Treatment Plan

Christa sat in the doctor’s office where she was waiting to follow up with the billing department about paying for her son’s prescription. Kade had been diagnosed last month, her husband Danny the month before, and the medication was expensive. Christa twisted the wedding ring on her left finger. Nervous habit. They were lucky it was so treatable, she reminded herself. Sure, it was a shame she hadn’t been able to get both of the twins in to see the doctor at the same time—these things ran in families, she’d been told, so the results were likely to be the same for Keelie—but that was the price of modern medicine. 

All Christa’s old friends from high school said she’d picked Kade over Keelie because he was her favorite. That wasn’t true. Christa had simply applied common sense triage procedure. Kade wasn’t as strong as Keelie, never had been, so he had to get seen first. As if Christa had wanted to choose which of her two kids needed her more. Mothers were supposed to have an infinite amount of love—and Christa did—it was just that there was only so much of her to go around. She was like that tree in the kids’ book, the one who had so many parts of herself plucked and sawed off for the boy she loved that, at the end, she was nothing but a stump. 

There was one other person in the waiting room, a man sitting in the row of chairs across from Christa. One of the Well-Intentioned Guilty, probably. Christa could tell by the way he stuffed his hands into his pockets when he caught her gawking. No one who was full-pay used this waiting room. He was either a dad who’d taken off work because his wife had been whittled down to so much nothing she didn’t feel like coming in this morning to collect their kids’ medications, or he was a drug rep.

Christa lowered her eyes to her lap. She picked at a smudge of peanut butter on her jeans. It shouldn’t be much longer. 

The door opened and a nurse carrying a clipboard entered the room. Pucker lines radiated like spiders’ legs from his slit lips. And then he noticed the man. “Mike!”

Drug rep.

Christa fixed her eyes on the polished gold arc of her wedding band. What business was it of hers, their back clapping and hand shaking? She tried not to notice how the nurse pointed his thumb at her. “Doc and I will be ready for lunch as soon as we finish with her.” Tried not to hear him whisper. “Payment plan.” 

Ever since Kade and Danny started the new meds, Christa had been trying to quit the habit of messing with her wedding ring. It drew attention to her hands, and she could do without the sympathetic looks. Her job was to think positively, the doctors said. Negative emotions could hinder the success of the treatments, and she didn’t want that now, did she? Not after all she’d sacrificed. 

Christa ran the index finger of her right hand over the twice-reduced pinkie and once-reduced ring finger on her left hand. She removed her wedding band and put it into the front zipper pocket of her purse. After today there’d be nothing left to hold it in place. They generally took only one knuckle at a time for payment, but these kinds of diagnoses and treatments always cost more than they quoted upfront, what with all the testing and retesting and the medication shortages. She just hoped they wouldn’t have to take the rest of her pinkie, too. She wanted to have something left for Keelie.