The redheaded old man coughed bruskly.  “I feel fine, when can I go home, doc?”

“Well, you look good, but a heart rate of 140 with walking isn’t normal,” I replied.

Maybe it’s his pneumonia.  No, I said that two days ago.  Maybe he’s still  recovering.  No, I said that yesterday.

Hunch.

“We need to get a chest CT today, okay?”

“So home tomorrow maybe?”

“Maybe.”

-

I felt like I could have been looking at a cracked mirror of myself when the dark-haired addict talked about his two kids, same age as mine.

“I don’t want to be locked up in an addiction ward.  I need to see my kids on the weekends.  They’re my rock.  They keep me clean.  It’s just that, when they’re gone….”

… You overindulge in order to stay level, I finished his sentence in my head.

On the phone, the kindly psychiatrist sighed and said in her old world accent, “He’s not suicidal.  I guess he can go then, so he can have more beer and cocaine.”

Her insightful pessimism made me laugh way too hard.

-

“So, the cardiologist told you about the heart cath?” I asked.

“Yessirree,” the older man answered.

“If there’s a blockage, they can fix it right there in the cath lab.  If there’s a lot of blockages, then … it’s a different story,” I simplified.

“Heh, a different story,” the man looked to his wife.

She pulled down her shirt revealing a healed chest surgery scar.

“You know that story.”

-

The pretty transport tech wheeled her patient down the hall.  I pretended to look at my pager so I wouldn’t seem rude when I didn’t say hi.  You see, if I said hi, she might not react and I’m back in high school again.  Or worse, if it went the other way, she might expect me to say hi every time I pass her in the hall, and I’m not sure I can do that.  If I miss once or twice, she’ll think I’m ruder than if I never said hi in the first place.  Then it all gets weird.  I’ve been there; totally not worth it.

This antisocial subroutine was going on in my head as she was rolling by when I heard,

“Hey!”

It was a gruff voice, not what I expected from a lithe young –  it was my old redhead patient in the gurney.

“Oh hey.  I didn’t see you.  Are you coming back from CT?” I asked as I clicked into unselfconscious doctor mode.

-

To the frail old woman, I said, “The news isn’t so good, but at least we know why your arm keeps seizing.”

To her daughter, I said, “It’s aggressive.  It wasn’t there three months ago.”

To her grand-daughter, “Usually we say six months, but in her case, I think that’s too optimistic.”

To myself, “Who lives forever?”

-

They were such a beautiful couple.  He was sixty, fit and angular.  She was radiant yet rational, so cheerfully magnetic.

He completely lost track of twenty minutes of his life.  Minute one, he was stepping out of the shower.  Minute twenty, he was in the kitchen in his clothes wondering what just happened.  Twenty minutes of nothing that changed his life.

“Transient global amnesia,” I explained, “It probably won’t happen again but-”

“But I can’t be a pilot anymore.  I looked up the regulations,” his eyes glistened as if he lost the love of his life.

His bright-eyed wife said soothingly, “You can still teach.”

“Yeah, great.  Teach a bunch of cadets how to fly, on the ground.  What.  A.  Thrill,” he pouted.

“Honey, you’re getting old.  Everything’s just breaking down.”

“…”

“…”

“You know, you’re really not helping,” he finally said as we all laughed.

One lucky guy.

-

The redheaded man’s CT scan reported a blood clot in his lung, right where his “pneumonia” was.  I ordered the blood thinners and told him the news.  His jolly self didn’t mind either way, even when I told him another one of these could have been fatal.

There’s not a whole lot about this profession, this career, this fucking JOB, that I love or even like for that matter.  But I do like understanding the things that are able to be understood.  I like making them make sense to other people.  Sometimes I even like meeting the various lives that I would never meet otherwise.  And once in a while, it’s these quiet intuitions, the little realizations that I may have just “saved this guy’s life” [cliche cringe] on a guess, a hunch, a word, and no one, not even him, will realize it.  I didn’t even realize it myself until I got this breezy prickly sensation and thought, “Yeah, that was pretty fucking cool.”