The Addict

Excerpt

It had rained the first week in April that year, and though the reappearance
of the sun raised the temperature to only forty-five New England degrees, it
made me hopeful again. My new patient sat on her black Converse high-tops,
her legs tucked under, as if she was trying to keep herself from running
away. She appeared to be in her late twenties and was wearing a loose gray
sweater over a pink and green polka-dot blouse. With her chin tipped into
her collar, eyes toward the floor, she appeared shy, or embarrassed. She was
tall but slight and had rolled up her sleeves to the elbows.
 
"I'm here for your program," she said. "You still have openings, right?" Her
soft voice gave me an impression of politeness. Sixty minutes isn't enough
time to learn a patient's complicated history so I was happy to start at a
gallop. I was grateful she required no transition from the general
cheerfulness of just meeting each other to the serious conversation, filled
with effort and nervousness and specifics, that would constitute the rest of
the hour. The answer to her first question was a simple yes or no.
 
"Yes, I do," I answered, as if we were getting married, which in some sense,
we were; from that moment forward, our time together would, like any pair's,
get snagged on expectations, hopes, and fears, mixed with promise and
excitement.
 
My exam room also serves as my office in the hospital clinic. At the far
end, just past the examining table, is a large window with a fifth-floor
view of the neighborhood and the two multifamily triple-deckers whose owners
seem determined to hold on despite the encroachment of hospital buildings
and parking lots. This window gives the room an unusual brightness every
season, particularly on spring mornings. My new patient had chosen the metal
chair whose bent rods and plain plastic seat and back offered, really, just
the ideogram of a chair. This uncomfortable seat does not give the exam room
a sense of well-being. I'd recently thought of bringing in a chair from
home, my mother's old chair, which my wife had reupholstered in maroon
velvet for my birthday. But I hadn't gotten around to it. On the wall behind
the patient's chair is a large photograph of vines that my brother-inlaw, an
artist, had computer-manipulated into the shape of a man kneeling. There are
books on the shelves above my desk-textbooks about renal and heart disease,
dermatology primers with pictures of common eruptions, guidebooks for how to
examine the knee and the shoulder-but I have no pictures of my children
under glass, no diplomas in thin black frames on the walls; I've never liked
that.
 
From the book THE ADDICT: One Patient, One Doctor, One Year by Michael
Stein. Copyright (c) 2009 by Michael Stein. Reprinted by permission of
William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.