What Matters Most (11 page)

“You know I’ll do the best I can.”

He didn’t like leaving Melanie alone to handle his office emergencies, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t leave his patients with no care at all. Since he’d opened that office, he’d learned more about poverty and the plight of the poor than in his previous thirty-four and a half years, and the knowledge had changed him irrevocably.

“You can certainly phone me. But if it’s an emergency like we had the other night, you may call a doctor whose name I’ll leave with you. He owes me, and he should help.”

“All right, but I hope I don’t have one that I can’t handle.”

At the concert’s end, he packed up, walked with Melanie to his car and stored the picnic basket and remains of their supper in the trunk. “I don’t know about you,” he said as he eased the Porsche from the curb, “but for me, this has been a delightful and revealing evening.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, Jack. It’s been wonderful.”

He stopped for a red light and looked at her, feminine and sexy with her hair swinging around her shoulders. “And in the office tomorrow evening, you’ll have your hair up and some little white pearl balls sticking in your ears.” He allowed himself a slight shrug. “But I don’t mind. Both women get to me.” When he reached the building in which she lived, he accompanied her to her apartment and waited while she unlocked the door.

“You gave me something very special tonight, Melanie. I’ll have to think about it for a long time before I’ll be able to articulate it, but I’ve locked it right here.” He pointed to his heart, leaned down and kissed her quickly on her lips. “Good night.” It had been an evening that he would never forget.

The following morning, Friday, at his Bolton Hills office, when he saw his South Baltimore office number on his cell phone caller ID, his heartbeat accelerated, pounding like horses’ hooves. Melanie never called him at this location.

“Hello, Melanie. Is everything all right? How are you?”

“Hi. I’m fine. I just got a call from Mrs. Hawkins. She said Midge got out of bed this morning and passed out as soon as she stood up.”

“Hmm. What’s her phone number?” Melanie gave it to him. “She’s a very sick girl. I’ll call her mother. Stay sweet.”

“You do the same.”

No matter what he prescribed for the child, she didn’t improve. That she had sickle-cell anemia was a fact. But she also had a serious respiratory problem that she exacerbated by smoking pot. His father would know in a second what to do about the respiratory complication, but he didn’t have the option of consulting him about a patient in his South Baltimore office. But he was learning, and he’d soon be as good an internist as he was a cardiologist.

He left his Bolton Hill office at the usual time, twelve-thirty, and went to visit Midge. “You’ll feel better if you do as I tell you,” he told the teenager, “and if you obey your mother. Smoking, including pot smoking, will kill you. Anybody who smokes knowing she has a respiratory problem is a fool. I’ll be back to see you tomorrow afternoon.” He gave the girl’s mother two packages of pills and directions as to how Midge should take them. “Throw away every cigarette or joint you can find in this house. She can’t tolerate smoking,” he said to Alice Hawkins, left them and drove three blocks to his office.

Seeing him unexpectedly seemed to frustrate Melanie. She dropped the file she held, retrieved it and knocked over the clock that sat on her desk. “You should warn a person,” she said.

He walked toward her, eager to hold her, but she warded off his advance. “I’ll make us some coffee.” With those words, she ducked out of the waiting room.

He started to follow her, and stopped. He didn’t crowd women, not even one he wanted as badly as he wanted her.
Besides,
he thought,
I have to learn how to be with her and keep a lid on my feelings.
A few minutes later, she returned with two mugs of coffee and two of Alice Hawkins’s cranberry scones.

“You haven’t had time to eat lunch,” she said, “and if you eat this, you may not want any.”

“I’ve had nothing today but two cups of lousy coffee and one dry doughnut. Hungry as I am, I’ll eat anything you put in front of me.”

“In that case, I’d better be very careful. How’s Midge?”

“She’s very sick. I don’t think her problem is life-threatening, at least not yet, but if she continues smoking cigarettes and pot, it will be. No matter what I give her for that upper respiratory ailment, it doesn’t help, and I know I’m prescribing the proper medicine.”

“Maybe you need to give it more time.”

“That isn’t it. Maybe sickle-cell complicates it. I’m not sure.” He rested the mug on her desk, dropped himself into the chair beside it, leaned back and closed his eyes. “My dad would have the answer in no time. It’s his specialty. I’m a good cardiologist and surgeon, and I know it, but here, with all these problems…I can’t possibly have the most current information on all of them. It’s a terrible feeling knowing that I can’t give all of my patients the best care they could get.”

He didn’t know when she moved, but she was there behind him, massaging his shoulders, stroking his cheek and whispering, “You’re as fine a doctor as these patients will get anywhere and at any time. You care, and they know it, and they recover, don’t they?” She kissed the side of his mouth, went back to her desk and sat down. He opened his eyes and gazed at her until she looked at him and smiled. It hit him forcibly then that he needed her.

What could she do with a room full of patients and no doctor? She straightened her back and smiled when the first patient entered the office that Tuesday afternoon. “The doctor is away this week,” she said to the twelve-year-old boy. After taking the child’s temperature and questioning him as to how he felt, she decided that he needed to see a doctor and called the doctor whose name and number Jack left with her.

“He’s pretty sick, Doctor,” she said after explaining the child’s ailments.

“Seems that way. Can you get him over here by six o’clock?”

She went into the waiting room and looked at the people who had arrived within the last few minutes. “I can’t leave these people and go across town to Bolton Hill,” she told him, “and he’s too sick to go alone in a taxi.”

“In that case, get an ambulance and send him to a hospital.”

She had no faith in that solution, for she knew the child had no insurance and that, if she sent him alone, he could wait hours for help, get discouraged and leave. “This settles it,” she said to herself. “I’m calling him, and if he refuses to come, he can answer to Jack and to God.”

She dialed Montague Ferguson’s home phone number, which she found after rummaging through Jack’s desk. “Dr. Ferguson, this is Nurse Melanie Sparks. I’m at Dr. Jack Ferguson’s office in South Baltimore. Dr. Ferguson is attending a meeting in Atlanta, and I have a patient here who needs to see a doctor. The doctor on call won’t come down here. Can you please help me, sir?”

“Well…uh…I’m making other plans for this evening. Can’t you take the patient to a hospital?”

“Dr. Ferguson, I have fourteen other people here, and I shouldn’t walk out on them. Besides, this child could sit in the hospital waiting room for hours without getting medical attention. I need your help.”

“I don’t think I can make it.”

“His temperature is a hundred and four. What shall I tell your son if this child dies after you refused to help?”

“I see you know how to play hardball, miss.”

“Hardball? I figured that you’re as proud a man as your son is. Will you come?”

“Call it whatever you like, miss, but I’m accustomed to some deference from nurses.”

“I am sure, sir, that not only nurses, but your peers, as well, defer to you. You’re a distinguished physician, and that’s why I want you to help my patient.”

“You’re good at spreading butter, too. I’ll be down there in twenty minutes. Let the patient lie down, and put a cold towel on his face and the back of his neck. I’d suggest an aspirin, but that might be contraindicated. Goodbye.”

After hanging up, she said to the boy, “The doctor will be here in twenty minutes.”

The boy looked at her with fevered eyes as she led him to an examining room. “Dr. Ferguson?”

“No. He’s away on business, but his father is a doctor, and he’s coming.”

She understood the boy’s disappointment, but if Montague Ferguson treated the boy successfully, maybe it would all have been for the better. Maybe the man would see for himself what his son faced twice a week. She put cold towels on the boy’s forehead and at the back of his neck and checked his breathing. At least it had not deteriorated.

Montague Ferguson walked into the office of Jack Ferguson, and looked around at what he estimated to be between fifteen and twenty people, all of whose eyes were trained on him. Not one of them seemed impatient or even anxious, yet he knew they were not sitting in that office for want of anything else to do.

“Good evening everybody, I’m Dr. Ferguson, your regular doctor’s father. Where is Ms. Sparks?”

“I’ll get her for you, Doctor,” a little girl, who he estimated to be about ten, told him and ran out of the waiting room.

“Ms. Sparks, I’m Doctor Montague Ferguson. Where’s that patient?” He didn’t extend his hand, and she reprimanded him by extending hers.

“Thank you for coming, Doctor. Please follow me.”

“Are you a registered nurse?”

She stopped walking and faced him. “Doctor Ferguson, I am an LPN, and I will not be an RN until June the fourth. Right this way.”

He made a mental note to scold Jack about leaving his patients with an LPN, but within ten minutes, he changed his mind. Melanie Sparks had medical smarts superior to those of many registered nurses with whom he’d worked. She drew blood, took an electrocardiogram and performed tasks that he usually assigned to his medical technician.

He gave the boy an antibiotic injection. “Are either of his parents here?”

“No, sir,” she said. “His parents are separated, and his mother works at night as a cleaning woman in the bank.”

“I see. I want you to take an aspirin every four hours,” he told the boy, then took a thermometer from his bag and showed him how to take his temperature. “Take it every two hours. If it goes above a hundred and two, phone Ms. Sparks, and she’ll get in touch with me.”

Melanie Sparks looked at him expectantly, or was it accusingly? He couldn’t tell. Damn! How could he walk out of here and leave the rest of those people unattended? He walked back into the waiting room, an elegantly furnished room suitable for welcoming the most discriminating individual, one that sent the message “I will do my very best for you in every way that I can.”

“All right,” he said. “Who’s next?”

A boy limped up and showed the doctor a cut on the side of his foot. “I can clean and bandage that, Doctor,” she said, “while you take care of someone else…unless you think he needs a tetanus shot.” He questioned the boy, then told Melanie, “I’ll give him the shot, and you clean and bandage his foot while I do something else. Do you have a crowd like this often?”

“Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and evening. Sometimes we leave here after ten.” She put an arm around the boy’s shoulder. “Come with me.”

“I see.” But he didn’t see at all. What had these people done before Jack opened that office? And it was ultramodern with the very best, up-to-date equipment and furnishings. The area needed a clinic, one that was staffed with doctors in all the major specialties. No one doctor, not even an internist, should try meeting the needs of so many people with such a variety of ailments. When he’d finally treated the last patient, he washed his hands and sat down, too drained to leave.

“I can make you some very good coffee, Doctor Ferguson, and I have some fresh strawberries and a couple of delicious cranberry scones. I know you haven’t had any dinner.”

“You know, I didn’t even remember that I hadn’t eaten. I feel like I did a good day’s work, for a change, and it’s a really good feeling. No wonder Jack enjoys this.”

“He does enjoy it, sir, and these people would do anything for him.”

“I can imagine they would. I’ll take that coffee and whatever else you’ve got in there. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I’m starving.”

When he got home, he warmed the leek soup that his cook had intended for the first course of his dinner, enjoyed it and got ready for bed. But sleep eluded him. He had been unfair to Jack about that office. He’d never seen people with that attitude of helplessness. Not one approached or beseeched him. They waited their turn and, considering the pain that a couple of them must have been experiencing, he didn’t see how they could sit quietly and passively. Waiting with Job-like patience, as if they had no right to make demands. And their gratitude was of such measure that it almost gave him a feeling of guilt.

Throughout the night, he fought with his conscience and, by morning, he had decided to do whatever was necessary to improve health care in the area.

Melanie didn’t expect Jack to call her while he was in Atlanta, but he had telephoned almost daily, and she always told him that she didn’t have any problems. She didn’t want him to worry or to change his plans and return earlier, as she knew he would have done if she needed him. He telephoned her at home around four o’clock Sunday afternoon.

“Hi. Can I come over? I just got in.”

The bottom seemed to drop out of her. She sat on the edge of the nearest chair and tried to compose herself. “Jack. How are you? I…Sure, you can come over.”

She recognized a slight pause before he asked, “Are you…I mean, did you hesitate in answering?”

“Yes, I did. I’m practically in shock hearing your voice, and then you ask if you can come over. Well, have you ever seen a puppy spinning around? What time will you get here?”

“I don’t know how to take that. Will I be welcome?”

“Will thunder follow lightning?”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

She brushed her teeth, replaced her white T-shirt with a red one and her house slippers with white sneakers, combed her hair down—because he liked it that way—and put a pair of silver hoops in her ears. True to his word, he rang her doorbell thirty minutes later.