var currentStory="What Hurts";
var myTitle="What Hurts";
var defText="\"What Hurts\" is a story of a young girl coping with life threatening disease. The story reminds reader, that whatever one's life circumstances are, one is always the shaper of own life. The story is written and copyrighted by Jenny Little, and it is used here with Jenny Little\'s  permission. Click any chapter on the right. Next, click \"start test\" button and begin typing. ";
var sideTitle="What Hurts - by Jenny Little;  This story is intended for older teens and adults.";
var chapter0="Weren\'t they supposed to put in a left-hand turn lane three years ago? he thought as he waited through three lights at the intersection with Exchange Street. The rain started when he crossed Miller, increased as he turned onto the professional building\'s drive. Walking in from the physicians parking lot, his umbrella was useless against the sheets of water blown in a pelting slant. He didn\'t make it up to the office until almost 8:30, and he sat shivering in wet clothes while he tried to race through the morning\'s files. His first patient was running late. She took up more time than she had been allotted for her presurgical, repeating all kinds of inane questions about her upcoming procedure. ";

var chapter1="Except for the occasional episode of teenage acne, he rarely saw anyone under forty.He specialized in cosmetic dermatology-Botox injections, chemical peels, nail fungus treatments. Hopeless cases of upper-middle-aged women trying to look the way they did at twenty. Imploring him like Rumplestiltskin to spin straw into gold. Stiltskin, yes, that\'s exactly how they saw him. As if he might boost up faces with the lift of a magic wand. These people kept him in business, but he knew what they refused to admit: youth is only eternal in fairy tales. Blend in the age spots, smooth out the wrinkles, thicken the lips-still, old is old. ";

var chapter2="No one can escape it. The doctor reveled in it. He wore his age like a weapon, like an accusation, refusing even the mildest of his own remedies.Once he had wanted to change people\'s lives, save them from the crippling effects of facial disfigurement. Now he only wanted to make it through each day. The doctor had a very comfortable routine. He rose every morning at six o\' clock, sipped coffee and watched the weather report. In the office by 7:30 to review files and get ready for the first patient at nine. He would prescribe creams and ointments, perform minor surgical procedures under local anesthetic, do follow-up checks. ";

var chapter3="Two hours off for lunch, then out the door by five on the dot. Stop by the florist for a fresh bouquet-something to match up with the multi-floral pattern of Clara\'s curtains, all the better if on sale. Home by six to catch the evening news while he ate whatever the housekeeper had prepared him for dinner. Though he used to enjoy cooking occasionally, he\'d rarely touched the stove since Clara died, some twenty-odd years ago. Didn\'t seem worth the energy to cook for one. The housekeeper made large meals that could be frozen in individual portions, placed a different selection in the oven to warm for him each night. ";

var chapter4="He ate slowly, commenting to himself on one news story or another, and left the dishes in the sink. In bed by nine, where he would read the latest medical journals, lingering over photos of freakish skin disease. Cutting-edge disorders undergoing treatment at cutting-edge clinics with whole staffs of researchers and technicians. A private practice like his, in an off-the-map town like Pekore, Ohio, couldn\'t compete. New York, Houston, even Cleveland-that\'s where things were happening. But Clara had picked this place. A place for children to roam shady neighborhoods, a place for lives instead of careers. So Pekore was where he stayed. ";

var chapter5="Now, the pages in these monthly journals were his sustenance. He found some meaning, in the painful beauty of human eyes suffering behind inhuman faces, that was entirely absent from his own office full of truly ugly people parading through with their psyches shattered over trifles. At 10:30, by an instinct so ingrained that his bedside clock had become a redundancy, he would tear himself away from even the most engaging of case studies, mark and close his journal, switch the light and fall almost instantly into an animal sleep. It was not a strenuous existence. He didn\'t like to be strained. But on this particular Monday, he was strained. ";
var chapter6="The late-spring weather hung low and heavy, with crackles of lightning threatening to burst the sky open. A fire at one of the old farmhouses along 271 had emergency vehicles blocking his usual route. When he tried to turn around, the crowd of gathered on-lookers slowed his retreat. Then traffic on Mason Road, his only alternate, inched forward at less than half the normally crawling rush-hour pace. Weren\'t they supposed to put in a left-hand turn lane three years ago? he thought as he waited through three lights at the intersection with Exchange Street. The rain started when he crossed Miller, increased as he turned onto the professional building\'s drive. ";

var chapter7="Walking in from the physicians parking lot, his umbrella was useless against the sheets of water blown in a pelting slant. He didn\'t make it up to the office until almost 8:30, and he sat shivering in wet clothes while he tried to race through the morning\'s files. His first patient was running late. She took up more time than she had been allotted for her presurgical, repeating all kinds of inane questions about her upcoming procedure. Would she need someone to drive her home? Of course not-only a small amount of lidocain is used locally. How soon would she be able to return to work? ";

var chapter8="The next day, certainly-very little physical exertion is required to review credit reports. What are the possibilities of complications?  A bit of swelling, perhaps. he\'d never had a fatality after a collagen injection. He answered each question for the third, then the fourth time, reassuring smile plastered across his face, all the while thinking, \"Does she want the lips or not?\"  When he was finally able to usher her to the payment desk, his next two patients had already been situated in room one and room three. He stood between the two rooms, staring alternately at their closed doors. His nurse came down the hall carrying a sterile surgical kit. ";

var chapter9="\"There\'s no light,\" the doctor said, pointing to the two doors. Large red lights had been installed over the center of each door, but neither was lit up. \"How am I supposed to know which room is next?\"  \"I\' m sorry,\" his nurse said. She fingered the dial on her hearing aid, gave a nervous little whimper of a laugh. \"It must have slipped my mind. Room one is next. Mole removal. Then three for a first consult.\"  The doctor shook his head. He disliked the nurse. Disliked the way things slipped her mind, disliked her habit of fooling with her hearing aid every time she was under pressure, disliked her cheery commentary during surgery, her skinny ankles sticking out of scrubs that were always a little too short. ";

var chapter10="She was a constant annoyance to him. But she had been irritating him for nearly fifteen years, and he was sure that her familiar irritation was better than the new, unknown irritation of any possible replacement. \"I don\'t know why I bother,\" the doctor muttered as he opened the door to room one. \"Put up lights to make things easier on myself, and you can\'t even remember to use them.\"  He said little as he sliced the mole off the man\'s back. He was glad this patient was male-no small-talk would be expected. He didn\'t even pause to look reflectively out the window and offer an observation on the weather like he normally did. He was behind schedule. The mole was unsightly but not dangerous. ";

var chapter11="The man\'s wife probably sent him in. The doctor had performed thousands of mole removals, but in his agitation he cut a little too quickly, headed too deep and had to reposition the blade. The wound came out jagged-looking, not a perfect circle. He could hear the wife already, complaining, demanding the refund or the blemish smoothed. It would be easy enough to fix, but not now. He put a band-aid over the spot, instructed the man to clean it with hydrogen peroxide and antibiotic cream, apply steroidal ointment to the scar twice daily after the scab had fallen off, wait for a call with the lab results. ";

var chapter12="He hurried on to room three, noting that the nurse had uselessly managed to turn the light on now that he already knew where he was headed. \"What seems to be the problem today?\" the doctor asked as he crossed the threshold of the exam room, not looking up from the chart the nurse had prepared even though he wasn\'t reading it. \"Nothing \'seems\' to be the problem,\" said a voice surprising for its rawness and youth. \"If you want to know what is the problem, I have a mole. New, and too dark.\"  \"I see,\" the doctor said. The patient was a thin blond girl, fair complexioned, sixteen from the age on her chart, though she looked younger. ";

var chapter13="She was already lifting her t-shirt, pointing to a spot a little above and to the left of her navel. The doctor balked at her abruptness. \"Is your mother here?\"  \"In the waiting room,\" the girl said. \"Where she should be.\"  \"I see.\"  He took the magnifying glass out of the pocket of his lab coat to inspect. It was alarmingly dark-almost black against the paleness of her skin. He thought he saw the tell-tale traces of a red highlight over the dark circle, but cursed his eyes for their murky imprecision even with the aid of magnification. \"Yes,\" he said. \"It needs to come off.\"  He turned to the nurse. ";

var chapter14="\"Make a record, atypical nevus, upper left quadrant abdomen, unraised, approximately two millimeters diameter, abnormal darkening, slight irregularities of color and border. Propose shave for biopsy.\"  The nurse placed her glasses ridiculously at the end of her nose and scratched out her untidy version of his words. \"Am I supposed to know what the hell all that means?\" the girl said, letting her shirt fall back. \"It could mean many things,\" the doctor said. Why did he feel like he was defending himself?  \"Medical terminology aside, the simple fact is that the mole may or may not be problematic. ";

var chapter15="We won\'t know until-\"  \"Was that upper quadrant or lower?\" the nurse interrupted, peering over her glasses. The doctor grimaced. She seemed to be growing less competent by the day. \"As I said, left upper quadrant abdomen.\"  \"Oh, yes of course.\"  She looked past the doctor and smiled brightly at the girl, who did not smile back. \"We won\'t know until what?\" the girl said. It took a moment before the doctor realized she was addressing him. He traced his way past the nurse\'s incompetence to recall where they had been in the conversation. \"We won\'t know what we\' re dealing with until we get the results back from the lab,\" the doctor said. ";

var chapter16="He felt himself slide back into the proper swing of things. He knew his lines in this routine. \"The shave is a very simple procedure. A small amount of lidocain is injected locally to the area, and we will remove the top layer of the mole to be sent to the lab for biopsy.\"  \"Okay,\" the girl said. \"Should I lay down?\"  She was lifting up her shirt again. \"Oh, we can\'t do it now,\" the doctor said with a small laugh. He had a schedule to keep. As if he could just go around slicing things off whenever they happened to pop up. \"You\' ll have to make another appointment, and your mother will have to sign the consent forms. ";

var chapter17="But for now, we do need to do a full body exam. I\' ll step out of the room, and I\' d like for you to remove everything except your undergarments.\"  \"What?\"  The girl\'s eyes narrowed suspiciously. \"I just told you what the problem is. I don\'t need a full body exam. Why can\'t you slice it off now and be done with it?\"  \"That\'s simply not the way these things proceed.\"  The doctor thought perhaps he should be thankful he didn\'t have to deal with children more often. \"If you\' d like, I\' ll get your mother to be present for the exam. Otherwise, I suggest-\"  \"No,\" the girl said. She began to untie her shoelaces. ";

var chapter18="The doctor sat down in front of the television that evening with a sigh of relief. His first moment\'s peace all day. The nurse\'s impenetrable cheeriness had seemed to feed off and flower from his steadily more savage admonitions. He supposed that was what annoyed him the most-her incessant smile and attempts at perky responses to even his foulest grumbling. Perkiness was unnatural in a woman of her age. She ought to give it up. The doctor inhaled the scent of this evening\'s selection-gardenia-as he leaned over the coffee table to cut his round steak. Clara would have objected to the strong floral bouquet mixing in with mealtime aromas and flavors, but he found it pleasant. ";

var chapter19="Better than eating alone, my dear. Across the television screen, a news anchor for the tri-county local segment reported on the morning\'s fire, dripping with tones of tragedy. Cut to earlier footage of the scene, complete with billowing smoke and tearful people wrapped in blankets. Then an interview with the family, crying about how they didn\'t have any insurance, and who could have ever thought a bolt of lightning would put their whole lives to flame?  A commercial came on and the doctor thought back over his day at the office. In the afternoon he\'d had a woman with an appointment solely to complain about the results of her chemical peel. ";

var chapter20="He wanted to tell her to see a plastic surgeon rather than a dermatologist, because the condition of her skin was the least of her face\'s problems, but he simply explained the limitations of the chemical process, and how imperfections deeper under the skin\'s surface could not be addressed by such a procedure. He was troubled by the girl\'s case. Not the nevus on her abdomen. He was fairly certain that was superficial, even if problematic. But his examination had revealed another nevus, similar in type though clearly more advanced, behind her right knee. An area difficult for her to see. ";

var chapter21="This had been asymmetrically raised, the rusty red hue over the dark background visible even to his weakened eyes. He suspected melanoma. Likely developing for some time. Considering her family medical history-the father\'s unchecked melanoma-it would have to be dealt with right away. Of course, he did not share his suspicions with the girl, or her mother, beyond the fact that an additional mole needed to be biopsied. People did not often take these things well, even though most melanomas he had come in contact with were very easily removed. ";

var chapter22="Patients tended to hear a diagnosis of cancer and stop listening, start planning their funerals while he was trying to tell them about a simple superficial excision that would eliminate the problem. It was better to wait until he was certain. Especially with children, wound tight in their own particular volatilities which he would never begin to predict. And the girl\'s experience with her father\'s cancer would only complicate matters. Then again, this girl might be made of something completely different. The doctor chewed his round steak slowly, setting down his fork to twist the gardenia\'s crystal vase so that it glittered in the room\'s dim light. ";

var chapter23="Clara had always wanted children. He\'d liked to tell anyone who asked that they couldn\'t. The truth was, he didn\'t until they couldn\'t. There were reasons, of course. No shortage of reasons for putting it off just a little bit longer, waiting until they were sure, until the time was just right. First, he could have no disruptions while he struggled through medical school. And how would he cope with diapers, with crying babies during the stress of his residency program?  Clara must have thought they were close, later, when he agreed to move to Pekore. But then he found questions of financial stability-as soon as the student loans were paid off, his own practice firmly established. ";

var chapter24="One reason after another until Clara was diagnosed with Premature Ovarian Failure, which made getting pregnant nearly impossible. She never blamed him, as he feared she would. She picked up and went on. He was again amazed by her lightness, her resiliency. Still, weeks after her one successful conception ended in miscarriage, he overheard her on the phone to a girlfriend, confessing she couldn\'t help feeling that this disease, this loss, was her punishment for not making the most of the time she was given, for putting off what should have been done. He wanted to go to her, that evening. Wrap his arms around her grief and lift it from her-away from her shoulders, from the lines growing deeper in her face. ";

var chapter25="But his own grief, his guilt, left her to cry alone. She was thirty-eight, then. It was the last time she ever talked about having a baby. It was just less than three years before she died. Apply ointment to scars twice daily, he said now, aloud to no one. To the gardenia, spilling its scent like a pot boiling over. He turned his attention back to the round steak and the television behind it. No point recounting things impossible to change. After the news, the doctor found the article from a past issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that he remembered-age hadn\'t quite beaten him yet-on pediatric skin cancers. Relatively rare. Uncommon, he should say. Uncommon is not as alarming as rare. ";

var chapter26="The article offered a few statistics that might prove helpful. Rates of survival and recurrence, adjusted for age and influencing factors. Quoted numbers always gave patients an impression of authority, control. He noted these on a small pad he kept in his pocket to jog his memory, wrote and underlined relatively rare, highly treatable, then marked the page in his journal and was asleep by 10:35. He had scheduled the girl\'s excision for Friday at eleven. After Monday\'s chaos, the week had slid back into predictable rhythms, and he was feeling much calmer-much more prepared-when he stepped into exam room one. ";

var chapter27="\"How are you today?\" he said to the girl, who was sitting on the edge of the table with a jacket across her bare legs. A heavy jacket, similar to one he had owned years ago, made of broad canvas with a hood that buttoned onto the collar. \"Fine, except for the fact that you\' re about to slice off chunks of my skin.\"  \"Oh, they\' re not really chunks, dear,\" the nurse said, smiling idiotically as she tore open the packaging of the sterile surgical kit. \"That\'s why they call it a shave. Just a bit off the top.\"  The doctor joined the girl in glaring at her. The nurse seemed not to notice. ";

var chapter28="\"A tiny little scar, really. You\' ll be back in your bikini in no time.\"  \"I don\'t wear bikinis,\" the girl said. \"Anyway, aren\'t you people supposed to be advocates against sun exposure?\"  The nurse giggled and adjusted her hearing aid. \"Of course. Sun exposure can be dangerous. I just thought-Well, I know you young people, always worried about scarring.\"  \"I\' m not. I just want to get this over with.\"  The girl executed a quick flip of the wrist to land her jacket onto the chair in the corner and lay back. \"Expecting rain?\" the doctor said, indicating the out-of-season gear. \"No. You people always keep your offices like refrigerators. ";

var chapter29="And god knows, if we have to keep chatting about it, I could be stuck here all day.\"  Yes, the doctor agreed, time to get things in motion. A schedule to keep. He didn\'t know why the jacket had distracted him so. He turned to look out the window, as he did before every procedure. Reflecting for a moment on the weather had a centering effect on himself and his patients. \"A nice day out today,\" he said as the nurse swabbed the girl\'s stomach. \"The first one we\' ve had since the storm. But they\' re predicting more tempestuousness before the season\'s over.\"  \"You use that same line of crap for all your patients,\" the girl said. ";

var chapter30="The doctor jerked his head too fast away from the window, put his hand to his chin, tried to recover. Had she heard him say it, in the other room, while she was waiting?  Or was she just guessing?  \"Can you start slicing already?\"  \"Of course.\"  He looked to the nurse. A flash of confusion crossed her face, and he thought of a child that has been caught daydreaming in class. Perhaps she\'d been too busy enjoying his embarrassment to pay attention to what she was supposed to be doing. \"The lidocain?\" he said, more harshly than his mood really warranted, confirming with some satisfaction from the slightest glance in her direction that the girl\'s scowl at the nurse matched his own. ";

var chapter31="United by mutual frustration. Today, for once, he was actually glad of the nurse\'s incompetent presence, shifting the balance and rearranging the room\'s alliances in his favor. He felt centered again and ready to proceed. \"Oh yes.\"  The nurse began fumbling with her tools on the tray. \"Now, dear, I\' m going to give you just a small shot of lidocain. I\' ve prepared the area with a topical anesthetic, so you shouldn\'t feel anything at all.\"  The girl wasn\'t watching anymore. Her head had turned toward the wall. She didn\'t move when the nurse slid the needle under her skin, and the doctor credited this to her own resignation rather than to the nurse\'s skill. ";

var chapter32="The nurse folded her hands in her lap, then seemed to remember her part in this drama was not yet finished. She rearranged the instruments on her tray for the third time, then handed the doctor the scalpel. After determining that the area was suitably numbed, the doctor made his incision-slowly, neatly. Careful not to mar the smooth skin of her stomach. The nurse applied a small round band-aid. The girl rolled over without a word, and the procedure was repeated on the back of her right knee. A slightly larger incision. The nurse produced the same round band-aid, though it was clearly not adequate for this wound. ";

var chapter33="The doctor got a one inch rectangular from the drawer, shaking his head and mumbling under his breath at her. \"Okay,\" the nurse said, patting the girl\'s calf in a too-childish gesture of reassurance. \"You\' re all set.\"  \"The lab results should be back within a week,\" the doctor said. \"You\' ll receive a call from our office, and then we\' ll-\"  \"Decide if you need to chop out more,\" the girl said. \"I\' ve been on the internet. I know.\"  Her voice sounded tired, the doctor thought. Without its usual rawness. Maybe she was, like him, ready for a break. The nurse escorted her out the door while he stayed behind to jot a few notes. ";

var chapter34="Leaning on the wide window sill, he looked out over the professional building\'s parking lot. His pen remained still as the girl and her mother appeared from the front of the building, made their way toward their car. It was difficult to be certain from three floors up, with his accursed sight, but they seemed to be engaged in some kind of animated argument. The doctor supposed life with any teenage child was an interminable series of such moments, though this girl must outrank her peers on the scale of combativeness. He watched the mother pursue her point with great sweeps of thrashing arms-overly dramatic, wasteful expression. The girl, on the other hand, was the measure of physical economy. ";

var chapter35="She moved with surgical precision, changing tactics with a slight change of step, moving in for the kill with a tip of her head, ending the argument abruptly with the sharp closed snap of the car door while her mother flailed on helplessly at the empty air. The doctor turned down to his file and a stray scrap of paper caught at the outer edges of his narrow vision. Lying on the chair in the corner of the room. Must have fallen out of the girl\'s jacket. He picked it up for inspection. On the side folded outward was an ink sketch, quite good, depicting a house of the English manor type. ";

var chapter36="On the reverse, a long line of dates was listed, headed by the announcement of scheduled meetings for the cast and crew of the upcoming Pekore High School production - A Man for All Seasons. She was an actress, the doctor thought. He could imagine it perfectly. The grace in motion, clarity of bodily intent. He wondered what role she was to play, settling immediately on that of Margaret-the quick-witted young daughter of Sir Thomas More. She certainly had the spark required. Indeed, she would light it up. He and Clara had been to several different performances of the play, and they had agreed that all of them had cast Margaret as rather too dull, completely out of the character Bolt had intended. ";

var chapter37="Clara was a great one for the theater. he\'d always told her she should be on the stage-she could have put any Margaret to shame. As a spectator, she made a shrewd critic, landing her finger on exactly what was lacking when the doctor was left with only vague impressions and unclassifiable intuitions. He couldn\'t count the number of times he\'d come home from the office on Friday to find her with tickets in hand, dressed past the nines, leading him back out the door to head into Cleveland for the latest evening adventure. Or else to the airport, for a full weekend of real productions in New York. ";

var chapter38="Once even a surprise trip to London over the Labor Day holiday. This was Clara\'s only regret surrounding the move to Pekore-distance from top-quality theater. Comedy or tragedy, modern or historical, William Shakespeare and Woody Allen as the same breath, Clara\'s tastes could not be plotted. She loved the spontaneous delight of the event itself, loved the avenues of exploration opened up by the ritual of conversation afterward. When was the last time he\'d been to the theater?  With her, of course. Over twenty years ago now. Though musicals were not generally her preference, they\' d seen Les Miserables on Broadway less than two months before she died. ";

var chapter39="I\' ve got a Margaret for you, my little critic, he said to the empty examination room. His voice sounded hollow, echoing overly loud against the walls of the small space. Lucky the nurse was deaf as he was blind. A heaviness had come to the doctor\'s chest, and he tapped his head as if to clear it. These were things of long past; it wouldn\'t do to dwell on them. He had a routine. He would stick to it. It would get him through the day. The doctor checked his watch, made his notes. Outside, the girl and her mother were gone. He put the folded paper in his pocket to return at the girl\'s next visit. ";

var chapter40="The girl\'s lab results came in the following Friday afternoon, verifying the doctor\'s suspicions. The specimen from her abdomen was precancerous-a dysplastic nevus possessing a tendency toward becoming malignant. The specimen from behind her knee showed melanoma. Both areas would have to undergo a widened re-excision-chopping out more, as the girl had so succinctly put it-and the borders of the excised tissue would have to be examined to determine how far the abnormal cells had spread. As he was preparing to leave the office, the doctor instructed his secretary to call the girl\'s mother, though the late hour dictated waiting until Monday. ";

var chapter41="\"Schedule an appointment with surgery time,\" he said. \"Surgery time?\" the secretary repeated. \"Won\'t this be a consultation visit?\"  \"Do we need to get you a set of hearing aids too?\"  It was true, things were not supposed to proceed this way. Consult came first: break the news gently, explain options. Allow time for acceptance. Then surgery at a separate, less emotionally charged appointment. But the doctor had thought of the girl\'s eagerness to go ahead with the procedure at her initial consult, and he wanted to give her the opportunity to get on with it this time if she preferred. ";

var chapter42="The secretary hung up the phone without looking at him. \"She has an appointment for Wednesday.\"  On Wednesday, dark clouds had again gathered in the sky, though the doctor did not comment on this. To the girl and her mother (who was present at the doctor\'s insistence, against the girl\'s will), he explained the results of the biopsy as simply and directly as he could, throwing in several authoritative statistics and speaking with what he hoped to be optimism about improved prognosis because of her youth. Highly treatable, his notes reminded him. \"You\' re really so young,\" the nurse said. \"At your age, sun exposure is not even a likely factor. ";

var chapter43="It\'s probably genetic.\"  \"Probably?\" the girl said, bringing ridges to her brow as her eyes narrowed. \"My father died of skin cancer.\"  The nurse took a deep breath and held it. She did not touch her hearing aid. The doctor jolted to a halt. Three visits over two and a half weeks and the nurse had not even bothered to glance at the girl\'s medical history form?  Surely this detail would have jumped out as the most prominent. He thought of a dozen admonishing remarks he might throw at her, but these were all lost to the sadness he saw gurgling under the girl\'s angry glare. \"Yes,\" he said. \"Of course there\'s a genetic predisposition. ";

var chapter44="Which is why we will certainly need to maintain full body examinations every three months. However, that\'s after we\' ve dealt with the particular problems at hand.\"  \"Please,\" the mother said, waving one hand in a gesture of exaggerated dismissal. \"Can we just deal with this problem right now?  Without bringing in everything else?\"  The girl turned her glare away from the nurse and recalibrated it ever so slightly to direct at her mother. \"The two do seem somewhat related. Inseparable events, you might say.\"  The mother bent her head into her fist and shook it. \"Let\'s not discuss this.\"  \"That\'s the real problem here. ";

var chapter45="You don\'t want to deal with anything. I\' m sick of it. I\' m sick of not saying it.\"  She looked up at the doctor, then at the nurse. \"My father didn\'t die of skin cancer. He killed himself. He killed himself because it was already in his lymph nodes. Because he knew my mother couldn\'t take it, couldn\'t take care of him. He killed himself because of her.\"  The mother opened her mouth, formed words without sound. The doctor wasn\'t sure if she was about to let out a scream or a sob. He was quite sure he did not need to be involved in either. The girl\'s eyes burned with something like satisfaction as she surveyed the quaking form of her mother. ";

var chapter46="\"I\' m dealing with it just fine, so don\'t bother asking,\" she said to the doctor and the nurse. \"And please don\'t tell me you\' re sorry. Now, can we get on with it.\"  She inclined her shoulders forward while she crossed her arms, indicating the conversation was over. Yes, get on with it, the doctor thought. Get on with the routine. He steadied himself and dove in to describe the procedure: under local anesthetic, a football-shaped area approximately an inch and a half at its length would be cut out around the original excision sites, then sent to the lab for analysis. The wound would be closed with several stitches. ";

var chapter47="Later, a further treatment plan would be developed on the basis of the lab results. \"We can schedule an appointment for the surgery whenever it\'s convenient,\" the doctor said. \"Alternatively, we can go ahead and do it now.\"  He wondered if this option was still a good idea. \"Now?\" the girl said, paused in the middle of an eye roll. \"Let\'s start slicing and dicing.\"  \"I can\'t do this,\" the mother said. She walked out of the room with forced emphasis-a caricature of military march, like a soldier retreating from battle. Did I give her permission to leave, the doctor thought. Did her daughter? ";

var chapter48="Not wanting to make a stab at the layers of painful workings between them, he sent the nurse to the waiting room with the consent forms to be signed. The doctor looked for calm out the window as the nurse prepared six syringes of lidocain. Rain had begun to fall lightly over the parking lot. The sky was a nasty shade that promised more to come. \"I\' m going to give you several shots this time,\" the nurse said, stroking the girl\'s stomach. \"So the numbness will go down deeper. But it won\'t hurt a bit.\"  The girl was again facing the wall without expression. ";

var chapter49="\"You shouldn\'t say that to people,\" she said after the third and final abdominal injection. \"It\'s not true.\"  \"Oh.\"  The nurse hiccupped her nervous little laugh and put a hand to the dial on her hearing aid. \"Have you always been deaf?\"  The girl raised her head off the pillow to eye the nurse straight. \"Yes, since very early childhood,\" the nurse said. The doctor frowned. For fifteen years he had presumed the hearing aids a facet of advancing age. He watched the nurse in profile as she tapped her finger around the excision site to test the progress of the anesthetic. The skin over her cheekbones was taut, unlined. ";

var chapter50="Perhaps she wasn\'t as old as he once believed. \"I\' m sorry,\" the girl said. \"Even though I know that doesn\'t help.\"  \"Oh, it doesn\'t bother me so much anymore,\" the nurse said. \"I expect you can get used to about anything if you have to.\"  \"I guess so.\"  The girl turned back to the wall. \"Are we all set for the slice and dice?\" the doctor said. No one responded. That evening, just after the news, the doctor was startled out of his thoughts by the sound of the phone ringing in the kitchen. He looked to the empty plate in front of him, to the daffodil in Clara\'s vase, to the blank television screen before rising. ";

var chapter51="He rarely had calls at home, and certainly not at this hour. \"Hello?\" he said into the receiver. \"Hi. I know I shouldn\'t have called you, but I have something I have to say.\"  The girl\'s voice struck his ear in short sharp bursts, like a hammer. \"My number\'s unlisted. How did you-\"  \"Nothing\'s unlisted on the internet. If you know where to look.\"  \"I see.\"  The doctor felt unbalanced, under attack. In the office, he knew the script. He wrote the script. This was not in it. Patients did not call him at home. \"Okay, I\' m getting that you\' re not in the mood to chat. Actually, you\' re probably never in the mood to chat. ";

var chapter52="I\' m sure you\' re busy, and I\' m not trying to bother you or anything, so I\' ll get right to the point.\"  The sharpness in her voice wavered and he recognized it for what it was: the girl was nervous. He didn\'t want her to be. \"It\'s quite all right,\" he said. What exactly were the things one was supposed to say to put another at ease?  He got the sense that quoting statistics wasn\'t going to be of any help here. \"I\' m really not busy at all. I was just-\"  \"I need you to be straight with me,\" the girl said. \"What?\"  \"About everything. None of that slice and dice, shave a little off the top bull. ";

var chapter53="I know what this thing is, and I know where it can get you. I need to have the truth. I can handle it. I\' m not like my mother. Or my father.\"  He could picture her face, contorted by anger to ward off the tears that waited always just behind it. \"Losing someone is so hard,\" the doctor said, feeling the emptiness of his words. \"Especially when you think it might have been prevented.\"  The girl was silent on the other end. The doctor thought he heard her sniffle. \"I lost my wife, a long time ago, and I-\"  He didn\'t know where he was trying to go with this, or trying not to go. \"We lost children. ";

var chapter54="Before she died. We lost all of them.\"  It might have been my fault, the doctor didn\'t say. The girl breathed hard, long into the receiver. A sound like static. \"I can\'t give you answers. The lab results will tell us more, but there\'s no such thing as a one hundred percent guarantee. It\'s a question of progression, as I\' m sure you know. Of catching things early enough. I can tell you I won\'t promise you anything. I\' ve learned not to make promises I can\'t keep.\"  \"Good,\" the girl said, softer than she had ever spoken in the doctor\'s presence. \"That\'s what I wanted to know.\"  The doctor waited for her to end the conversation. ";

var chapter55="She did not. \"How old were your kids?\" she said. \"When they died.\"  \"Oh. They were never even born.\"  \"I\' m sorry,\" she said. Then, \"Does it ever go away?\"  \"No.\"  \"Thank you. Thank you for talking to me.\"  She hung up the phone. The doctor sat for a long time, looking at the daffodil curving over the crystal lip of Clara\'s vase. Multiple organ failure. Doctors-friends who were doctors-had attributed it to a rare syndrome that sometimes presented in cases of Premature Ovarian Failure, though a causal link had not yet been firmly established. Perhaps related to an unknown effect of long-term hormonal imbalance, which had not been studied extensively back then. ";

var chapter56="Against all contrary opinions, against all his medical training, the doctor could not help but believe that Clara had simply stopped wanting to live. Those other doctors were no longer his friends. The doctor rose from the couch. Out the window, the sky was darkening to twilight. Pekore: where families have room to grow. Or, where there is room to do one\'s quiet penance in peace. His eyes strained against the shadows to pick out the daffodil on the curtains. The doctor walked into his study. He tried to think when was the last time he had called the nurse, and where her phone number might be. Before he left the office that day, she had come to him with an apology. ";

var chapter57="For missing the information about the girl\'s father on her chart. She had made no excuses. The doctor was taken aback. She had never apologized to him, in his memory. he\'d been unnecessarily short with her. Perhaps it was time to make amends. On Monday night, the doctor mixed himself a drink-something he hadn\'t done in years. He wondered if scotch continued the aging process as it sat gathering dust in a cabinet, or if it just went off. He sipped gingerly. It tasted all right. A little strong, perhaps, but he supposed that a result of his long absence, its strangeness to his tongue. ";

var chapter58="He took another sip, less cautious now, and swilled it a moment around his mouth before letting it slide, warm and smooth, through his chest and stomach. The theater group meeting schedule was still in his pocket. He removed it. She was not an actress, it turned out. She worked on set design, behind the scenes. he\'d told her she should find her way to the stage. She\'d responded with a dubious tilt of her head. The doctor sipped scotch and looked again at the drawing, thinking he was not the one to decide which direction her talents might take her. He folded the paper neatly back into squares, slipped it under the front cover of the latest issue of The American Journal of Dermapathology. ";

var chapter59="This was to be his nightly reading, and he would need something to mark his place. She\'d had her last appointment today. The melanoma on the back of her knee had spread, beyond the borders of the area removed. Beyond the limitations of his practice. But not beyond hope, he had told her without making any other promises. There would be a larger operation, possibly involving a skin graft. Lymph node mapping was indicated as a precaution, though the tumor was not thick enough to suggest further invasion. Radiation, chemo, immunotherapy would have to be considered. She needed specialized treatment options. ";

var chapter60="He had referred her to an oncologist at the Taussig Cancer Center in Cleveland-the corporate medical giant could afford to offer technologies impossible for a small-town private office staffing three. She left with a look on her face that swung between resigned and betrayed. Her mother\'s face was empty. He didn\'t know why it seemed sad to see them go. He didn\'t know why he thought of Clara, of the dwindling at the end of her life that had nothing to do with cancer. The clock on the mantel chimed six. Time for the news. But tonight he didn\'t want to hear it. Instead, he went to the window, parting the yellowed cloth of the curtains Clara had hung the year after they moved to Pekore. ";

var chapter61="She bought them at a ridiculous price from a theater memorabilia auction in New York, because they started out their life decorating the American Embassy set for the first Broadway production of Don\'t Drink the Water. He had thought them obscenely ugly at first-printed all over with botanists\' drawings of every imaginable flower. Clara was fascinated, in the way she was fascinated with everything. She\'d studied the fabric from end to end, then used it to teach him the proper names, pointing out each variety and describing colorful histories. ";

var chapter62="Now, in the too-bright light of the early summer evening, he searched the curtain length for tonight\'s selection: an iris. Iris Hollandica, in scientific terminology. Iris meaning rainbow. Clara had told him a story of the significance of the flower at weddings; a blue iris and a white iris were tied together in a vase at the bride\'s table to remind the young woman that her marriage would have times of brilliance as well as bleakness. The doctor jiggled the ice cubes in his glass. Scotch spun in amber clinking circles. ";

var chapter63="Sipping again, he felt the slow warmth spreading deep, under seven layers of derma, under fat, under the muscle beneath that, spreading even into his exhausted angry bones which stiffened with age and an inertia more persuasive by the day. Spreading, numbing, anesthetizing. It won\'t hurt a bit, he said aloud, to no one. The cloth of the curtains was rough in his hand, gritty from some twenty years of accumulated dust. As he loosened his fingers, the cloth slid back into place against the window, against the assault of the sun. He felt like crying. Not for the girl. She was a fighter. She would survive, and more. He felt like crying for himself, who had survived and so much less. ";


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