CHAPTER 19

Instead of waiting around for Dr. Heidenheimer to give us the MRI results, I took the elevator down to nuclear medicine in the basement to find out for myself. The radiologist on duty must have been bored, because he agreed to show me the MRI film that Copeland Imaging had sent to Sinai Hospital. When I returned to the sixth floor, I saw Heidenheimer leaning on the high counter at the nurses’ station going through a blue binder. He looked up. “We got the report,” he said. I pretended I didn’t know. I let Heidenheimer tell me about the mass they found. He used the same wording as the radiologist had downstairs. “There’s a mass between the cheekbone and the maxillary sinus.” Heidenheimer seemed less concerned, though, than the radiologist who had stroked the coarse hairs on his chin repeatedly as he spoke to me, as if to soothe himself and ward off my grief and terror. There was no need. I was calm. Relieved, in a way. It turned out my father wasn’t a crybaby. It wasn’t nothing. At last, he would get treatment. Finally, the time had come to cut out the massive headache and give it a name.

As I pretended to hear the news for the first time, I noted that Heidenheimer didn’t mention the second shadow the radiologist had pointed to on the light box and identified as a brain lesion (assuring me brain abnormalities resulted from many conditions, including meningitis, a complication of TB). I thought it was odd that Heidenheimer omitted the brain lesion, so I had to tell him about it myself and reveal that I’d gone around him and had already been down to see the radiologist.

“No, they’re wrong,” Heidenheimer said. “What they think is a brain lesion is just a reflection from the other mass, like a double image.” He grabbed a fountain pen and sketched a few blobs on a scrap of paper and showed it to me. A blob with a mirror-image blob. Doctors, in my limited experience, assumed non-doctors were idiots who needed stick figure drawings to understand basic concepts. I believed Heidenheimer at first—I didn’t need his crude illustration. I may not have wanted the pain to be a phantom, but I certainly didn’t want my father to have a lesion on his brain. The thing between his cheekbone and maxillary sinus was enough.

“I’ll give your dad the results on evening rounds,” the doctor said.

“It could still be tuberculosis, though, right?” I said.

“Yes,” Heidenheimer said. “TB is still a possibility.”

“That’s good,” I said, a little surprised both Heidenheimer and the radiologist were keen on the TB theory. I bit my lip to keep from smiling. I didn’t want him to see how encouraged I was, afraid he might take it back. “So when do you go in there and do the biopsy?”

“Hold, on,” Heidenheimer said. “Not so fast. First, I want a consultation with an Ear, Nose and Throat man.” He scratched his head, then brought his hand down to scratch his wrist and slide his watch higher to peek at the time.

A chill prickled my neck and I shuddered. He was entitled to check his watch. He had other cases to see to. But I detected something more, a subtle shift in his attitude. The realization blew through me like a ghostly draft. I hugged my cardigan tighter. Dr. Heidenheimer didn’t want a patient like my father. He was trying to get rid of him. That was why he lied about the double image. Surely, radiologists knew how to read MRIs better than anyone else. They dealt with blobs and mirror images on film day after day. But Heidenheimer disregarded the radiologists’ report about the brain lesion because Heidenheimer was a neurologist—a brain man. If the brain were involved, Heidenheimer would have to take care of my father, a disheveled and difficult man who looked like he was dying of cancer. If just the sinus were involved, Heidenheimer could pass off the patient to an ENT doctor. I was starting to see what was going on. He was not going to help us. No one, not Dr. Cromwell or Dr. Heidenheimer, not Brenda, not my mother or sister, wanted to open the door even a crack and have to deal with the giant insect on his back.