Brad Aiken: Questioning the Tree

“Are you one of them?”

I raised an eyebrow and used my slight height advantage to convey my answer without having to resort to an outright lie.

She seemed to accept that. “They don’t know how good they really have it nowadays.”

I nodded.

“It’s just not analytical. Don’t they know that people can make mistakes?”

“Spoken like a new graduate, Ms. Johnson.”

Her lids narrowed. “You don’t agree?”

“That people can make mistakes? Sure.”

She shook me off. “That machines are the only way to examine a patient, that there’s no need to ever touch a sick person as long as they can get into a scanner or surg unit by themselves.”

I let out a deep breath. “Scanners are faster, more accurate, and completely disregard emotion. No time wasted dealing with a person’s feelings.”

She looked relieved. “Exactly.”

“But they can’t empathize, can’t connect to the psyche. There’s a lot more to pain than nerve endings firing willy-nilly. The same pathology can cause different symptoms, different degrees of pain in different people.”

Her eyes widened and I could feel my skin start to crawl.

I forced out a hah and said, “Gotcha.”

Her demeanor eased, but her guard didn’t drop.

“No, I’ve been down that road,” I said. “You can’t imagine the time it takes to deal with someone’s feelings, much less the emotional stress that weighs on you. I’ll take a scanner over that any day.” I gave the Medtron 3000 a gentle pat on its cold titanium side. “Thanks to these babies and the folks who came up with those answer trees, modern medicine has really evolved to a whole new level.”

A relieved Ms. Johnson was back in amiable sidekick mode. “Makes the shift go by pretty quickly, too.”

I shot her a smile. I’d gotten pretty good at this game. I, too, had sunk to a whole new level. Survival instinct is strong.

“Ms. Johnson?’

She turned.

“Bring in the next patient.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Doctor . I sure as hell didn’t feel like one anymore.

Another shift endured, I stepped out into the cool breeze of a late October evening and squinted up at the sunlight reflecting off the glass facade of the Unity Health Insurance building that dominated the downtown skyline, as I pulled my collar up and gripped it tightly against the wind. It would be a short walk home.

I’d been living in the city almost five years. The day Nan informed me that she couldn’t tolerate having me around the house anymore, I decided to seek out an apartment within walking distance of the clinic. Oppressive crowds thronging in and out of mettube stations were not conducive to the mental well being of anyone, particularly those of my generation, and besides, I enjoyed taking in the… well, you couldn’t really call it fresh air anymore, but I loved the atmosphere of the grimy city streets, preferred it to the sterility of modern buildings.

I made my way past Hot Beanz, my morning coffee spot. The aroma slowed my pace, but the thought of coming back out into the streets after warming up again kept me on my path. I turned the corner, approached the front door of my building, faced the camera imbedded above the front door, and said, “Entry.”

The oversized glass doors swished open and I hurried in out of the chill that my body would soon adjust to as the season progressed. I nodded at the animatronic receptionist in the lobby, which greeted me by name and summoned an elevator to the ground floor. As I entered, a perfectly pitched voice, the kind you hear on the six o’clock news, greeted me. “Going home, Dr. Jenkins?”

“Yes. Home.”

“Very good.” The door slid shut and I was escorted to the thirteenth floor, where I exited and made my way down the hall to the door where another entry command would grant me access to my little sanctuary.

I threw my coat over one of the checkered cloth-covered dining chairs, walked into the living room, and looked out at the modest view of Centennial Park provided by the wall-to-wall windows that gave this place its charm.

“Play music,” I commanded, just before flopping down into my favorite overstuffed black leather easy chair by the window. I pushed the little black button by my right hand and a footrest popped up to the perfect height. “Petrushka.”

As the music started to play, I closed my eyes and let it take me back to the day this album was recorded, a live performance in which my daughter had played the brief but famously recognizable trumpet solo the piece was known for, in her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It had been one of the proudest days of my life, a life that was once filled with proud moments.

Medical school, marriage to my college sweetheart, three wonderful children, suburban bliss; all memories that now seemed more like someone else’s life than one I had led myself. I should have seen it coming, should have noticed the signs, but I was blinded by the drive to succeed and failed to pay attention to the world evolving around me. The changes had been so gradual that they crept up on me like age, one wrinkle at a time. And then one day Nan asked me to leave. It wasn’t really until that day that I realized just how much had changed—everything but me. The kids were all grown and scattered around the country, each a success in their chosen lines of work, but none a part of our daily lives anymore. Nan had managed to stay in sync with the pulse of the city; she had become a community activist and a prolific volunteer: She was doing things that mattered.

And I was but a shadow of what I’d been, increasingly disgruntled with a medical system that had long ago crumbled, a system that had lost its way from what it was meant to do—take care of people. I’d become so bitter that I was poisoning Nan’s life, but never had a clue until the day she shattered my world.

It wasn’t until that day that I realized Nan had been the one constant in my life that kept things real, that shielded me from the endless alterations reshaping the world around us; that she was the one who had been taking care of me all those years, not the reverse I had always taken as granted.

And on that day, I was lost.

After the divorce, it took me a few years to get a grip on life again. Not joy—you couldn’t really call it that, but I was beginning to discover things that fulfilled me, that gave me pleasure, that gave me a reason to live. I was starting to feel comfortable again until the day Arnie Hirsch got hauled away. Then the questions of what I was doing with my life began to tear at me once more.

Stumbling in for my Saturday morning pick-me-up at Hot Beanz, an outing I looked forward to every week, a call of, “Jenks!” greeted me as I walked through the door. I hadn’t been called that in a long time.

I looked up and smiled feebly. “Doug. How are you?”

Doug Barnes and I had gone to med school together and started a family practice soon after graduating. It was a thriving practice for a while, but the bureaucracy eventually caught up with us. Insurance companies only wanted to contract with doctors they could control, and we weren’t willing to play the game. We thought we were better than that, but time wore us down. We were eventually forced to liquidate the practice and seek out clinic jobs like the rest of them. I hadn’t seen him in years.

“Better than you, from the looks of it,” he said, waving me over to a table. “You look like hell.”

I hadn’t realized my desolation was that transparent.

We sat down, facing each other across a small round table. I smiled feebly. “Quite the coincidence bumping into each other here, huh?”

The edge of Doug’s mouth curled up. “Nah, not really. It was Carma.”