My Favorite Midlife Crisis by Toby Devens Page B

onto some really promising leads in the research. One of these days there’s going to be a major breakthrough. Probably too late for Harald, but...” he shrugged and I filled in the blank, maybe in time for you. Otherwise, you too may wind up fingerpainting with your mashed potatoes and thinking Eisenhower is president.
    Alzheimer’s. Worse than the F-word.

Chapter 10
    A few days later, on a mockingly vibrant autumn afternoon, I said good-bye to one of my patients. Twenty-nine, mother of a toddler, lovely, accomplished, she’d come into the office with Stage 3 ovarian cancer and pleaded with me to buy her time.
    Together we fought the crab for twenty months, a tug-of-war I thought I weighted for victory with chemotherapists and radiologists and experimental protocols. Wrong again.
    With everything we know, with all our science and our technology, our data and our skills, clinical medicine can still be a crapshoot. The slip-on-the-banana-peel school of medicine teaches you not to take the credit for a save and not to hold yourself entirely responsible for a patient’s loss. Which doesn’t make it any easier to lose one.
    I sat at her bedside and let my dying patient console me. “You did everything you could, Dr. Berke. I couldn’t have asked for a better doctor.”
    She whispered this final benediction even as I was powerless to do anything more than increase her painkillers, wrap her glacially cold hands in my warm ones, and not turn away when my eyes filled.
    Which is why I decided to fix myself a martini on a weeknight.
    I came home early, changed into sweats, turned on the news, and headed for the vodka. I bent over the wet bar to pour myself two fat fingers of Smirnoff. Therefore, my back was turned when Bethany McGowan plunged the knife deep between my shoulder blades.
    I heard the nasal voice first. It whirled me around, showering martini on my blouse. Oh, it was her, all right. In living color, the weaselly face magnified by the TV set. I must admit someone had done a creditable job with her makeup. And her shiny dark hair, which she usually wore sleek against her skull, had been fashionably tousled. From beneath the white lab coat peeked a pale blue spread-collar silk shirt. Expensive looking. If I were a woman concerned about precancerous uterine dysplasia, I’d think Bethany was a reliable resource. Except that every September for the past decade, I’d been the one facing the camera during National Pap Test Week. I’d been the gynecological talking head on WJZ-TV urging Baltimore’s women to get their cervixes swabbed.
    But this year, the commemorative week had slipped my mind, and the health reporter hadn’t called me. Whom did she call? Not Bethany certainly. Potak? Bernstein? One of the seniors who passed the call to Bethany? The bastards. I fumed as Bethany explained the difference between regular and thin prep Pap smears and described cell changes in cervical cancer. You’d have thought oncology was her specialty when 90 percent of what she did was obstetrics. She knew from first trimester vomiting and last trimester hemorrhoids. She was a mommy-sitter and a baby-tugger, for godssakes.
    By the time Bethany’s sermon gave way to coverage of a five-car pileup on I-70, I was punching numbers into my phone. Neither Potak nor Bernstein, alerted by caller ID, would pick up. Fine. I’d ambush them tomorrow before I’d had my caffeine. While I was still a madwoman.
    At eight the next morning, Seymour Bernstein leaned back in his leather chair looking desperate to press a button that would project him beyond my fury. “The truth is, they asked for Bethany. Well, not exactly for Bethany. But they wanted a younger face. Not my words, Gwyn.” An artificial smile exposed twenty thousand dollars’ worth of oversized dental implants. Since divorcing his comfortable high school sweetheart wife, he’d been dyeing his grayish hair a one-dimensional beaver color and worn a perpetual ersatz tan. Some members