Her first two patients were routine. She saved the best for last: Mr. Fogelman.
Anyone exiting the bank of elevators would be able to tell which room contained Mr. Fogelman as soon as they set foot on the second floor, because he personified an unabashed confidence common to a certain kind of older man: booming voice, untended clouds of tufty ear hair—in short, total imperviousness to embarrassment. You had to love him.
“I got a new one for ya, Doc,” he said, enthusiastically grasping Georgia’s hand as soon as she came within grasping distance.
That was another thing about being a female urologist: you were confronted with a lot of penis jokes. Most of them were terrible, but occasionally one was right on the money. You might think patients would be reluctant to share such jokes with their own urologist, but you’d be wrong. Georgia heard them all the time.
“Hit me, Mr. Fogelman,” she said, dragging a chair next to the bed with her free hand. Next to them, in an orange pleather cube appearing only slightly more comfortable than a block of cement, Mr. Fogelman’s tiny wife lay asleep with her mouth open. Georgia resisted the urge to check a pulse.
“What’s that insensitive thing at the base of the penis called?”
She’d heard this one before but she didn’t let on. “Tell me.”
“The man!” He chortled. His chest shook as he laughed: it was impossible not to laugh with him.
“Aw, Mr. Fogelman,” she said. “I’m sure you personally are among the most sensitive of men.”
“I’m actually kind of a jackass, Doc. According to my better half.” He gestured to Mrs. Fogelman, who, miraculously, opened an eye and croaked, “Yes, dear.” Without opening her other eye, she eased out of the chair, tottered over to the bed, lowered the bed rail, nestled against Mr. Fogelman, and fell instantly asleep again, looking for all the world like a jumble of stick-covered skin. He lowered his lips to the top of her wispy white head and kissed her, winking at Georgia. “Isn’t she a beauty?” he asked.
“She is,” she agreed, trying not to think about the fact that Mr. Fogelman was dying of bladder cancer. Later today, he would be taking his final trip home from the hospital, this time aided by hospice. Both of them knew this was the last time they’d see each other, but neither of them wanted to acknowledge it; Georgia because she was afraid she’d cry, and Mr. Fogelman because there seemed to be no circumstances in which his natural bonhomie deserted him. Even now he was beaming through the pain and the drugs, his hearty face split by wrinkles of joy. He pointed at her.
“You’re married, yes?”
“I’m not.”
“You’ve got a fella, then.”
“No,” she said, and some compulsion toward honesty prompted her to add, “Not after today, anyway. I’ve been dating someone but he lost interest.”
Mr. Fogelman’s beam dissolved into outrage. “What? He’s lost his damn mind. Who breaks up with a woman like you?”
“Plenty of people,” she said, grinning, although in truth she was generally the dumper, not the dumpee. The downside—one of the downsides—of being a single thirty-six-year-old surgeon was the parade of people trying to fix you up with an ever-dwindling pool of single professional men, most of whom were single not because they hadn’t met the right person but because of a glaring personality flaw. Possibly it indicated an abundance of pickiness on her part, but Georgia was perfectly comfortable being picky. She was not perfectly comfortable dating someone who said snide things about the pants size of the cashier at the grocery.
Mr. Fogelman, summoning up an uncanny ability to read her mind, nodded. “Don’t even think about settling,” he said. “A gal like you deserves to be cherished.” Without disengaging her hand, he shifted in the bed to more directly face her, adding in a voice considerably more gentle than his usual, “You’re the best, you know that, honey?”
“So are you,” she said, redirecting her gaze toward Mrs. Fogelman in an effort to diminish the ache rising in her throat. “Call me right away if you need anything from my office. Don’t go through the phone service, okay? Your wife has my cell number; just call me directly. I can come to you if I need to.”
“I will, Doc.” He traced the path of her gaze to the frail woman beside him. “I’m a lucky man: forty-eight years with an angel by my side. I know it’s not going to be any better than this in heaven.” Again, he brushed his lips against the snowy cloud of his wife’s hair, and this time, finally, his voice cracked enough to reflect his age and his health. “Leaving her—” he started.
Georgia waited.
“Leaving her—” he tried again, his face still resting against his wife’s head. He closed his eyes and cleared his throat, a harsh, haggard sound. When he spoke again, she could hardly hear him. “Leaving her is the only reason I’m afraid of what’s coming.”
* * *
—
The remainder of the day passed in the slightly surreal haze accompanying an epiphany. She did all the usual things: she performed a vasectomy on a grimacing man; she employed a green-light laser to photo-vaporize the prostate of a hedge-fund manager with trouble urinating; she spoke with a college soccer player and his weeping father about surgery to remove his cancer-ravaged testicle. She gave each of them her full attention, focusing not only on the questions they asked but also on the ones they failed to ask, taking care to give the floppy-haired soccer player her special-patient email address so he could, at his leisure, write the questions he could not bring himself to consider now. She placed a nerve-stimulating device in a painfully shy elderly lady, contemplating the yawning gap between social ease and the dysfunctional hell of being unable to control your bladder. Sure, people lauded their adorable pediatricians and their lifesaving cardiologists and the heroic last-ditch efforts of their oncologists, but you’d never experienced gratitude until you’d given someone the gift of continence. Not to mention the profound indebtedness of a man who could have sex again.
But throughout all of this, she kept reverting to an image of the Fogelmans, entwined in one another’s arms, pressed by the narrow confines of the hospital bed up against the metal safety bars. Here death, the ancient, great, primordial fear, had been eclipsed by love. Her patient feared not dying, not pain, not a cessation of form and life and thought, but separation from the human being he loved above all others. What would that be like, she wondered, for another person to love you that much? And Mrs. Fogelman: Georgia imagined her face as she watched the sentience leave her husband’s eyes, as his vital mind, so full of verve and dazzle, switched itself finally and irrevocably off. How did you withstand such a loss?
How did you find that kind of love in the first place?