The sky was slate gray the next morning as I stepped out of my Upper West Side apartment building and headed to the subway, reformulating my case to Dre. It had been all I could think about overnight, as I read and reread the various notes I’d made to myself throughout the previous day. When I had gotten home from work, Heather could tell I was in need of a distraction and had taken me out to a BYOB Indian restaurant to get my mind off things. But I found myself unable to talk with her about anything other than the hospital—my patients, my pills—and I doubled over after I tried to take my first sip of beer.
I wasn’t much of a conversationalist with her these days; I picked at my tikka masala as I stared off into space, trying in vain to divorce work life from my private life. But I was consumed by thoughts of Dre and Benny and of my own medical condition. Heather offered reassurance on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis, but it was of little use. We both knew statistics were on my side, but what if I was the outlier? Shortly after boxing up the leftovers, I crawled into bed and drifted off to sleep, returning to Dre and the lumps on her face. She ultimately needed to be on nine different medications, which I hoped to achieve, one by one, as soon as possible.
It had been a fitful night of sleep—I’d scarfed down the leftover Indian food at 3:00 A.M. and spent the next hour checking my email—but as I strolled toward the uptown subway station, just as the morning sun was rising above the East River, I realized that Ashley was right. Under her gruff exterior, Dre did kinda like me. It wasn’t quite like the relationships Jim O’Connell had with his patients, but it was something. It might give me enough of a toehold to get past the bait and switch. As I hopped on the 1 train toward Washington Heights, the idea of a career spent using unconventional methods to work with only the most difficult cases took hold of me.
Oh, McCarthy’s the guy who touches faces. Like an even weirder Patch Adams, he’s not for everyone, but there’s a method to his—
A lavatorial whiff of the 168th Street subway stop—sulfur and saliva today—cued me that it was time to stop daydreaming. As I stepped into the Tuberculator, my thoughts returned to the silver screen and my favorite movie, Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray relives the same day again and again. Life at Columbia, which often took on a cinematic quality, was the antithesis of that film. I liked to think that was a good thing. My experiences outside of work, by contrast, were relatively unremarkable. When Heather and I could eat, we ate; when we could sleep, we slept. And if the mood struck us, we devoured episodes of Lost. But the needle stick had upended all of that. Now I routinely found myself at home, nodding through dinner or staring at a wall, trying to regain the physical and emotional energy to handle the rigors of my job, while contemplating an uncertain future and uncomfortable possibilities.
The news wasn’t all bad. Benny had been stabilized and was expected to come off the ventilator in the next twenty-four hours, after the fluid was removed from his lungs, and Ashley had commended me in front of Dr. Chanel for convincing Dre to take the magnesium supplement. They were small victories, but they felt like something I could build on.
“Two pills,” I said to myself over and over as I approached the hospital. “I know you can do it, Dre.”
I exited the elevator and made a beeline for Dre’s room. I knocked on the door and called her name, but there was no response. “It’s Em,” I said loudly as I opened the door. The room was empty. “Dre?” I wrinkled my brow and wondered where she could be. Patients often left the floor for imaging studies, but I hadn’t scheduled anything for her. As I stared at her empty bed, an elderly white woman was wheeled into the room by a nurse.
“Where’s Dre?” I asked.
The nurse shook his head. “Who?”
“The woman who was in this room yesterday.” Patients were occasionally shuffled around based on the male-female ratio of beds and at times were clustered in rooms based on their histories of communicable diseases. “Tiny black woman,” I said, holding my hand up to my hip.
“Oh,” he said, helping the woman into bed. “Gone.”
“Yeah. Where?” I didn’t have much time before rounds, and nothing was quick with Dre.
“She’s gone, man.”
“What?”
“Left in the middle of the night.”
“What? How?”
“Grabbed her stuff and left.”
“She’s blind. She can’t just leave.”
“Just grabbed her stuff in the middle of the night and left.”
I shook my head. “That’s impossible.”
“Security tried to stop her, but she’s gone.”
My arms went limp; I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I hadn’t been aware until just that moment how emotionally sucked into Dre’s life I had become. The face touching, the playful nicknames, the agreement to take one pill. We were connecting. At least I had thought we were. Now I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. What if that was just how she was with everyone? I had assumed I was special when I wasn’t, and it hurt.
And I had told her that I might have HIV. That had seemed fine in the moment, when we were making progress, but now I felt vulnerable and uneasy about it, not to mention guilty. In the cold light of her absence, that level of sharing seemed manipulative. She was a poor homeless woman who suffered terribly from the disease. I was a doctor who wasn’t even sure he had it. It was hardly the equivalency I had presented to her. Maybe she saw through it. Maybe she hated me for bringing it up and using it to play on her sympathy.
It mattered all the more because Dre was my responsibility. Lalitha may have checked her in overnight, but technically Chanel and I were her doctors. I felt like I had failed her. She was headed out into the world without HIV meds, and she would be dead in a few months because I couldn’t get through to her. This sort of thing never happened to Jim O’Connell.
My body sagged as I exited the room and walked down the hall. I wanted to talk with someone. I wanted to go to Wendy’s and have another Frosty with Ariel. I couldn’t move on, but I had to. There were more patients to see, more notes to write. I closed my eyes tightly as four words began bouncing around my head: Why did she go?