Left to wait for him, my eyes wander over his pictures and degrees before stopping on a wall of ornate wooden shelves. Most of the contents look like antique medical instruments.
My breath catches when I spot a gold cylinder.
“Where did you find it, Biz?” He gives me a half smile. “Should’ve known.” He shakes his head.
Why doesn’t he seem surprised about this?
It’s heavy in my hand. I run my fingers over it.
“I’ll take it.” He holds out his hand.
No.
Not until he tells me what’s happening.
The door closes, as Dr. Fraine strides into the room. “My apologies, Ms. Ahrens. I had a surgical consultation that ran over. How have you been?”
My mind is screaming at me. So loudly I almost miss the doctor’s greeting.
Why do these hallucinations feel like real memories?
I aim to tell the truth, but I miss.
“A little worse.”
But he doesn’t buy it.
“Ah, I see. What symptoms have you had since our last visit?”
Leveling with him, I tell him about the past three days. The worsening symptoms. The nosebleed. The strange hallucinations.
He goes over my medication list and looks over my test results from last week. Steepling his hands, he taps them against his lips before saying sympathetically, “I would like to start seeing you at the hospital for our appointments. We can make some medication adjustments, but as I said previously… they aren’t a cure. We’re managing symptoms at this point.”
No cure.
Just the end moving closer.
“I know.” My voice sounds small.
While the doctor types in prescription changes, my eyes find the object again, hoping to jog more memories.
Dr. Fraine looks up and notices my attention on the wall. A brief smile crosses his face before he shakes his head. “I really should get rid of that clutter. My father’s artifacts were part of the office I inherited.”
He walks to the shelf, picking up an old thermometer resting in front of the gold tube. “He liked his trinkets.”
“He was a doctor, too?”
Putting the thermometer down, he pushes the cylinder behind an old medicine bag. “Yes. His career meant more to him than anything else. He was very dedicated.”
Dr. Fraine, while warm, doesn’t usually get personal on my visits. He effectively puts an end to our conversation about his father by handing me a list of medications with instructions.
“Do your parents want to speak to me about your treatment regimen or your diagnosis? I know it’s a lot to explain.”
That’s if I tell them at all.
I don’t trust my voice, so I simply shake my head. How do I tell my doctor that I don’t want to tell anyone about this? That I want my last days, months… whatever I have left, unfettered by spoiled interactions. People deciding to stay away, treating me like I’m sick, or maybe even worse, sticking around, either in pityor a sense of duty. But if they actually cared, it would make my inevitable passing fraught with more unnecessary pain.
Like all my appointments, Dr. Fraine reviews my vitals, listens to my lungs, and checks my eyes. With his nurse sitting quietly in the corner, he gives me a shot, a cocktail of meds.
