He looks up at my smiling face. He’s struggling now. He wants to be angry with me for making him wait, but I’m making it challenging for him.
Before he can say a word, I grab the stool I keep in the room and sit down. I always sit down with my patients. I don’t think Philip has sat down once in the last fifteen years (including possibly for meals), but I make sure to always do it in examining rooms. And when I sit with Mr. Kellogg, I lean forward as if whatever he has to say to me is intensely important.
“Are you doing okay?” I prompt him.
Finally, I see him cave. “I’m okay, Doctor.”
I smile wider at him, and he reluctantly smiles back. I suppose I have to thank my father for this gift. The ability to turn up the charm. And I can turn it off just as easily.
“We heard you had an emergency,” Mrs. Kellogg speaks up. “I hope everything is okay?”
I tilt my head to address my patient’s wife. I considermyself very observant when it comes to the human body, and it’s very hard not to notice the hint of purple fading into yellow below Mrs. Kellogg’s left eye. I’m so taken aback by it, the smile slips from my face and I can’t manage to answer her question.
“She can’t tell you that!” Mr. Kellogg snaps at her. “It’s a privacy violation, Diane. What’s wrong with you?”
“Oh.” Mrs. Kellogg drops her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry to me. Say sorry to Dr. Davis.”
She doesn’t lift her eyes. “Sorry, Dr. Davis.”
I keep staring at that bruise under her left eye. I remember from his chart that Mr. Kellogg is right-handed. So a right hook would end up hitting her in the left eye. I do recall she was at his pre-op appointment, and I remember him snapping at her. I didn’t like it, but I figured it was none of my business.
But now she’s got a black eye.
Mr. Kellogg is not a large man. But his wife is a frail little thing, and even in a weakened state from his surgery, I believe he could’ve done this to her. Scratch that. I believe it’slikelyhe did this to her.
I wish I knew before the surgery. I wish I knew when his abdomen was sliced open and he was under anesthesia. One slip of the knife and I could have nicked his bowel. If I had done that, he wouldn’t be smacking around his wife. He would be experiencing a world of hurt right now.
But no. I would never do that.Never.
I’m not like my father. I feed stray cats. I save lives.
I take a deep breath and ask Mr. Kellogg to get up on the examining table. He pulls up his gown to reveal the rowof vertical staples I embedded in his belly. The incision looks great. I get out a staple removal kit and start pulling them out one by one. It takes less than two minutes, but then the last staple snags.
“Easy there, Doc,” Mr. Kellogg says.
I look over at Mrs. Kellogg, who is wringing her hands together. I yank on the staple and it twists free. A drop of blood oozes from his skin.
“Jesus, Dr. Davis!” he yelps. “That hurt worse than the surgery!”
“Sorry,” I say. Not sorry.
While Mr. Kellogg grumbles under his breath about my incompetence, I dig around in a drawer to find a bandage. I open the package to pull out the gauze, but on the discarded wrapper, I scribble a sentence with the pen in my scrub top pocket:
Is he hurting you?
I pass by Mrs. Kellogg as I’m walking back to the examining table, and I hand her the scrap of paper as surreptitiously as I can. She takes it from me and looks down at my question. Then she looks up at me with her watery brown eyes and hesitates.
Then she shakes her head no.
Do I believe her? I don’t know if I do. At the very least, I’ve seen him act emotionally abusive to her in the span of this short appointment, so God only knows what happens in their home. But she’s denying it, and the woman isn’t even my patient. It makes my blood boil, but there’s nothing more I can do.
Chapter 5
My last patient leaves at nearly six, but I’m not even close to being done. I’ve still got a ton of paperwork to catch up on and phone calls to return. And sometimes I go back to the hospital to do a quick round on my surgical patients in the evening, but I might be too tired tonight. I’ll just call the nurses over there and ask for a run down.
My office is located way in the back of our practice. Philip snagged the larger office, but mine is large enough. And unlike his office with the leather couch and mahogany desk, I’ve got a simple wooden desk I bought online, with a small bookcase stuffed to the brim with every textbook I purchased since medical school. There are two wooden chairs set up in front of the desk in case I decide to bring a patient in here—an event that has yet to occur.
