Free Medicine Men by Alice Adams Page A

of town, hisnurse informed her. Perhaps Molly would like to see some of his residents? Molly thought that she would. Any doctor would—or might—help, she thought. Any doctor but Dave. She realized that in a very irrational way she was confusing her illness with Dave: I’m allergic to Dave, is what she more or less thought, as she made more and more excuses not to see him.
    The two residents were both Chinese, both small. One plump, one thin, and both very courteous, shy, and thorough. They examined Molly gravely, with a small air of apology for invading her head in that way. They smiled a lot in her direction—a form of reassurance, she thought.
    But then, at the end, with a tiny frown the thin one told her, “We found some small polyps. High up.”
    “Well, that would explain quite a lot, wouldn’t it?”
    Evasively, their looks consulted each other. “We have to talk to Dr. Stinger.”
    Dr. Stinger’s nurse told her that Dr. Stinger would like her to have an MRI, whatever that was.
    Molly told Dave, “I really don’t like all this communicating through his nurse. He could call me. Dr. Macklin does. I’m not going to keep him on the phone.”
    “His girl is good at communicating with patients, I’m sure. She’s trained for that.”
    “Why do you insist on calling her a girl if she’s so highly trained? She’s a nurse. I met her, and she’s a very smart woman.”
    Carping at Dave had become a way of complaining about her whole situation, for Molly. Otherwise she was really too enfeebled to protest. Her sense was that Dr. Stinger thought her a neurotic, hypochondriac woman—and she was not entirely sure that he was wrong.
    “Everyone calls them girls,” Dave snarled.
    “Not anymore. Besides, why didn’t Stinger find the polyps?” Molly had suddenly thought of that, another indictment. But it was a reasonable question, to which Dave had no answer.
    The MRI.
    Molly had to lie in a long white tube, with a lid fitted over her head and her legs strapped down. The nurse, Dr. Stinger’s “girl,” had asked as she made the schedule if Molly was claustrophobic, and Molly had said no, not especially, but lying there, locked in place, she thought that she really was claustrophobic, very. And what would she do if she was: would she kick and scream her way out of there?
    Later, when various kind friends remarked that she had been such a good sport about everything, even that she had been “brave,” Molly thought that really she had not had much choice—as she had no choice in the MRI white tube. She just had to lie there. Enduring.
    Almost the worst of it was the noise. The young doctor who put her in the tube had warned: “There’ll be a sort of pounding in your ears. If you’re really uncomfortable with it let me know.” He did not say how she would let him know. But before each bout of noise his disembodied voice would announce, “This first will take about five minutes … this will take seven … fifteen minutes.”
    All those long sequences involved a pounding near Molly’s ears, as though someone were tearing through the next room with a jackhammer, Molly’s most hated noise; to her it sounded like a giant’s dentist drill. Sometimes in the intervals there was music, once a Haydn “Sinfonia Concertante” that she especially liked, so graceful, so literally full of grace. Superstitiously then, she thought, Oh good, a good sign, this will be okay.
    So much for superstition.
    Until that MRI, Molly had no idea how long seven or eight or fifteen minutes could be. Just lying there, with that terriblenoise in her ears. Later, she had no idea what she had thought about during those endless minutes, nor for that matter how she had managed to get through it without some childish display.
    At last the doctor, a dour and sallow young man, released her, and Molly sat up. “I can go now?” she asked, not believing it possible that she could.
    And—right: she could not. He said, “I just have to