Page 2 of Don't Tell Me How to Die

I looked up, and there she was, standing in my doorway, a dripping-wet pink umbrella in one hand, the tools of her ugly trade in the other.

The Angel of Death.

She was blond, in her early thirties, and still holding on to her kick-ass high school cheerleader body and flawless skin. Her name was Rachel Horton, and like the six other phlebotomists who had come before her, her job was to draw my blood three times a year to make sure I hadn’t contracted the same fatal disease that killed my mother.

It had been a medical ritual for me and my sister Lizzie for over a quarter of a century. But this was the first time one of those smiling bloodsuckers ever showed up in my office unannounced.

“Rachel,” I said. “Whatever it is, I have no time for you.”

She flashed me a perfect smile and held up her blue soft-sided medical tote bag. “I only need a minute, Mayor Dunn,” she said, as perky as a Girl Scout delivering a box of Thin Mints. “Dr. Byrne needs some more blood.”

“What did he do with the blood I gave him last week?”

“He said the lab screwed up,” Rachel said, capping off the ominous news with yet another sunny smile that was so genuine I realized I’d misjudged her. Rachel was not the Grim Reaper. She was more like one of those lovable yellow Minions, gullible enough to believe that the lab actually bungled a routine blood test.

The lab screwed up. I’ve been married to a surgeon long enough to know medical malarkey when I hear it. It’s a classic doctor ploy. Rather than tell you straight up that your first set of test results looks suspicious, they give you the healthcare equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”

But I knew the truth. My white blood cells were amassing the troops and were hell-bent on killing me just like they killed my mother.

“Make it fast,” I said, sitting back down at my desk.

“You’ll feel a little prick,” the sweet young thing said to me with a straight face, which never fails to make me wonder if she gets the sexual innuendo. She stuck the needle in my vein, and I closed my eyes.

It was a Thursday. I would have to wait till Monday before my hematologist made it official, but when you have a fatal disease hanging over your head for twenty-six years, you learn to arrive at your own medical conclusions before your doctor has the clinical proof and the balls to tell you what you already figured out.

I was dying.

“What’s so funny?” Rachel asked.

I hadn’t realized I was grinning, but I had to admit that my entire morning was rife with macabre humor. I was only a few weeks past my forty-third birthday, and I suddenly realized that I was going to be spending my forty-fourth with Minna Schultz. In hell.

Yeah, hell.

I’m a fairly popular mayor and a rather well-liked human being. On paper I look like a shoo-in to be ushered through the Pearly Gates and into the Kingdom of Heaven by St. Peter himself. That’s just because I’ve been able to hide the truth from the rest of world.

But I can’t hide from God, so I had no doubt that when my time was up, I was destined to spend eternity burning in hell for my sins.

TWO

Rachel removed the needle, put a piece of gauze over the vein, and taped it to my arm. “There you go,” she said. “You survived another one.”

Survived, I thought. Interesting choice of terms.

She zipped up her bag and gave me a cheery “Have a good one.”

I wasn’t having a good one when you got here, and I’m certainly not going to have one now, I thought, but I opted for, “You too. Close the door on your way out.”

Minna Schultz would have to wait. I went to my laptop and typed into the Google search bar:How often do labs screw up blood tests. Google, always trying to stay one step ahead of me, immediately gave me some options to finish my question:in cats, in dogs, in criminal cases, in early pregnancy.

“This is not a good day to test me, Google,” I said, banging out the wordsin humanson my keyboard.

I got ninety-six million results. I scanned the first few till I found an encouraging number. Labs make twelve million mistakes a year.

Yes, but out of how many, I thought, trying to decide if twelve million was a life raft. I was about to explore Google’s credibility quotient by typing inHow many dogs a year actually do eat homework, when my cell phone rang.

I looked at the caller ID and burst out laughing.

It said JIFFY ESCORT SERVICE.

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