Could I Have This Dance? by Harry Kraus

Author:Harry Kraus [Kraus, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-310-86151-5
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2002-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Claire pushed her seat into a reclining position shortly after takeoff and wondered how her life could get any more complicated. She’d been given one week off which she’d have to take out of her two weeks yearly vacation. Another intern, Brian McNeil, was pulled from his ER rotation to cover CT while she was away. In two hours, she’d gone from writing notes in the ICU to thirty thousand feet, flying home to a parent reported to be on death’s door. She hadn’t even stopped in at her rented brownstone for a suitcase. With her call bag packed, and her new clothes purchases carefully folded inside, she ought to have enough to make it until she returned.

She closed her eyes and reflected on the one advantage of her flight. At least she’d be away from Lafayette and out of Roger Jones’s reach for a few days.

She thought of her father and wondered if her ideas about Huntington’s disease were totally off the wall. She’d been accused of ivory-toweritis, and her mother implied that she was being paranoid about every disease she saw. She knew that was an exaggeration, but had known other students in medical school who always developed the symptoms of the disease they were studying. It wasn’t so uncommon. A little hypochondria circulates in every medical school class.

Her father was drinking again. It wasn’t so hard for her to believe. But did that mean nothing else was wrong? Were all his symptoms simply alcohol intoxication or alcohol withdrawal, or a combination?

She tried to close her eyes to rest, but the nagging feeling about her father’s case wouldn’t go away. She drank a diet cola and stared at the clouds.

Everything below her looked so small. Cars and trucks were ants. Buildings were blocks and the rivers were spaghetti. It was all a matter of perspective. All of the mountains that loomed so large when they were right in front of you looked like goose bumps from an airplane window.

Perspective. Maybe that’s what she needed in her life.

Her problems seemed so big, but maybe that was because they were in front of her nose.

She was in an all-out competition with the best medical school graduates in the country. Her life was threatened by a man who blamed her for killing his daughter. Her father was on death’s door in an ICU, and even if he recovered, he might still suffer from an incurable genetic disease, which he may have passed to her. She was engaged to a man she rarely got to see. She was attracted to a man she felt guilty for desiring. It had been months since she’d been to church, and weeks since she’d read the Bible.

Could things get any worse?

She looked at a man in a business suit next to her, busily typing on a laptop computer. He was a salesman, an attorney perhaps. If he made a mistake, someone might lose a few dollars. If she made a mistake, a mother lost her only daughter and a little girl would never ride her purple bicycle again.

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