Andrew Neiderman: Deficiency

"Was there any identification?" she asked softly.

The nurse gazed at her clipboard.

"Paige Thorndyke, age twenty-eight. Lived in Mountaindale."

"Thorndyke?" Terri asked looking up. "Paige Thorndyke?" She looked at the dead woman. Her face was unrecognizable at this point, otherwise, she would have known her. "I knew her," she muttered. "I know the Thorndykes. Her father, Bradley Thorndyke, is a commercial airline pilot for American. They live in the Greenfield Park Estates."

The nurse nodded sadly and they both turned back to the deceased young woman. Terri recalled that Paige was in junior high when she herself was a senior. There was an older brother, too, Phil, who was a year behind her and Curt. He had been on the basketball team with Curt.

A little voice in the back of her mind threatened: "You're not going to be able to do this -- you're not going to be able to practice medicine in a hometown community where you will get emotionally involved in every case." She stared down at Paige Thorndyke for a few more moments and then covered her with the white sheet, her fingers trembling as she did so. Whatever it was that caused this, she thought, it was a horrible way to die. The emergency room was already buzzing around her. She sighed and dropped her shoulders. She had to recuperate and, after speaking to the policemen who waited in the ER lobby, go back upstairs and continue with Mrs. Heckman.

The rest of the night went just as badly. They had two motor vehicle accidents, one resulting in a fatality, dead on arrival. She couldn't believe she was looking into the vacant eyes of another corpse, two within four hours. She set one broken arm and patched up another motor vehicle victim. Then she had to pump the stomach of a four-year-old girl who had swallowed paint remover. By the time 6:00 A.M. rolled about, she was ready to check herself into the emergency ward.

But despite all the activity, she couldn't get Paige Thorndyke out of her mind. The diagnosis she had instinctively arrived at seemed ridiculous, but the symptoms supported it. When her tour ended, she walked out to the parking lot still reviewing the possibilities. She ambled slowly through the pools of cool white illumination dropped over the macadam lot by the globular pole lights and walked right past her black BMW convertible, a graduation gift from her parents. She shook her head and doubled back.

Talk about your absent-minded professors, she thought, and sifted through her pocketbook to find her car keys. As usual, she fished out her house keys first and panicked, thinking she had misplaced her car keys; but they were there, lost in the makeup case, the lipsticks, the piles of change, the hand mirror, Life Savers, and gums. How could she be so meticulous in her work and so messy and disorganized in her personal life? she wondered. Probably because I don't concentrate on myself as much as I should, she replied to her own question. Curt had advised her to concentrate on putting her work behind her once she had left either the office or the hospital, but sometimes, that just wasn't possible, at least, not for her. Curt was wonderful about closing the door behind him. He could shut himself off so completely, it was as though he were indeed two different people.

In the beginning she thought that indicated he wasn't fully involved in what he was doing, but now she had come to believe his power of forgetting was an asset. Many a night and many a morning after a night, she tossed and turned for hours reliving what she had done the previous eight hours. She had little hope for anything different this morning, despite her physical fatigue. She imagined she looked terrible -- pale, drawn, strands of hair flying this way and that. She certainly felt drained.

At five feet ten with olive green eyes, prominent cheek bones, raven black hair that was shoulder length when she wore it down, and a firm, full figure, she looked more like a Cosmopolitan magazine cover girl than a physician. Her sensuous mouth and alluring smile drew endless compliments, but at this point in her life and her career, she found that to be more of a burden than a blessing. Despite the many inroads women had made, medicine was still a man's domain. Patients who could choose usually chose male doctors over female. Even women discriminated against female physicians. It was maddening, but if a woman was to be accepted as a physician, she had to look brilliant and be coldly analytical, whereas a man could look goofy, have a personality, and even flirt. She did the best she could to deal with the problem. Whenever she was on duty or practicing, she wore her hair tied in a tight, "granny bun" behind her head and wore no makeup, not even a light shade of lipstick. She had a pair of thickrimmed, very plain glasses, her doctor glasses, she called them, and she always wore these dull-colored heavy cotton or tweed cardigan suits with a flat white blouse. Usually, she couldn't wait to get home after work and take off her physician clothes.

She would brush down her hair, apply some lipstick and some eye makeup, put on one of her pants outfits or nice blouses and sweaters with her tight-knit skirts or leather skirts and feel like... Wonder Woman. Curt kidded her about it, and said, "You accuse me of being like two different people. What about you?" But when she chased him down, forced him to be honest, he confessed he felt more comfortable with a male doctor than a female himself and if he went in to see a doctor who was female, he would be nervous if she was what he called "a looker."

They almost got into a heated argument about it, but in the end she concluded it wasn't his fault. There were years and years of social changes yet to evolve. Wise old Hyman Templeman had lowered his bifocals, even though all he had to do was raise his eyes, and warned her about all this when she first came to see him about the position he had advertised.

"It's like coming to bat with two strikes against you, Terri," he advised. "You want to work in your hometown where people remember you as the girl next door, a cheerleader, homecoming queen, and ask them to accept you as their family physician. I got as far away from my hometown as I could," he muttered, shaking his head, a head still crowned with a full crop of angel white hair. "I was born and bred in South Africa, you know."

She didn't know that. Funny, she thought, Hyman had been a doctor in this community for nearly forty years, and not once had she heard anyone talk about his coming from South Africa.

"And the second strike?" she asked, suspecting the answer.

"That you're a woman, what else?"

"So you wouldn't think of giving me the position then, I suppose."

"Never suppose anything," he chided gently, his bushy, gray eyebrows rising and then shifting forward as his forehead creased. "Conclude after you review all the facts. Supposing gets you onto side roads that are often dead ends. Whenever my patients ask me what I think, I say, I think I'll think about it.

"So," he concluded. "I'll think about it." She left, never expecting he would call, but he did.

"Things are a bit boring for me these days," he said a bit impishly. "I could use some excitement around here."

"You won't regret it, Dr. Templeman. I promise I'll work hard and..."

"Now one thing right off, Terri. If we're going to work together and you want people to accept you same as they accept me eventually, you start calling me Hyman. Understand?"

"Yes, Doc... Hyman."

She had it! Her parents were overjoyed. How proud they could be, but she lowered their balloon a bit when she announced that she wasn't going to live at home. She wanted to move into Grandma Gussie's house. It had been on the market for four months without a bite, much like most of the real estate around there lately.

"But why?" her mother questioned, her face grimacing as though she were suffering real physical pain.