Deficiency Read Free

someone about to lose consciousness.
    She raised her hands from the small of his back and ran her fingers through her hair, pressing her palms against her temples as if she wanted to keep her thoughts contained or her head from exploding. He was kissing her neck and moving his lips down over the base of her throat to the valley between her supple breasts. She felt the tip of his tongue move over one nipple and then the other, but when she heard herself moan, she thought she sounded more like someone moaning in pain than in sexual delight.
    She opened her eyes and he raised his head so she could look into his. They no longer looked light blue. Instead they looked blacker, deeper, larger. It was as if they were absorbing the rest of his face until he would be nothing but eyes.
    Suddenly she felt a terrific aching in all her joints. It was difficult even to bend her arm without experiencing some pain. The back of her neck felt tight, as tight as it would if someone had placed a metal clamp over it and had begun closing the clamp. She opened her mouth to express her discomfort, but he pressed his lips over hers and his tongue jetted into her mouth and over her own tongue, attaching itself to it like fly paper.
    She began to gag. She willed her arms to push him away, but they remained limp at her sides.
    Vaguely she knew he had entered her and they were making love, but the
initial pleasure was gone from his thrusts. There was a terrible ringing in her
ears that grew louder and louder. She was struggling now to extricate herself
from his embrace. The chill that had come into her face grew even colder. She
felt her eyes going back in her head and she fought desperately to remain conscious, but it was impossible. Everywhere his body touched hers, it felt sticky.
    The last thing she thought was, it feels as if he is oozing over me.
    Then she went dark.
     
ONE
     
    STAT!
    Dr. Terri Barnard dropped Irene Heckman's medical chart and rushed from her hospital room. The seventy-two-year-old woman had just begun to describe her chronic back pain in a slow, monotone voice as if the aches had taken over completely and turned her into another one of the walking dead, aged zombies parading through the corridors of Medicare, haunting the consciences of doctors. Terri knew it was arthritis and there was little she could do in the way of a cure, especially an instant cure, but she was prepared to be patient and sympathetic despite Mrs. Heckman's laying all the blame for her aches at the foot of her doctors and an uncaring medical community. Terri had an especially good bedside manner when it came to elderly patients. It made sense for a doctor to have that quality, she thought. Most of his or her patients would be elderly, wouldn't they?
    STAT!
    It was originating from the emergency room, and the Community General Hospital serving the once-famous resort area in the Catskills had no doctor on duty during the fall months. The participating physicians were rotating the responsibility. Tonight, it was hers, and for the first time!
    Tough luck, she thought. Only hours after beginning her rounds she was thrown right into a crisis. At age twenty-eight, she had just finished two months as an assistant to Dr. Hyman Templeman, a sixty-eight-year-old family physician who had become something of a fixture in the upstate New York community of Centerville, a village of just fewer than two thousand year-round inhabitants. During the summer resort months, it and its surrounding hamlets and villages used to jump to ten times their population. It still multiplied five or six times, and Hyman's patients did come from all the surrounding hamlets in the Fallsburg township and not only Centerville.
    Terri Barnard considered the elderly hands-on physician a perfect mentor: a doctor who diagnosed almost as much from instinct as from knowledge, maintaining an almost gleeful distrust of the new technology, but willing to learn and seize upon any aid to diagnosis and