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“Driving around,” Scott said. He pushed a five-dollar bill across the counter.
“On vacation?” she asked.
“I work down at Los Alamos,” he said.
One eyebrow went up, a physical ability which Scott recognized as a scientific mystery, as yet unsolved. She said, “On them A-bombs?”
“No. Actually, I’m a doctor.”
That seemed to stop her. She gazed at him, then asked, “Like a medical doctor?”
“Yes.”
She put the five in a cash drawer and handed him a one. She said,“My boy is sick. I don’t know…maybe something he ate. Maybe we should go to the doctor, but, you know…insurance. We don’t have it.”
Scott sighed, but didn’t show it. Instead, he asked, “What are his symptoms?”
She shrugged. “He’s got a tummy ache. He’s got a fever…”
Not good. Scott: “If you’d like me to take a look…”
“I’d love that,” the woman said. “He’s in back.”
Scott popped the Mexican Coke’s bottle cap on a counter-mounted bottle opener, took a swallow, and followed her past racks of snack food to the door in the back. She pushed through to a small living space, a bathroom and two tiny separate rooms on either side of a living/dining/TV area. One of the side doors was open, and she gestured to it. A young boy was lying awake on a narrow single bed; he wore a pair of shorts and a tee-shirt and was barefoot. His face, in the dim light, appeared to be on fire.
Scott said, “Hi, I’m Lionel. I’m a doctor. I understand you’re sick.”
The boy, who appeared to be nine or ten, said, “Hurt.”
Scott reached out and put his fingers on the boy’s forehead: too hot, way too hot.
“Where does it hurt?”
The boy touched his belly, lower right, near the waistband of his shorts. Scott used the fingers of his right hand to press softly the place where the boy had touched himself. The kid lurched up and blurted a long “Aaaahhhh. Awwww…”
Scott was used to the pain of children. He turned to the woman and asked, “He’s had some nausea? Has he thrown up?”
“A little,” she said. “That’s why I thought maybe it was something he ate.”
Scott shook his head. “I don’t believe that’s it. Your boy hasappendicitis and it’s somewhat advanced. We need to take him to a hospital. Right away. Do you know where the closest one is?”
“Taos,” she said. She was frightened. “But no insurance, we always been healthy…I don’t know if they’ll take us.”
“They’ll take you. They have to,” Scott said.
The woman said her pickup rode rough, so Scott suggested they drop the front passenger seat of his Subaru, and that the woman lead the way to the Taos hospital in her truck. Scott picked up the boy, who groaned and squirmed against him. His dark eyes were pools of pain, but he didn’t cry.
The trip down through the mountains and then up the High Road to Taos took forty-five minutes. Twenty minutes out, Scott checked his cell phone and found that he had a bar and honked his horn until the woman pulled over. Scott stopped behind her, and as she hurried back to the Subaru, he explained what he was doing: “Calling the hospital.”
When he had a nurse at Holy Cross on the line, he identified himself as a visiting physician, that he had a ten-year-old boy suffering from acute appendicitis, an emergency intervention was needed, and that they were on the way. He asked that a surgeon be notified.
Twenty-five minutes later, they delivered the kid to the emergency room and waited as he was wheeled away; a while later, a surgeon appeared and introduced himself and confirmed what Scott had suspected. To the woman, the surgeon said, “We have to operate on your son. We need to get his appendix out. The operation is fairly routine, but if the appendix is burst, there could be some follow-on problems…”
She gave her permission for the work. The woman clung close to Scott as she asked, “He isn’t going to die?”
“He should be fine,” the surgeon said. “If we’d waited any longer, it could have been tricky. But, I think we caught it.”
They talked about that, then the surgeon turned to Scott. “You’re British?”
