Page 3 of Dying for the Doctor

And what the hellareyou doing here, I ask myself as the elevator doors hiss open on Seven and I lead the Turners down the hall towards the S-through-Z section of the hospital rooms,stopping in front of a closed door with Wanda Turner’s name on the printed-out label.

Without waiting for an answer to my internal question, I knock twice on the door, then turn the knob and push it open.

Stepping inside, I take a deep breath, inhaling a sweetly feminine fragrance of lavender and roses. Strange, because I know for a fact that UNLV Medical Center does not use synthetic air-fresheners that could cause allergic reactions in patients. It also prohibits flowers inside the patient-rooms for the same reason. So where’s this sweet fragrance coming from?

But then I enter the room and gaze upon the sweet round face of the wide-eyed angel sitting up in bed, the sheets gathered around her gorgeously curvy body as she stares at me like I’m an alien monster about to eat her alive, and immediately I know why I’m smelling flowers and seeing rainbows.

It’s the same reason I’m grinning like a wolf and panting like a hound.

It’s because she’s mine.

Wanda Turner is mine.

She’s fuckingmine!

2

WANDA

Is that my doctor, I wonder as the hot panic settles down to a simmering nervousness when I see Mama and Papa enter the room behind this blue-eyed, broad-shouldered, hard-bodied doctor who’s grinning at me like a big bad wolf who’s just cornered a cowering rabbit.

“You’re not my doctor,” I blurt out when my frazzled mind spins back to the memory of that other doctor who checked on me earlier this morning, that vaguely creepy long-faced gray-eyed man whose name was Lenmore or Lenworth or something like that. I barely remember what happened after I somehow got my hysterically hyperventilating self safely to the ER in the middle of the night. I’d been up for three days straight trying to make my PhD thesis absolutely perfect, was so exhausted that I was hallucinating to the point where everything looked like a terrifying cartoon.

Of course, all cartoons terrify me, but that’s a different problem. Let’s tackle our neuroses one at a time. Baby steps. One foot in front of the other. Breathe. Oh, shit, here comes the panic attack again. Breathe, damn it, Wanda!Breathe!

The breath comes in sharply, and the fresh oxygen buzzes through my brain, bolts my body upright against the back-rest of this large hospital bed that I vaguely think is big enough for two. Why is it big enough for two? Why is that even a consideration right now? Who is this blue-eyed doctor and why is he grinning like that?

“You’re not my doctor,” I say for the second time, my eyes bulging like marbles, the whites probably spider-webbed with blood-red capillaries from being awake three days straight.

This handsome new doctor smiles pleasantly to show healthy white teeth, and the anxiety that flashed through me from his earlier wolfish grin subsides. The blue-eyed, brown-haired doctor strides briskly to the foot of my bed, snatches up the clipboard with practiced ease, flips through the charts and notes, the test-results and prescriptions. He taps his smooth-shaved chin three times, then grunts, nods, and smiles reassuringly at me again.

“No, Miss Wanda, I am not your doctor.” His smile is still warm, that strangely dark grin he’d flashed when he first saw me nowhere to be seen, like perhaps I’d imagined the whole thing. “But I am indeedadoctor,” he continues in a smooth tone that’s both friendly and authoritative, a very good bedside manner.

The thought of this doctor close to my bedside sends a strange tingle through me, and for a moment that image of his first reaction flickers in my head again. He’d definitely grinned in a very un-doctorly way when he first saw me curled up in bed, just a thin bedsheet and a flimsy hospital gown separating my bare skin from his probing touch. I don’t even have underwear on beneath the crinkly-clean hospital gown, a fact that suddenly excites me.

Wait, what? Why are your thoughts going there? You’ve never been particularly attracted to doctors. You would know by now—after all, you’ve seen a hundred doctors in your anxiety-riddled young life.

Actually, you aren’t so young anymore, comes the needling reminder from some part of me I can’t seem to turn off. Twenty-six and counting. Life expectancy for American women is the mid-eighties, that paranoid voice continues, but with your chronic anxiety that even medication can’tcontrol, you’re burning away all your vital energy in uselessly paranoid ruminations, thoughts spinning senselessly through your churning brain. So wave goodbye to living till you’re eighty-six. That isn’t a realistic expectation because you’re putting too much pressure on your heart by forcing it to beat hard and fast all the time, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-BUM!

I gasp and lurch as my heart hammers behind my boobs at the thought that I’m going to die sooner than most, maybe even right now! The heart-monitor I’m hooked up to spikes like the Dutch stock-market during Tulip-mania, and I clutch the sweat-soaked sheets and grit my ground-down teeth and stare at the doctor in expectant anguish, wondering if he’s going to just watch me die with that blue-eyed gaze that makes my toes curl under the bedsheets.

Mama and Papa are clutching each other, their faces whiter than my sheets, their bodies petrified and paralyzed, all of us watching the heart-monitor now, the blood pounding in my eardrums, my vision starting to blur as I tumble towards what I’m certain is my imminent death!

But just when I’m certain my eyeballs are going to explode from the pressure, I feel the doctor’s big warm hand take my shivering paw in his. The skin-on-skin contact sends a current of electricity through my entire body, but instead of inducing the heart-attack that always feels imminent, I’m suddenly calm in a way I didn’t think possible.

Well, notcalm-calm, I think when my eyes flicker back into focus and I see that my pulse is still elevated but rapidly slowing down, moving well below heart-exploding level. And now, ohmygod, I can almost breathe normally, can actually hear things other than the blood pounding in my eardrums.

“You’re all right, Wanda.” His voice is soft like a cloud, gentle like a breeze. “I’m going to take care of you. Fix you up so youcan be your perfect little self. I’m going to take care of you, Wanda. Make sure you stay perfect forever.”

Both Mama and Papa gasp in chorus at the word perfect. But that word only makes my tummy lurch, and I gather the bedclothes around me and try to disappear into the burrow of sheets. I’m smart enough to know that perfection is an unreachable goal. I also recognize that my parents love me dearly and only want the best for me . . . and, of course, the bestfromme.

And so I can’t stop striving for the unattainable goal of being perfect, making Mama and Papa proud, living up to my potential.

A potential that perhaps isn’t as magnificent as Mama and Papa hope.

“Let’s see now . . .” says the blue-eyed doctor, glancing at the clipboard, then sliding it back into the holder attached to the metal frame near the foot of my bed. He looks up at me and smiles. He’s mid-thirties, with a boyishly handsome face that’s somehow also got a hardness to it—just like there’s a hardness to his body. “Looks like you’ve been prescribed every anti-anxiety drug on the market. You’re like a walking, talking, smiling experiment for the pharmaceutical industry. How long have you been on this cocktail of drugs?”

I blink twice at his facetious comment about my health and sanity, my brow furrowing along the grooves created from years of grimacing, gasping, and gnashing. “Um . . . forever?”

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