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Lady Patient

Ciara M. Blecka

    “Here’s my phone number,” my lady patient said, scrawling it down with a pink glitter gel pen on a Hello Kitty greeting card. The card smelled of cotton candy perfume. “Promise you’ll call. Tonight.” She was so delicate and pixie-like sitting there on the examination table, rocking back and forth, swinging her battered legs. She had been picking at them again out of anxiety and I had prescribed a salve, but I doubted she would use it.

    “I’m prescribing Ritalin,” I said, trying to avoid the inevitable subject of our awkward friendship, yet still accepting the pink envelope that she had sealed with a kiss from her petite glossed lips. “It should calm you down a bit.”
    She fiddled with her pretend cell phone. “My boyfriend has been calling me nonstop,” she said, flipping her long stringy dirty black hair over one shoulder. “He’s a movie star, you know. We met on Instagram.”
    “Keiko, I’m a little concerned about your thyroid, as well,” I said. “It’s slightly hyperactive. I want to consider Tapazole.”

    She didn’t reply, but instead chewed numbly on her fingernails. She had bitten them down to the quick, and they were bleeding. She seemed to be shaking with panic. I had never seen a young woman like Keiko before. She was nearly an adult, but she did not have the mentality of an adult. She had the mentality of a much younger woman. Almost like...a child.

    I knew I was on the edge of doing the unthinkable with my young lady patient. It was not proper for me to befriend her the way I was. And yet, it seemed I was the only one that could possibly understand her. Keiko did not fit in with the other teenagers in her community. Making friends did not come easily to her. And all she wanted in the world was a friend. All she needed in the world was a friend. I could be that friend.

    But it wasn’t long before I began to doubt my resolution to be Keiko’s friend. She started calling me late in the evenings when I was trying to have dinner with my wife and son. My wife actually answered the phone on occasion.
    “Who is this?” Alannah wanted to know. She had the phone propped up between her shoulder and her ear while she was pulling the lasagna out of the oven.
    “It’s Keiko Jophiel,” Keiko explained. “I’m your husband’s best friend.”
    “Best friend? Oh, really?” My wife gave me that look and handed me the phone.

    “I can’t talk, Keiko,” I told her over and over. “We’re having dinner.”
    When she realized she could rarely reach me at home, she began making more appointments to see me in the office. Imaginary illnesses began to abound. She started having mysterious fainting spells that seemed to have no discernable cause. No one ever saw her faint, but she had elaborate stories of her near-death experiences, and her mother seemed more than willing to chauffeur her to the clinic whenever she complained of any ache or pain. Keiko was adopted from Japan, and her parents were always so concerned for looking good, but rarely ever truly concerned about Keiko as she wasn’t a child of their flesh and blood.
    “It may be your thyroid,” I decided. “I’m going to start you on the Tapazole.”

    “Can I take a picture of us together, Earl?” Keiko wanted to know. “I want to show my cousins how handsome you are.”
    I tried to laugh the whole thing off. “I am old enough to be your father, Keiko. You don’t want a photo with me.” I had to be more careful. I didn’t want her parents suing me for malpractice. After all, they didn’t want her anywhere near any men. They didn’t want her to be taken advantage of. I didn’t blame them.
    In fact, it was that photo that pushed her parents over the edge. Keiko cherished that photo and showed it off to everyone, everywhere she went. She put that photo as the background on her iPad. And thus, she ended up getting in a knockdown drag-out fight with her mother over her newfound love for me. I had no idea. That was until she showed up at my doorstep with a package of menstrual pads in one arm and a duffel bag of clothes in the other.
    “I need a place to stay,” she said.
    “What?” I was incredulous.
    “My mom kicked me out,” she explained. She shifted back and forth on her feet nervously. Keiko always seemed like she was on high alert, her narrow dark eyes darting around her like a little sheep wary of a wolf in her midst.

    “You can’t stay here, Keiko,” I said gently. “I’m your doctor, not your father.”
    “But I love you!” she objected, pouting out her thin lips. “We were meant to be together. It is our destiny. Unmei.”
    “Perhaps it was our destiny to meet, Keiko, but for another reason. However, I am happily married and I cannot have a relationship with you, romantic or otherwise.”
    Alannah joined me at the door, gazing down at the pathetic downtrodden wretch that had come calling at our doorstep. She knew why Keiko was here, but she merely smiled warmly. “There’s cookies and milk inside. If you’re hungry,” she said.
    The comfort food did something to console her. And she perked up sitting by the fireplace wrapped in a woolen blanket sitting in my own wooden rocking chair while my wife read to her from a book of Grimm’s Fairytales. I suppose Keiko’s fairytale life had been rather grim in fact. But, I knew how to turn it into something a bit more Mother Goose.
    I called my son down from his room upstairs. Clark was a bit younger than Keiko, but he was someone she might be able to call a friend. Clark had Down Syndrome, though he was very high functioning, and one of the most caring and polite boys I had ever had the pleasure of knowing.
    “He takes after his old man,” I told Keiko. “Handsome and bright.”
    “He’s lovely,” Keiko said, reaching out her pale thin chewed fingers to grasp Clark’s ruddy thick stubby ones.
    “You’re pretty,” Clark told her. In fact, she was.
    The two of them became fast friends, and Keiko soon forgot all about me and her girlish fantasies. But I had never realized how her childlike mentality was what had given her the wisdom to see the value and beauty in a boy like Clark. Both Keiko and Clark were children who didn’t easily make friends. But they had found lifelong friendship in each other.

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