The Blue Cotton Gown (14 page)

“Did you ever see that doctor again?”

“I would never go back there. I imagine he’s gone.”

I want to know what the young doctor looked like, but I don’t want to dredge up bad memories. Maybe the guy’s still around somewhere, a pedophile stroking young girls, thinking they like it, thinking he’s helping them develop their young sexuality, justifying it in his warped mind. I feel my face flush with anger. “Do you remember what he looked like?”

“Oh, I won’t forget. He was tall, with thick hair; brown, I think. He had long fingers, thin fingers like a girl. Very handsome. I can’t remember the color of his eyes. I don’t think I really looked into them.”

I take a long, shaky breath. I would like to hunt this pervert down, but I imagine he’s long gone. Penny sits calmly, her head tilted, inspecting one of the framed photographs on the wall. It was a long time ago for her. To me, it just happened.

“This is like where I live,” the woman says, nodding at the picture. “Where was it taken?”

“At the state park.” The photograph is one of mine, a view of the forest in the fall when the leaves are in full color. There’s a mist blurring everything, and the sun pouring through.

“I’m sorry all that happened to you,” I say, apologizing on behalf of the 99.9 percent of doctors, physician’s assistants, midwives, nurses, and nurse-practitioners in the world who are decent and car-ing people. Penny shrugs.

“Let me get you some samples of vitamins and calcium. Do you need anything else?” She shakes her head no. When I return with the bag, I want to hug the young Penny, the seventeen-year-old Penny. The middle-aged Penny is waiting near the door, her black cloth handbag over her shoulder, dressed in jeans and a bright red sweater.

*

I close my laptop and look out at the golden sun setting into Lake Erie. I could have taken the photograph off the wall and given it to her. I wish that I had.

mrs. teresi

My husband exhales in a drawn-out sigh. “What’s up?” I ask. “Huh?” We are hiking along the beach on Pelee Island, about a

mile from the cottage. The waves lap up on a slate rock surface as smooth as poured concrete. A round boulder sits exposed, left by a glacier millions of years ago. The air smells of rotting fish.

“The long sigh, what were you thinking?”

Tom breathes out again slowly. “I’m just thinking about Dottie, Mrs. Teresi, and the phone call I made to the hospital yesterday. I was wondering how she is now, hoping she’s better. When I called Dr. Hazleton from the Pelee Tavern, he said the clot was resolving and she was starting to eat, but if she gets febrile again I’ll have to take her back to the OR for the third time. If the infection is resistant to the antibiotics, I’m not sure what I’ll do.” He pushes back his rimless glasses and smiles sheepishly. “I know,” he says. “We said we wouldn’t talk about work this weekend, but I’m still worried. Sometimes I think I just want to walk away from it all.” He whistles

for Roscoe, who’s wandering along the edge of the lake but getting too far away. If that dog sees one rabbit, she’ll run for miles.

“Remember when the phone rang at home the other night about three?” Tom goes on. “It was the nurses calling. I had this sense of dread that something else would go wrong and I’d be called in for a hearing in front of the peer-review committee.” He picks up a stone and skips it across the water. “You know that happened to Dr. Runnion, don’t you? Hal Runnion? He was harassed for two years by the committee. They’re a board of docs authorized by the hospital to investigate surgical complications or medical errors, a real power group. They looked at every surgery Hal had ever performed, criticized him for every minor complication. Dr. Jamison told me he thought Runnion’s competitors on the committee were trying to destroy him. If that’s so, it worked.

“The peer-review committee has no checks or balances.” Tom shrugs and walks on. “Their meetings are secret, the minutes protected by law. I don’t know what went on in there, but he finally lost his privileges.”

“Dr. Runnion? I remember it now. There was a big article on the front page of the
Torrington Tribune.
They made it sound like he was a quack, a danger to the community.”

“Yeah, it ruined him, and the hospital’s required to report any restriction of a physician’s privileges to the National Practitioner Data Bank, on the Internet. After that, Dr. Runnion was finished, couldn’t get liability insurance and couldn’t get privileges anywhere else. He ended up having to close his practice and leave town. Too bad. He was a good doc . . . Really cared.”

I listen, for once not saying a word. I’ve never heard Tom talk like this before.

“There’s no way
any
surgeon can be without complications forever,” he goes on, “especially with the cases I have. But when the phone rang, I thought,
I like my work and I think I take good care of my patients. I know I do. But this tension isn’t worth it. I don’t like being a surgeon that much.
”

“Do you think that’s what’s going to happen to you? Peer-review harassment? Like with Dr. Runnion? Burrows and Hazleton are on that committee, aren’t they?”

My husband shrugs. We trudge on in silence, watching Roscoe run into the water and back.

Tom is a compassionate doctor, so careful in the OR, so competent, so calm. I know how much he’s concerned about his patients, and the OR nurses like him. Many of them come to him for gyn care, and they’re good judges of competence. It makes me sad to hear my husband ready to give up a career in medicine he’s worked so hard for.

“We can quit any time,” I say, reaching for his hand. “Maybe it would be for the best. There are lots of other things we love to do. Making ceramics, writing, photography, taking care of the honey-bees.” I pull him over to a smooth square boulder and we sit down. Far across the water, against the red sunset, two sailboats lean into the wind.

“Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning,” I say aloud.

Tom stares straight ahead, not seeing any of it, not the silver water reflecting the pink and red clouds, the seagulls gliding across the bay, or the white sailboats on the horizon. “Unfortunately,” he counters, “ceramics, photography, and honey don’t pay the bills.” “But the boys will be out of college soon. That will help. We could put the house on the market, get a smaller place, and go back to being hippies. Well, sort of hippies . . . but we’d have to have indoor plumbing!”

I go on, pressing my point. “I could sell my photography. You could expand the beehives and market the honey.” If we closed the practice, the worst part for me would be letting go of the staff, women who’ve stood by us since we started.

We rise and head back toward our cottage. Tom whistles again for Roscoe. She’s as rebellious as our boys, and she runs the other way. Finally we catch her and put her back on her leash. The knot

that had loosened in my stomach over the last few days begins to tighten again, like the collar around the dog’s neck.

Later I ask him, “Do you think we should call the hospital and check on Mrs. Teresi after dinner?” We’re at the Tim Goose Inn, the only gourmet restaurant on Pelee. It’s our last night on the island. “No, I’ll call in the morning. Dr. Hazleton is competent to cover.”

“But don’t you want to
know
how she’s
doing?
”

“No,” Tom snaps. “I called yesterday. I don’t want to hear about it until tomorrow, when we get back to Torrington. Even if she’s worse, there’s no way to get off the island tonight.”

“It’ll be okay,” I say quietly, wanting to mean it. “Yeah, probably.”

Then we say nothing. After dinner, we pick up our bikes where we left them in the bushes and pedal back to the cottage. It’s almost dark now. Roscoe follows on her leash as we roll through the dusk over gravel roads, past the campground with campfires burning and the marina with the little lights from the fishing boats. I think again how it would be to sleep without concerns about taxes, office finances, peer-review committees, surgical complications, or the suffering of patients. Tomorrow we will go home again, back to the cares of the world.

It has been a long time since the only responsibilities we had were to ourselves, our family, and God.

Dream of Flying

For three days I’ve managed without my sleep medicine. Tom’s worried I’m drinking too much. Maybe I am, but I’m trying . . . I stand in the bedroom, listening resentfully to his soft snore, then open the glass door to the porch. High in the sky the crescent moon holds a bright star in its arms. I’m restless tonight and I don’t know why;

I’m exhausted, but my brain won’t turn off. With a shrug of disgust, I go back to the bathroom for the jam jar of scotch, then return to the deck chair overlooking Hope Lake.

Mica hasn’t called for a month. If I say anything, he’ll be con-sumed by guilt and even less likely to telephone. My oldest has a problem with guilt. I don’t know if he got that trait from Stacy or me, but it wasn’t learned from Tom. I don’t think Tom ever feels guilty. We’re out of milk and toilet paper. I should stop at the store after work. The thoughts free-fall through my mind as I stare into the woods.

It’s quiet tonight. Then the wind comes up, and the alcohol settles me. “Thank you,” I say out loud into the darkness. Thank you to whom? Thank you to God? Thanks to the booze? Thank you to the comfort of the dark forest and lake below?

At the foot of my bed I drop my terry robe and crawl in beside my gentle, hopeful husband. I sleep . . . then I dream:

Four women, naked under their thin blue cotton gowns, wait on four chairs in the exam room. They sit like a Greek chorus, muttering secrets they won’t tell the midwife.

One is young and afraid. Her long brown hair hides her eyes. She’s pregnant by her fifty-year-old stepfather. One is tall and im-patient. Her coiffed wig hides her baldness. She has eight months to live. One is obese and ashamed. She has bruises on her back and doesn’t please her husband anymore. One is shrunken and wise. She had sex with herself before breakfast.

From the corner of the exam room, I watch unseen. I too am naked under my exam gown.

Kneeling on the cold linoleum floor, I pray, adoring these women whose lives are as knotted and scarred as my own. The sun rises in the windowless exam room and the walls fall back.

Like a red hawk, I rise.

When I look back, the four women are flying with me, and their blue exam gowns open like wings.

*

chapter 8

caroline

The first day back in the clinic after a break is the hardest. It takes me a while to get in the swing.

This morning the office is tense. Donna is crying in the kitchen, but before I can find out what’s going on, a petite Asian woman stops me in the hall. “Hi, Patsy. Do you remember me?” I’ve got other things on my mind, but I answer politely, “Mmmmm, you look
familiar.
”

“You did my first delivery, don’t you remember? I’m Caroline, the patient whose baby was breech at thirty-eight weeks, then head down, then breech again. Dr. Harman was planning to do a C-section, but just before going into the OR, he did one last scan and found the baby was head down again.” She waits for me to remember.

“You’re Caroline Akita.” My face lights up. “How could I forget.” “I just wanted to say hi. I saw the other nurse-practitioner for my

gyn annual. Your schedule was full.”

As always, I’m apologetic. “Sorry.” I give her a one-armed half-hug. Watching the tiny woman walk away, I think back to the birthing room. When was this, six months ago, a year?

*

“So what do you want to do?” Dr. Harman is asking the patient after doing the final ultrasound in the triage room of the birthing center. “The baby’s in position, head down again. You’re already three cen-

timeters. Maybe we should get labor started before the little guy turns again.” We all agree.

Tom breaks Caroline’s water bag with an amnihook, a slender plastic device that looks like a long white crochet needle. I write on the admission note,
Induction of labor at term, artificial rupture of membranes. Diagnosis: Unstable lie.
The fluid is clear, not bloody or stained, so Tom goes back to the office.

Two hours later, the patient is dilated to five centimeters. Contractions are coming every six minutes, but Caroline never groans, never moans, never asks for pain medicine. Once she says something in Japanese to her husband. The man places his hands on each side of her face and kisses both her eyes.

There’s nothing much for me to do, so I observe from the rocking chair, occasionally murmuring words of encouragement. “You’re doing so well.” “That’s perfect, Caroline.” “Go with your body. Don’t try to get away from the pain. The contractions will only hurt more.”

Mozart plays on the boom box, the fetal heartbeat remains 145 with good accelerations, and the mother’s vital signs are all normal: my favorite kind of labor. But when I do the next vaginal exam, I’m surprised to discover that the fetal head, which was engaged at zero station earlier, is now transverse and out of the pelvis, meaning that the baby has moved backward and is now turned sideways. This isn’t good.

“How’s she doing?” asks Jay, the concerned husband.

“Still five centimeters, but don’t be discouraged. The baby’s just trying to get into position. Time to get up and moving again, Caroline. Why don’t you try squatting, and, Jay, you can stimulate her nipples. See if you can make the contractions stronger.” The labor nurse, Joy, draws me toward the door.

“Everything okay?”

“The head’s not engaged anymore. It’s turned sideways now, transverse. I know I could start Pitocin, but Caroline’s doing so well,

and she wants to go naturally if she can . . . I’m going to give her two more hours, then if there’s not good progress we’ll augment her labor. You’d better check fetal heart tones more frequently, and I better level with the couple. Let them know what I’m thinking.” From two until four, Jay holds Caroline as she sways back and forth in a slow dance, one of his hands on her breast, twiddling her nipple. Contractions are now three minutes apart. When I next examine the young woman, I’m pleased to find the head back deep in