Page 5
“When a child finishes the intensive phases of treatment,” she says, “the hospital celebrates, the family exhales, and then something harder starts. Two more years of pills at the kitchen table. Two more years of counting…”
I stop taking notes.
She talks about the maintenance years for forty minutes, and she is fierce about it, precise about it, human about it in a room where most speakers hide behind their own slides. There’s a passion behind her words that drives the story. When she talks about relapse windows, the room goes still. When she talks about a mother who set alarms for pills and slept through her own life, the room leans in.
This doctor holds all of us in the palm of her hand. Wouldn’t mind finding myself there literally. She’s far too pretty for the volume of citations attached to her name.
The applause runs long. She looks surprised by it, and I find the blind spot charming. I’m still deciding what to do about all of this when she leaves the stage, and by the time the moderator releases us, I’ve decided.
The hotel bar is full of lanyards. She’s at the corner of the bar, alone for the moment, one heel hooked on the stool rail, wearing the loosened posture of a woman whose hard part is over. The adrenaline has to land somewhere when the fear lets go. Maybe it can land on me.
“Dr. Raines.” I take the next stool. “Your headshot undersells you.”
She turns. Her eyes turn hypnotic as they run a fast assessment, top to bottom, that she doesn’t bother to hide. “That headshot is from residency. I was twenty-nine and hadn’t slept in four days.”
“Then the photographer captured it beautifully.”
“Careful. I’ve had one glass of wine and no lunch. I’m easily amused.” She tips her head. “Front row, right? When the adherence numbers went up, everyone clapped except you.”
“You count the room after all.”
“I count the people who don’t clap.” She says it with a smile, and means it. “Everyone claps at that slide. It’s the good-news slide. When someone doesn’t, they either know the literature or they’re asleep, and you didn’t look asleep.”
“The confidence interval on that slide is doing heavy lifting. You know it too. You footnoted it in the paper and left the footnote off the slide.”
She sets her glass down and gives me a second, slower look. I watch myself get reassessed, recategorized, and upgraded, and I enjoy the process more than I’ve enjoyed anything else this week. “You read my paper.”
“I read both. The adherence one everyone loves, and the family-burden one that’s better.”
“It is better.” She narrows her eyes, pleased and suspicious at once. “Nobody cites it.”
“Nobody wants to fund what it proves. Sick children are fashionable. Exhausted parents aren’t.”
“That,” she says, pointing at me with two fingers around an empty glass, “is the most honest sentence anyone has said at this conference, and I sat through the payer-relations panel.”
“Then let me ruin the streak with a criticism. Slide nineteen. You apologized before you showed it.”
“The cohort was small.”
“Small, and the effect held anyway. The data needed no apology, and you gave it one, and four hundred people took the discount you offered.” I lift my glass. “Nobody else will tell you that tonight. They’ll tell you that you were wonderful, and they’ll be right, and it won’t be useful.”
She goes quiet for the first time since I sat down. “But I can come to you for the truth?”
“Lies bore me. Truth, twisted or otherwise, is far more compelling.” I signal the bartender and get her next round along with my sake.
“You’re definitely not a physician.”
“I’m not?”
She almost smirks. “No. Doctors lie as needed.”
“Then most doctors are boring.”
“Most?”
“Present company excluded.”
She blushes at that as the bartender delivers our order. “So, pharma money?”
