The M.D. Next Door

It was a busy weekend for Meagan, as her weekends usually were. She was on call Saturday, and she spent most of the day in the O.R. She had a few emergency lap appy and lap coli surgeries—the shortened reference to laparoscopic appendectomies and cholecystectomies, or removal of the gallbladder—and one splenectomy from a battered young man whose mountain bike had proved no contest to the steep ascent he had attempted.

Even without complications, she found those almost-daily procedures challenging and interesting, but they were only a portion of the operations she performed in her general surgery practice. More complicated procedures could take eight hours or more to perform, on her feet the entire time in a busy operating room, working in a narrow sterile field, surrounded by staff who were there strictly to assist her in providing care to the patient. Time passed quickly when she was focused on her work. Her days never seemed to hold as many hours as she needed to get everything accomplished.

She stayed too busy to spare much thought for Alice and Seth that day. She only wondered about them every hour or so. Only glanced at her phone four or five times to see if she’d missed a call from either of them. Only asked herself a half dozen or so times if the kisses she’d shared with Seth on her couch had been the last time she would ever be that close to him.

So what if his image was the last picture in her mind before she fell into an exhausted sleep that night? So what if he was still in her thoughts when she first awoke the next morning? So maybe she was still a little infatuated with him, but she imagined those feelings would fade with time, just like the scar from the surgery that had indirectly led to her meeting him.

She spent Sunday morning with her mother and grandmother, who was struggling with another illness, a urinary tract infection this time. Though her grandmother resisted, Meagan finally insisted she be taken to the hospital through the emergency department that afternoon. Meagan wasn’t at all comfortable with her grandmother’s vital signs. She wasn’t Meemaw’s primary care physician, she insisted. Her grandmother needed hospital care under the supervision of her very capable gerontologist.

Back at the hospital, she checked on a few of her patients while her grandmother was being admitted and evaluated. LaDonna wouldn’t leave her mother’s side, and Meagan figured she would stay the night in her mother’s room. Meagan still worried almost as much about her mother as she did her grandmother.

She stopped by the coffee shop for a take-out cappuccino for her mom and straight coffee for herself. She knew her m

om had a weakness for vanilla cappuccinos and she could probably use the little boost. An insulated cup in each hand, she entered the elevator, only to find her sister already in the car.

“Going up to Meemaw’s room?” Madison asked, reaching out to relieve Meagan of the cappuccino.

“Thanks. Yes, I thought Mom could use some liquid energy. Did she call you?”

“Yes. I was at a baby shower for one of the other residents. You know how I hate baby showers, so I said I needed to rush right over.”

Meagan smiled wryly. “I was going to call you once we got the lab reports back. I guess Mom called Mitch, too.”

“She said she was going to. Not sure what Mitch was doing today, but he’ll probably stop by when he can.”

“He will, unless he wants to risk one of Mom’s disappointed looks.”

Madison faked a shudder. “Anything but that.”

The car stopped and the only other occupant, a man holding a spray of pink roses, got off. A few people waited on the other side of the sliding doors, but they must have wanted to go down because no one else entered this car. The doors slid shut again.

“How is Meemaw, really?” Madison asked when the car began to rise again.

Meagan shrugged. “Just a UTI, I think, but in her condition…”

“I’ve been thinking. Maybe it’s time to start talking about a hospice referral. More for Mom’s sake than Meemaw’s, really.”

The focus of hospice care was to provide comfort and support for dying patients and their families. Hospice was usually called in when a person was diagnosed as terminal, with six months or less remaining to live. Their grandmother’s physician had not yet made that call, but Meagan suspected he would agree if Meagan and Madison consulted him. She thought six months was rather generous as a prognosis.

“It’s going to be tough for Mom to concede the end is getting that close,” Madison murmured as the elevator bumped to a stop again. “I’ve been trying to prepare her, but she keeps thinking one of the treatments will give Meemaw a few more good years.”

They fell into step toward their grandmother’s room, both nodding greetings to hospital staff they knew and worked with on a daily basis.

“I’ve hinted, too,” Meagan said, “and I think Mitch came right out and told her last weekend, after the respiratory incident, that Meemaw doesn’t have much longer. All that seemed to do was make her even more determined to fight for more time. She’s been cooking like crazy all week, making Meemaw’s favorite foods, coaxing her to eat and spend more time out of the bed. Meemaw’s been cooperating as best she could, but you and I both know it’s a losing battle.”

Madison sighed and nodded sadly.

They found their mom standing in the hallway outside the room. “The nurses asked me to step out for a few minutes while they do someone in there,” she explained, looking disturbingly wan. “They said they’d let me know when we can come back in.”

“I brought you a cappuccino, Mom. One of the vanilla ones you like.” Meagan nodded toward her sister, who pressed the disposable cup she’d carried into their mother’s hands.

“Thank you, Meagan. That was very thoughtful of you.”

“You’re welcome. There’s a sitting area at the end of this hallway with some recliners and couches and tables. Let’s go wait down there and drink our coffee.”

Her mother frowned. “The nurses won’t know where to find us.”

“I’ll go in and check on things,” Madison volunteered, moving toward the closed door of the room. “You two go on down and rest a minute.”