Dr. Steinbeck nods. He’s giving me the active-listening doctor face, eyebrows turned up, lips pursed, head cocked as if to say,I hear you. Then he turns to Helen, rattles off the battery of tests that we’ve already conducted, and asks, “What’s on your differential?”
All the color rushes out of Helen’s pale cheeks. She looks around the room like she would like to escape it. Her fingers wind together.
“Um…” she says quietly. “Well, honestly, it sounds like the symptoms of opioid withdrawal.”
The genial smile drops off Dr. Steinbeck’s face.
“Well, um, wow,” he blubbers, scrambling to find a way to salvage this visit from the enormous accusation Helen has inadvertently lobbed. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Sullivan—give us a moment, I’ll be back—”
“No,” I say suddenly. The blood rushing in my ears sounds like a coursing river. I think of that first time with Julian in the back of his car, how I’d shuttled forward in time and wondered if he’d put something in my food. The night when I woke up in his bed with no clear memory of how I ended up in it. “No, Helen, you’ve got a point. Thank you.” Then, to Dr. Steinbeck, “Test me.”
I make Dr. Steinbeck order a drug test with an expanded panel. It comes back negative, but I’m a dog on the hunt now and I havepicked up a trail. I flip through my symptom journal. The first entry is dated not long afterPERPETUITY, and I write that I am inexplicablytired. I feel better a few days later, after Julian gives me the espresso machine. Then there’s the second time, after I covered for Brandon’s STEMI. I’m completely destroyed for a week after that, but the day after seeing Julian again I’d felt incredible, as light as air.
The body doesn’t lie, I remember. During the last few years of my relationship with Eric, I’d been hit with a laundry list of maladies: headaches, back pain, indigestion that I went to doctors for and attempted to treat, to no avail. It was only a few months after he left that I realized I’d miraculously been healed of all my ailments. They had simply been my body telling me to run.
This pattern is equally unmistakable. Just as Helen said, I’m following a pattern of withdrawal, and my symptoms are getting worse.
Except my drug of choice isn’t heroin, it’s aman.
“Maybe it’s stress,” Dr. Steinbeck suggests on his phone call to me after my results come in. “You have a difficult job. Take some days off.”
He sends me a work note, and I send it straight to our office manager and CC Krause.
“I’m sick,” I tell him, when he calls me to complain. “I’m taking a week off.”
“You can’t. We’re short—” he starts, but I cut him off. This kind of guilt trip might have worked on me a few months ago, but I have no more patience in me for entitled, manipulative men.
“I have a note from my PCP. Coming in while I’m unwell puts our patients at risk, masks or not. I don’t want to make a mistake.” He hears my implication:And if you try to stop me, I’m taking this over your head, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?
It takes me seventy-two more hours to sweat Julian out. It gets worse before it gets better, but I stick it out, arming myself withelectrolyte water and soups, calling my dog walker to take Onix out instead of pushing through.
It works. On the fourth day, I emerge from my apartment with my strength back in full force. The winter air is icicle sharp with cold but the sun shines bright, and even Onix seems to get a boost in energy, chasing squirrels all over the park as if his hips aren’t arthritic. It’s a new year, a fresh start, and I mark it the way I best know how.
“You want me to cut them off?” the stylist says, shifting through my chin-length locs in shock. “Are you sure? They’re gorgeous. We can just dye your roots black, maybe do a rinse to tackle the grays…”
“Yes, I’m sure,” I say. My reflection rages back at me from the stylist’s seat, ferocious with determination. My locs have carried me through so much. Medical residency. Bleeding out on my bedroom floor. And now this. There are memories and moments and traumas entwined in the strands. They hold too much, and by the state of my new growth, my body agrees.
My stylist begins her work. I watch my locs fall away one by one, dropping to the floor with soft thuds like lost appendages.
When I return to the cath lab the next week, Pamela is the only one there. She gasps as I walk in.
“Oh my god,” she says. “Sullivan! This look!”
I run a hand along my shorn head. My hair is short, silver, and I’ve kept up a consistent brushing regimen that sets my waves glistening. The effect is striking and more feminine than I could have imagined, and, paradoxically, makes me look younger. Even my stylist was shocked.Oh honey, you were born to be bald-headed.
“I know, right?” I say. It feels right, like I’ve reclaimed what the loss of pigment snatched from me. Looking at myself in the mirror is the only thing that seems to bring me any real joy these days.
“You look magical,” Pamela continues.
Ethereal, Julian’s voice croons in my ear.
I shake the memory from my head and work out a thank-you, then add on a more genuine one for encouraging me to go to the doctor. At this, she drops back into her chair and sighs melodramatically.
“Almost wish I hadn’t done that, if I’m honest. Last week was a shit show without you.”
The stab of guilt makes me stand up straight.
“Really?” I ask. “What happened?”