Dr. Charles Smith rode in the back of his Lexus LX series sedan, a stack of patient files on the leather seat next to him. He frowned as he studied the open file on his lap, reaching behind his head with a hair tie to corral his long gray hair. He peered over his cheaters and caught his driver’s eyes in the rearview. “How much longer, Joe?”
Joe Diener, the large driver who also served as Smith’s bodyguard, nudged his sunglasses onto the top of his head and glanced at his phone. “G-Maps says another seven minutes, boss.”
Milwaukee’s traffic was nothing compared to some larger cities, but two rollovers this morning on different interstates had turned their normal thirty-minute commute into forty five.
Smith was antsy. He looked again at the open file and tapped his right index finger repeatedly on the page by the patient’s name. He cared about all of his patients, knowing every one of them came to him at a troubled point in their lives. The reasons why they came to his clinic were as varied as the women’s ages, beliefs, or the hue of their skin. But for each woman, the choice she faced was as intense as it was personal. He never judged, and he did his best to ease the pain of their decisions. The woman in the file tried to bury it, but Smith felt she was especially troubled. Was she alone? Was she being intimidated or manipulated? Had she been raped? He kept tapping but, though he tried, he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Smith’s no-show rate, the percentage of patients who failed to return for their follow-up visit, was less than five percent. But he worried about each one who didn’t return to see him. He was anxious to sit down with the woman in the file this morning so he could better understand her situation and comfort her.
When the sedan pulled into the clinic’s back lot a minute later, Smith had the files under his arm and was out of the car as soon as it crunched to a stop.