Med school had been the big goal, then internship, and now residency. He was solid in his knowledge that delivering babies and providing women’s health care was exactly where he needed to be. It was a vocation and not just an occupation. So, he knew he was capable of making a massive life choice and settling into it with great happiness, contentment, and intellectual curiosity that would always drive him to go deeper and further.
Outside of work, though, life was a giant hole, occupied occasionally with friends, a game of basketball that he picked up here and there. Could he fill that hole with something as satisfying as medicine? Could life away from work actually balance, complement, his work? Could finding someone be the same? Could you really find one person, like one career, with every element you needed in one package, an anchor for your sense of being, unswayed by drama or volatility? Was it possible to love someone and have them love you back, not 50/50 but 80/80?
Alex didn’t know. He gave up entirely on the magazines in front of him and gave in to an Angry Birds app on his phone. His brain was exhausted. Flinging little red, round electronic renderings of real-life animals was easier than navel-gazing.
“Josie, are you dating anyone?” Ed asked, reaching across the table and placing his hand on hers, the gesture grandfatherly and not at all a pass.
She decided to turn it into a joke anyhow. “Why, Ed? You looking for a girlfriend?”
Mirth filled his eyes and the boom of his laughter carried, she imagined, out into the hall. “Oh, no! Don’t you dare even imply it,” he said, laughing, his hands slapping the table. “I have a girlfriend, honey. I’m taken.”
“Bummer!” she said, snapping her fingers in a gesture of frustration.
Ed just shook his head, those brown eyes filled with a kind of wisdom and focus that she didn’t get to see very often in her patients. “My girlfriend and me, we’ve been together for two years, and Josie, honey, if she thought you were coming on to me she’d come in here and rip your head off.”
“Really?” Josie answered, slapping her palm against her chest. “You got yourself a sweet young thing who could beat me up?”
“I got myself a sweet old thing who’s been around the block a few times and could take a whippersnapper like you down like snapping a twig.”
Josie stood and Ed picked up on the body language, standing as well, understanding that the session was done. It was a small test, but one that she used for almost every appointment, along with a few other nonverbal social cues to see how aware her patients were. Ed was doing well—not as well as she had hoped, but reasonably well for a man his age and with his level of Alzheimer’s advancement.
Her sense of empathy broadened, blossoming, carrying out to cover Alex. She didn’t know which of Ed’s daughters was Alex’s mother, but all three of them had come in here at various times with their dad, loving and supportive though busy. The worst patients were the ones who were dumped off, left alone, the caretaker or the home health aide or occasionally a family member absent. Just a body in the driver’s seat of the car waiting. Patient outcome or disease progression for those patients weren’t nearly as positive as for those who had a strong family support network.
Ed would do fine compared to some of her other patients, but the whole family had a long road ahead of them. She suspected that Alex probably had a lot to do with enrolling Ed in the program. The older man didn’t strike her as the proactive type, and, frankly, neither did his daughters. The driving force behind all of this must have been Alex. She’d seen it before; a fair number of patients in the trial had family members who were in the medical profession. In many ways, it was a perk of having a relative who was a nurse or a doctor or a physical therapist.
The downside, though, was that for the millions and millions and growing who didn’t have that advantage, new medications, new procedures, new ideas went untapped. Thinking about this was depressing her, all of it floating through her mind in seconds, as she took Ed down to the prize closet.
Most patients loved the prize closet, especially those who’d grown up poor or who were currently poor. Even if they hadn’t, or weren’t, the prize closet seemed to be a nice little place where folks could indulge. She opened the slim door and there, before them, were three shelves. On the first shelf was a smattering of gift cards to local restaurants. The most popular had surprised her—a local coffee shop, not a chain, and after the fifth or sixth person in a row chose to take the $25 gift card as a “thank you” for the monthly meeting, she asked why.
“Every morning, before 9 a.m.,” one of her patients explained, “seniors can get a dollar coffee. This will give me coffee for most of the month, and it’s a real nice place. You get to sit there and just chat with people.”
The next time the administrator went to order gifts for the prize closet, Josie had made a point to let them know about patient feedback and she found herself gently steering some of her older, lonelier patients to pick that, imagining a group of them sitting in this local coffee shop, sharing a cup of joe in the morning, finding the companionship they needed.
That could be you, she thought, the voice invasive and melancholy.
Pushing that thought aside, she returned her attention to the closet. The second row was covered with books. Large-print books leaning more towards Nora Roberts and Tom Clancy than anything else, though some of the women delighted in the romance novels, clutching them to their chests and covering the book cover as if it were a clandestine gift.
The men, though, tended to go for the third shelf, which had mostly sporting goods: golf balls, tennis balls, swim goggles, and kites—things designed to be played with a grandchild or to be enjoyed by the more active seniors.
Ed’s hand went straight for the gift-card shelf and then stopped.
“Have you been to the coffee house?” she asked.
His hand was suspended in midair, shaking just a little. He didn’t have an official diagnosis of Parkinson’s, so she knew it was just the slightest of tremors that come with age. He put his hand back down, pursed his lips, and gave her a disapproving look. “If I’m going to get coffee I’m not going to get it there.”
“Why not?” She had been thinking about gently suggesting that he take that to get out more, and enjoy conversation.
“I can get all of the coffee I want whenever I want. My girlfriend works at a restaurant,” he said, nudging her in the ribs.
“Oh. That’s a nice perk.”