Practicing Medicine Without A License

Living with Cadell and Emily was not that much different for Andy than not living with them.

Emily had her nannies to take care of her when she was home from the hospital. Cadell slept in late most mornings and then went to the recording studio about ten o’clock to work until the late afternoons. After that, he either came home or performed with Killer Valentine at a bar late into the night.

Andy lived the life of a resident just as she had for the last several years, which meant working every waking minute that she could. Medicine is less of a calling than a cult.

After she got back to Cadell’s house, long after dark on most nights, sometimes she found him in the wide, country Italian kitchen, sipping herbal tea and noodling on the guitar with pages of sheet music spread across the rough-hewn kitchen table.

Every time she walked in, he sighed audibly, and his shoulders slumped like he had been holding himself together until she came back.

She did the same thing.

At the hospital, too many babies needed liver transplants. Too many parents hounded her to tell them when and whether it would happen. She had no answers. She did not believe in miracles. She could only cite statistics.

Many times before, she had gone home and cried herself to sleep, careful to be very quiet so that her father, a neurosurgeon, would not hear her. When she had started her surgical residency, he had told her that women didn’t make good surgeons because their hearts were too soft. Andy knew that blanket damnation was wrong, but she didn’t want to admit that he might have been right about her. She didn’t want to be too weak to be a surgeon.

When she went to Cadell’s house on those nights, Andy fixed herself a cup of decaf chai and sat with him, listening to the music that he was working on and telling him about what was going on at the hospital. It was a bloodbath. All her friends were being laid off because, as the youngest residents and physicians, they were all the last in, first out.

“I don’t even like going into the on-call room anymore. There’s never anyone there. It doesn’t even smell like Chen’s fish and cabbage anymore.”

Cadell smirked and plucked the strings on his guitar. The light above the table cast shadows over his hand so she couldn’t see what his fingers were doing. He said, “Funny, that’s not what I remember most about that room.”

They stayed up far too late on those nights, talking about inconsequential things and laughing over decaf tea until Andy finally begged off to go to sleep.

And she did sleep, a lot better than when she was living at home. She didn’t cry herself to sleep, anyway.

On her days off—and since she didn’t have to work at the clinics, Andy had a few days off—she spent time with Emily. The little girl was not getting noticeably sicker, but Andy wanted to readmit her soon to check her bilirubin levels.

The next Wednesday, Andy would have been working with patients down in the clinics but didn’t have to do that anymore, so she picked up Emily from Cadell’s house and went to the recording studio to shanghai Cadell for lunch.

She was responsible for keeping him out of trouble, after all. Nutritious food was part of it. Granted, she wasn’t cooking subjis and sambars for him, but she could at least see to it that he ate at a nice, organic restaurant that also had a good selection of vegetarian dishes.

A driver drove them to the studio in a black town car. Cadell had insisted on a driver for her and Emily, citing that there was some legal reason why Andy shouldn’t drive Emily around because she was Emily’s physician and something about the hospital and the money he had donated.

Andy was good with that. She sat in the backseat and played pattycake with Emily for the few minutes’ ride to the recording studio.

The little girl loved having her Dr. Andy around the house, and she toddled after Andy, stretching out her little arms and showing Andy her veins, believing that Andy liked blood and that was why she needed so much of Emily’s. Andy hugged her instead.

The driver pulled the car into the parking lot, and Andy made sure that the lady was okay with sitting with Emily for a few minutes while she went in to kidnap Cadell.

She found the band in the same recording studio as the last time, on the day that they had turned down that unsuitable liver for Emily.

They hadn’t been offered another one yet, but Emily was doing fine. Surely, she would be offered another one. She probably had another year before things got hairy. At least a year. Probably.

As Andy walked in the mixing booth, she looked through the wide window to the live room.

In there, most people in the band were lounging around, eating take-out from cardboard boxes with plastic forks while the instruments lay idle.

Cadell was leaning back in a chair, his guitar across his stomach, plucking the strings and listening to them. She knew him well enough to know that he was deep in thought about the sound of the notes.

Georgie, Tryp, and Peyton were all eating and relaxing.

The lead singer Xan Valentine was lying far back in an office chair with his feet propped up on a tall speaker. His long, blond hair hung over the top of the chair, pointing toward the floor.

A blond woman whom Andy had never seen before was inexpertly applying an electrostimulation device to the man’s throat, dragging the wand over his skin like she was doing an abdominal ultrasound instead of a precise procedure.

Andy’s jaw dropped as she strode over, slammed open the door to the recording room, and snatched the device out of the woman’s hand. “What the living hell are you doing?”

“It reduces inflammation,” the woman said. Her platinum blond hair was scraped back tightly into a bun.

“When it’s done right, not how you were doing it. Are you a physical therapist? A physician?”

The pianist, Georgie, was delicately eating small morsels with chopsticks. Georgie said, “Yvonne does that to him all the time. All the time. Sometimes a couple of times a day. I keep telling them that it’s not a good idea.”

Andy shook the wand at the woman. “I’ll say, it’s not. You are doing it all wrong. What is your training? Are you even licensed?”

The blond woman said primly, “Unfortunately, the doctor who was on tour with us couldn’t continue to stay on the road. He taught me how to do the electrostimulation.”

Georgie leaned back in her chair, crossed her feet on her keyboard, and pointed her chopsticks at the woman. “And the cortisone shots. Don’t forget to tell her how you stick a cell phone in his mouth so that you can see his pharynx, and then jab a needle into the side of his neck and shoot steroids directly into his vocal cords.”

“What!” Andy pulled the plug of the electrostimulation device out of the wall, whipping the cord across the studio. The machine whirred as it ground down. “Are you even a damn doctor?”

“Nope,” Georgie supplied, her face a rictus of grinning and triumph. “She’s an EMT.”

“Are you serious? This is practicing medicine without a license.” To Xan, she said, “She could have easily ruptured one of your cords. You must stop this. You certainly can’t do the cortisone shots ever again unless a licensed physician, a specialist, does it. She stuck a cell phone in your mouth?”

“She sure did!” Georgie called across the room, narcing happily with a big smile on her face.

“I cannot believe that any of you would allow him to do this. You are all complicit. You are all enablers.” Yes, Andy was quite aware that she wasn’t only talking about Xan’s steroids, damn it.

Georgie stuck the chopsticks into her box and held up her open hand, expressing her innocence. “Hey, Xan was supposed to have stopped doing the cortisone shots a month ago. You haven’t done any more, right?”

Xan shook his head. His long hair swayed where it hung off the back of the chair. “We stopped the cortisone shots. I’m dying for one. I feel like I can’t sing without them, like I’m going to squawk or crack, but I haven’t taken one in a month.”

Andy pressed her fists on her hips. “I should hope not. Abusing steroids causes rebound inflammation that is worse than the original problem.”

Georgie said, “That’s right. You tell him, sister.”

Andy wound up to righteous anger. “I cannot believe that you would allow someone who is not a licensed physician to stick a needle in your throat. Are you insane?”

Tryp, the drummer, waved his hand in the air. “Oh! Oh! I know the answer to that one!”

Xan shot him a dirty look.

Andy told Xan, “You need to be under the care of a licensed specialist. I can easily give you a referral if you need one.”

Xan looked her up and down, an uncomfortable feeling because she was still wearing dress slacks and a blouse from work that morning. Her hospital ID was tucked inside her blouse pocket. The clip peeked out. “Are you a doctor?”

Andy pulled herself together. “Yes, and a damn good one.”

“Can you give me cortisone shots?”

“No, and I wouldn’t if I could. They are, at best, a stopgap measure that is too often abused. You need proper therapy from a licensed professional.”

“So what kind of doctor are you?” he asked, looking at her with more interest than when she’d just been a booby woman hassling Cadell a while ago.

“I’m a pediatric hepatic transplant surgeon,” she said, giving herself a slight promotion as if she had finished her fellowship, assuming that she did finish her fellowship without imploding, “and a damn good one, but I’m not an otolaryngologist or a vocologist, so I know better than to stick a damn needle in your throat.”

“So what do you do?” Georgie asked, sitting forward to look at her better.

“I do liver transplants on children,” Andy said.

Georgie whistled, and Tryp said, “Wow.”

Xan thumb-pointed toward Cadell and asked Andy, “Why is someone like you hanging out with this wanker?”

Andy glared at Cadell, who was still lazily plucking the guitar strings and staring at the ceiling. She said through her teeth, “He’s my boyfriend.”

Xan asked Cadell, “Are you going to marry this woman?”

Cadell didn’t look up from where he was lying back in his chair. “Yep.”

Oh, they would talk about all this later. Don’t think that they wouldn’t.