False Witness: A Novel by Uhnak Dorothy

Author:Uhnak, Dorothy [Uhnak, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.to
ISBN: 9781453291061
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

“I KNOW DR. DAVID Cohen as a teaching colleague since for many years we were both on the staff at Columbia. And of course his wife was my patient, but that had very little to do with him.”

Dr. Irving Calendar was a pompous jerk. He had shaved the remaining hair on his head to make it appear that his state of baldness was his option rather than nature’s. As he spoke, reacting to a pre-set inner time clock, he periodically reached his right hand behind his head and slowly, lovingly brushed his fingers along the shaved edge of his neck.

“I used to be a Freudian,” he told us. “But I realized a few years ago that the therapy of the future was preventive medication. Instead of seeing maybe six, seven patients a day for the famous fifty-minute hour, I can now deal with four, maybe five patients an hour. That’s twenty-four, thirty patients a day. At fifty to sixty bucks a throw.”

“That is remarkable, Dr. Calendar. How many patients does that multiply up to per week?”

He shrugged at me and pulled his wide lips into a smile, then gave his neck the old feel.

“Depends. There are days when I just don’t schedule myself. Days when I devote myself to myself.” He pressed his hard flat stomach and flexed his hard wide shoulders. “Tennis. That’s my game.”

It sounded like his raison d’etre. It was said with tight but passionate emphasis.

“Another thing about this type of therapy is that it doesn’t leave me drained. They make no emotional demands on me. My patients. They come; I check their reaction to dosage: good, bad, effective, not effective; high, low, stable. I have each one keep a journal. I give them a coded notebook I have printed up especially for this kind of notekeeping.”

“So your patient just shows you a notebook and that’s it?”

“I evaluate what’s been going on, medication-wise. And make whatever adjustment, if any, is necessary. And decide when the next visit should be. Maybe two weeks, maybe four. The patient is reassured by the visit. We don’t get involved with their emotional hangups or past lives. After all, it is the current day-by-day life we have to deal with, not mama and the toidy potty and papa and the primal scene.”

“Are many of you former Freudians crossing over?” Bobby Jones asked.

Another gentle shrug; another brush of the stubble; another smile. “The smart ones are.”

Dr. Calendar had treated Mrs. Melissa Wise Cohen for depression. It had been a lifelong syndrome with her. She had tried conventional therapies and found none that helped. Regardless of what was going on in her life, when her biological time clock messed up her blood chemistry, she hit bottom. The fact that there was no precipitating cause for the depression, the cyclical nature of it, and the degree of total despair she suffered during it were right up Dr. Calendar’s alley.

“Very typical type of case and the most likely to respond to medication therapy. An almost casebook demonstration of clinical depression.

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