sounded like my funny, don’t-give-a-damn friend, the only person in the Gazette management I respected. But lately I’d been encountering a new Georgia, one who was sentimental and overgrateful and cried for no reason. The old Georgia never cried. I didn’t recognize this weepy, grateful Georgia, and didn’t like her as well as the old one.

  “You don’t have to do this,” the new Georgia said, her voice wobbling under a heavy load of tears. “You have columns to write. How are you going to finish them?”

  “I bought a laptop,” I said.

  “You did that for me?” she said.

  “No, I did it for me,” I said. “I needed one anyway.” That stopped the tears, thank god.

  Georgia was the smartest woman I knew. She made only one really dumb mistake. Her cancer was more advanced than it should have been because Georgia was terrified of mammograms. I’d been trying to get her to make an appointment for the last two years. She made excuses instead. “I’m too busy,” she’d say. Or, “I hate those things. Talk about your tit in a wringer.” Then she developed a lump she couldn’t ignore. Too late, she learned the discomforts of a mammogram were nothing compared to what she was going through now. The cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.

  “Dumbest damn thing I ever did, putting off that mammogram,” she said, “and that includes marrying my ex and joining the Gazette.”

  She gave me the bad news at Miss Lucy’s Lunchroom. It was a safe place for us to talk. Nobody from the Gazette ever went there, even if it was just around the corner. Miss Lucy’s specialized in tea and tiny sandwiches without crusts, served by sweet elderly women in ruffled pink uniforms. Georgia and I stood out there like a couple of streetwalkers at a finishing school, and it didn’t help that Georgia sounded like one.

  I arrived first, sat at a dainty pink table, and felt like the Incredible Hulk. The pink ruffled waitress brought a pot of cinnamon orange tea and a plate of cookies that tasted like ceiling insulation dipped in powdered sugar. I’d bet the paper doily they were on had more flavor. This must be bad news indeed if Georgia insisted on meeting me here, and I thought of a dozen different things that could go wrong, but I never guessed the truth.

  When Georgia charged through the tearoom door in a fungus-colored suit, she looked so shaky, I wanted to pour her a stiff Scotch, her usual drink. Instead, she swallowed some tea, made a face, and said, “Might as well get used to this swill. I can’t drink booze for eight months. I’ve got the Big C, Francesca.”

  “Cancer?” I was almost too frightened to say the word.

  “Yes, I have cancer. I need surgery, chemo, and radiation.”

  “How do you feel?” I said, sounding like a talk-show shrink.

  “Like shit,” she said, and the two women in Laura Ashley at the next table looked up like startled deer.

  I’ve always regretted I didn’t check their table again before I asked my next question: “What kind of cancer?”

  “Breast cancer,” she said, in a voice loud enough to be heard over the roaring web presses, except it was perfectly, pinkly quiet in Miss Lucy’s, so quiet I could hear one of the ladies at the next table pouring, and I knew both were eavesdropping. “Can you believe it? Tit cancer. Isn’t that a joke? I finally get a lump on this flat chest of mine and they want to whack it off!”

  I heard a teacup hit the floor and knew the ladies had been shocked to their Pappagallos. I called for the check, and drove Georgia home to her penthouse, stopping first for a bottle of Dewar’s for medicinal purposes. Then I spent the rest of the evening listening to her talk, while the lights of St. Louis came on around us, and the city shone like a movie set against the black sky. Two million people were below us, but we were absolutely alone.

  As the weeks wore on, Georgia’s anger and defiance gave way occasionally to an emotion I’d never seen before: terror. She kept up a brave front at the Gazette. Even I couldn’t tell she was fighting for her life. But sometimes, when she was with me, I saw the fear in her eyes. “I’m not afraid to die,” she said once. “But I hate dying. The Gazette makes it so undignified. I can’t stand to have Charlie slowly take away everything I’ve worked for.”

  I tried to tell her this was a curable cancer and she wouldn’t die, but we’d both seen too much death at the Gazette. The paper had an inordinately high number of staffers with cancer. There were nine brain tumors and four breast cancers out of a newsroom with less than one hundred people. Eight of those cancers were fatal. The staff blamed it on the old, radiation-leaking computer terminals and tried to interest OSHA in a study of the situation, but OSHA brushed us off, saying the sampling was too small and newspaper people had an unhealthy lifestyle with lots of stress and alcohol. That was true for some, but not all. Milt, for instance, used to run four miles a day, played tennis twice a week, and rarely drank.

  What we noticed was that the people who got cancer usually worked at their computers all day. Reporters who got out of the office frequently, and goof-offs like Charlie, our managing editor, who hardly touched a computer, remained free of symptoms. Georgia was a worker, and now she had it, too.

  Physically, Georgia was well enough to drive to her chemo and radiation appointments, but her fear made her so absentminded, she was an accident risk. So I drove her. As a columnist, I had enough freedom that I could sneak out to drive her, as long as I turned in my column. I bought a laptop so I could write while Georgia was in treatment, and if I had to, I finished my column at home that night. Georgia may have been sick, but she still cared what happened at the paper, and soon turned her conversation back to work. “Oh, hell,” she said. “You’re right. I’m not dead yet. I’m certainly alive enough to notice that Charlie screwed with your column when I took an hour off Monday afternoon.”

  “He wanted to test reader reaction,” I said.

  “I think you passed the test,” she said. “At three-thirty today, we had five hundred eighty phone calls. Nice work, Francesca.”

  “Don’t thank me,” I said. “Thank the readers.”

  The Wendell C. Moorton General Hospital loomed in front of us on Lindell Boulevard, a jumble of fifty years of mediocre architectural styles. We found a parking spot in the garage, a near-miracle right there. It was almost always filled.

  “Look at those bastards,” Georgia said.

  “Which ones?”

  “The doctors. They’ve got
the best parking spots, right near the entrance. It’s one thing if they needed a close parking space because they had a medical emergency. But this is ridiculous. Two ground floors of parking reserved for perfectly healthy physicians, while seriously sick people have to park four and five levels up, then wait for the elevators. No wonder people hate doctors.”

  “The doctors get to park free, too,” I said. “You know why God is God, don’t you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because he couldn’t get into medical school.”

  At least I had her laughing by the time we got to the hospital lobby, a pompous eighties addition that was supposed to be impressive. Instead, it looked like the hospital was trying to drum up more business. The green marble floor seemed slick as a skating rink, and terrified the patients who used crutches and canes. The bubbling fountain tantalized wayward toddlers. About once a month one took a header into the water. The atrium ceiling allowed the hot St. Louis sun to beat down on anyone waiting on the spine-crippling benches.

  Once out of the lobby, the hospital was a maze of depressing tunnellike halls, bristling with heating ducts and pipes. There were so many new buildings and additions, the only way to find your way around was by following one of the red, blue, green, or yellow lines painted on the floor. Radiation oncology was on the blue line. Georgia and I made nervous chatter as we passed pathetic sights in wheelchairs and on gurneys. Both of us were too frightened to talk about what we were really seeing.

  The radiation oncology center was in a separate wing of the hospital. We walked into a room that smelled stale and closed in. It was decorated in 1980s face-powder pink. The chairs were worn, the gray industrial carpet soiled, and the cheerful, anonymous pictures of pink flowers were crooked. The magazines were well-thumbed and six months old. The receptionist, a plump woman in a flowered smock uniform, could have been pretty, except for her dissatisfied expression. She was busy laughing with a radiation therapist, who was sitting on her desk. The receptionist ignored Georgia and me. We stood there for maybe five minutes while they talked and flirted, and Georgia, this new Georgia I didn’t recognize, was curiously passive. She just stood there.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Excuse me,” I said. “Can anyone here help us?”

  The receptionist looked up, frowned, and said, “What do you want?” The flirtatious radiation therapist oozed away.

  “We have an appointment for radiation therapy,” I said.

  “What’s your insurance?” she asked.

  “Medallion American Healthcare,” Georgia said, sounding like she was sleepwalking.

  “PPO or HMO?”

  “HMO.”

  “Where’s your referral sheet?” she said.

  “My what?” Georgia said, finally coming to life.

  “Your referral sheet. Your HMO requires it. If you don’t have your referral sheet, you can’t have treatment.”

  “But Dr. Partland said all I had to do was come over here. He didn’t give me a sheet.”

  “Sorry, can’t do it without the paperwork,” the receptionist said, not sounding sorry at all.

  “Dr. Partland’s office is in the next building,” I said. “We’ll go get the paperwork and be right back.”

  “Too late,” the receptionist said. “We’re closing in ten minutes. We’ve been here since eight this morning, and we’re not staying late. She can come in another day. Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “This is unconscionable,” I said. “This woman has cancer. You’re going to let her suffer because you don’t want to stay five more minutes?”

  “One day won’t make any difference,” the receptionist said in a snippy voice.

  “Easy for you to say,” I said. She shrugged in an irritating manner. I fixed her with a patented South Side glare and intoned: “I am a witch, and I curse you and your curse is that you will be treated the same way you treat these cancer patients.”

  “You’re nuts,” the receptionist said.

  “Let’s get out of here and get the paperwork,” Georgia said.

  “I can’t believe you gave that woman the evil eye,” Georgia said, as we walked to Dr. Partland’s office. “Where’d you get that, from one of your weird South Side relatives?”

  “The spirit just moved me.”

  “How did you do that stuff with your eyes? You looked like something in a horror movie.”

  “That’s definitely from my weird South Side relatives,” I said. “It’s the South Side glare, the most powerful force known to woman. I think I scared that receptionist.”

  “You sure as hell scared me,” she said.

  Dr. Partland’s office was next door in the Wellhaven Medical Arts Building, a yellow brick cube so filled with doctors’ offices it was nicknamed Doc in the Box. Georgia picked up her paperwork at Dr. Partland’s office, and a kindly receptionist called and rescheduled her radiation treatment for eleven-fifty the next day. I said I’d drive her to radiation oncology tomorrow and promised not to fight with the receptionist. I also promised not to fight with anyone at work, while I was making promises.

  I was a model columnist the next day. I sat quietly at my desk and worked on the Leo D. Nardo story. I’d forgotten to ask him how he’d gotten into the business, a fairly crucial question. And I didn’t ask where he went to high school. No St. Louis interview was complete without this revelation. The answers looked so harmless, but they revealed everything about you: your religion, your social position, and how much money your family had. My old high school, St. Philomena’s, for instance, let everyone in St. Louis know I was South Side, blue-collar, and Catholic. I needed answers to those questions, and I knew Leo often had a lunch-hour performance. It was eleven now, so maybe I could catch him. I called the Heart’s Desire.

  “Leo’s not here,” Steve, the manager, said. “I can’t find him. I’m frantic. He didn’t turn up yesterday. If he doesn’t show again today, I’ll have to put on a substitute again. I have Officer Friendly and his Arrested for Love routine, but the women don’t like him as well as Leo D. Nardo. This isn’t like him.”

  “Maybe he’s taking off for a few days,” I said, and realized what a horrible pun that was, considering Leo’s line of work.

  “Not without telling me,” the manager said. “He’s always so reliable.”

  Reliable was never a word I’d associate with Leo. He was a stripper, not a brain surgeon. He probably was with an enthusiastic admirer. He’d turn up soon.

  I said I’d call again tomorrow. It was time to take Georgia to radiation oncology. This time, she had the right paperwork, and she was shown straight into a special interior waiting room. I waited outside in the “caregivers area,” the depressing, down-at-heels, pink waiting room, and listened to the receptionist abusing other patients. She ignored a frail seventyish woman wearing a white turban that I knew was not a fashion statement. She’d temporarily lost her hair in the cancer wars. When Mrs. Turban asked for a cab, the receptionist snapped, “There’s a pay phone down the hall. It’s not my job to call cabs.”

  “But they always call one for me up in chemotherapy,” Mrs. Turban said.

  The receptionist shrugged. “Well, I’m too busy,” she said. I doubted that. I’d seen the open paperback romance on her desk.

  Next, a dignified old man with a four-legged cane hobbled up to her desk. He wore a white shirt and an old narrow-lapelled suit that was too big for him. “I’m here for my prescription from the doctor. He’s supposed to give me some pain pills.”

  “We can’t do that. Your primary care physician will have to do that,” she said.

  “But I called here and you said the doctor would write me a prescription.”

  “I said no such thing,” the receptionist said. “It must have been the person who answers the phones while I’m at lunch. She told you wrong. You’ll have to go to your primary care doctor.”

  “But I came here by bus,” the old man said, about to burst into tears. I was grinding my teeth, listening to this convers
ation.

  “You can stand there and whine, or you can get on the phone and do something about it,” she said. “There’s a pay phone down the hall.”

  “Can I have change for a dollar?” the man asked, resigned.

  “No. I’m not a bank. You’ll have to use the change machines in the cafeteria. Follow the yellow lines down the hall.” She left him to shuffle and stump his way through the endless hospital corridors. I followed him out and gave him my pocket change. When I went back to the waiting room, the inner door opened and Georgia came out, looking pale and shaken. “Get me out of here,” she said.

  “Me, too,” I said. I couldn’t wait until we were out of radiation oncology. Even the air in the hospital hall seemed fresher. The atmosphere was certainly less poisonous.

  “What a vision of hell. Are they as nasty inside as they are outside?”

  “Worse,” Georgia said. “I’m stuck in a M*A*S*H rerun. They joke around like I’m not there. I’m lying on a chilled table with my mutilated chest exposed to complete strangers and they’re swapping jokes and talking about their hangovers. It’s like I don’t exist. It’s horrible.” For a minute, she seemed about to cry. But she didn’t. I couldn’t get used to this new Georgia, who was so often close to tears.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone goes postal and takes a machine gun to that place,” I said. “It’s the meanest department in the hospital. They were really nice in X-ray, and the chemo nurses are angels. But this place seems to attract every sadist in the hospital.”

  “Well, if anyone loses it and starts shooting, a jury of their peers will give them a medal,” she said. “Especially if I’m on it.” That sounded more like the old Georgia.