The next day, Dr. Andy Kumar trotted back into Emily’s hospital room, evaluating the test results and notes on her father’s chart on the tablet. “I see that you have persevered, Mr. Glynn.”
Emily’s father looked up from where he was softly playing the guitar to entertain the child. A stack of picture books was strewn across the white sheets and beige blanket from where he had been reading to her.
Emily was lying in the bed, exhausted by her illness. Her brown eyes were bright and happy as they always were when her father played music for her, even though he was practicing scales. He was always careful to play his guitar quite softly, which Andy appreciated. Some of her other patients’ parents weren’t so thoughtful, and she’d had to convince them to turn down their music that they played at all hours of the day and night.
He was curled around the guitar, his muscular arms supporting it while it rested on his thighs. His black hair, tipped with bright blue, swung when he looked up at her.
He said, “I gave that up. All of it.”
“And I’m glad to see these results, Mr. Glynn.” No sense in allowing any recrimination into her voice. He had been clean for eight months with only that one slip during the first month. From what she had been able to tell from the test results that had barely picked up the traces of it, it had probably been very little and possibly only a few times, as if he had weaned himself off over the course of a few days, a staggering feat.
Emily said, “Daddy’s doing scales again. I want him to play ‘Rock Like Rome Is Falling,’ but he’s just playing scales.”
He grinned at her, still clamping his fingers around the neck of his guitar. “Maybe in a minute.” He turned his face back to Andy, and his dark eyes took on that sexy twinkle. His smile warmed. “We do this every time I’ve been gone for more than two days. Not Mr. Glynn. Call me Cadell.”
Oh, the problems with being on a first-name basis. “Thank you, Cadell.”
This was the point where Andy was hesitant to return the familiarity. She was a small, chubby, female doctor in a surgical profession. While the atmosphere was certainly better than it had been even ten years ago, the surgical specialties were still dominated by men, especially a specialty as esoteric as hepatic transplantation. Respect was hard-won.
And yet, little Emily Glynn had been Andy’s patient for nearly eight months now, and Cadell had been insisting on a first-name basis ever since the beginning.
There had been more than a few long nights when he had been sleeping in a chair beside Emily’s bed, and he had roused when she came in for midnight rounds. After she had finished her rounds, they tended to talk for several hours, sometimes through her only chance to sleep or go home.
Sometimes, the intensity of her specialty bordered on being too much for her. Andy didn’t know how she was going to deal with a husband and children when they came. The very thought of children and this lifestyle sent panic-flutters through her chest.
Andy had told Cadell about her concerns a few weeks ago around two o’clock in the morning, when Emily had been asleep in the bed and they had been whispering, their heads near each other.
“Why don’t you quit?” he had asked her. “Why don’t you do something else, something that will allow you to live your life the way that you want to?”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said. “My parents want me to do a prestigious fellowship and have a high-power career. I can’t be just a pediatrician or a GP or something.”
The concern in his dark eyes had surprised her. “But what about what you want?”
She hadn’t been able to answer him.
Surely, if she should be on a first-name basis with any of her patients’ parents, it should be Cadell Glynn.
She let herself smile at him over his chart, which showed normal liver functions, no viral antibodies on even the most sensitive of Western blots and PCR amplifications, and no evidence of any recent drug use. “And call me Andy.”
Cadell’s eyebrows twitched up, but he looked down at the guitar on his lap with just a fleeting smile.
From the bed, Emily said, “I always wondered why you called her a weird name. Her name is Dr. Andy.”
Cadell chuckled. “I am dying for a cup of coffee again. Would you like to get a cup of coffee, Andy?”
Her head had felt as if it were stuffed with cotton for an hour, and between her patients’ needs and the continuing, furtive gossip in the corridors about the Medicare fraud verdict, she had not managed to get lunch that day, either.
She shrugged. “I would like a chai. We could go together.”
He looked up, the dark glitter in his eyes focused on her.
Emily asked, “What’s uch-eye?”
Her father smiled at her and handed her his phone. “Chai. It’s tea. Indian tea. It has cinnamon in it, like I put on your favorite toast. We’ll be back in just a few moments, baby. I downloaded a new game for you.”
Emily squealed and started poking the screen on his phone.
Andy noted that the patient was not too lethargic to respond to a new video game, which was an excellent sign.
Cadell laughed and stood his guitar against the wall behind him. He pushed to his feet, stretching his arms above his head. His fingertips nearly swept the high ceilings.
Andy had checked his chart once to see just how tall he was. His height was an excessive, ostentatious six feet and four inches, a number that had staggered her. She didn’t know anyone else who was even nearly that tall.
His liver must be enormous. If he ever donated it, they could probably cut it up into five recipients, if only he had enough ducts.
But of course, Cadell would never be allowed to donate it because they knew his medical history. He was a former IV drug abuser, assuming that he was not a current IV drug abuser. His body could be harboring viruses—HIV, hepatitis viruses—and it was not worth the risk to a patient to transplant a diseased liver into them. With the immunosuppressive drugs that transplant recipients must take, any virus that was dormant in his liver would reactivate and kill the recipient swiftly. It would be unethical to allow it.
So, no matter how much he protested, no matter how excellent a match he was by every other measure, Cadell was not a candidate to donate a portion of his liver to his daughter, not unless the situation was so dire that the possibility of infecting Emily with HIV or HBV outweighed the risk of withholding the liver.
Which meant that the child would be dying.
It meant that Emily would be the one out of four.
Surely, a liver from a healthy donor would become available before then.
Cadell strode across the room to Andy, covering the small room in just a few strides of his long legs. “Shall we?”
She smiled at him. “Certainly.”