Deficiency Read Free Page A

treatment that proved itself. Hyman Templeman liked to refer to himself as a medical iconoclast.
    Despite her youth and her high-tech medical education, Terri had an affinity for the human touch. She believed in her grandmother's adage: people get well faster when they feel the doctor really cares whether they do or not. Her grandmother always wanted her to be a doctor, but "a real doctor, like your great-uncle Abe, who thought a doctor was a man with a gift, not a man with an expensive education." It followed then that if someone was given a gift, it was ungrateful, no, sinful, for her not to use it whenever and wherever possible.
    Terri seemed to be following the dream life design. She had been a brilliant student, and she had returned to practice medicine in her hometown, where it was presumed she would marry her high school sweetheart, Curt Levitt, who had himself come back to the community to become a successful attorney in his father's firm, now taking it over with two partners since his father's retirement.
    "Mr. and Mrs. Yuppie America," her girlfriends called them, "the dream couple." They teased, but she recognized their underlying envy, too.
    Was her life too perfect? Could such a thing be so? She thought about it often. Her grandmother had brought all of her Old World superstitions with her, not the least of which was a belief in the Evil Eye. Whenever things were going too well for you, some covetous witch could cast a wicked spell. According to her grandmother, it was best to be humble, even secretive about good fortune.
    At this moment in the emergency room, however, she thought about nothing but the problem at hand. She was doing what she was quickly becoming noted for… concentrating so intently she looked like she had shut away all distracting noise and sight.
    A young woman had been brought in by ambulance and was on the gurney in one of the examination rooms. The woman had lost some of her teeth, but it didn't appear to be the result of a blow to the mouth. There was no trauma, no blow to any part of her face. It appeared her teeth had simply fallen out. In fact, the young woman's face seemed to age right before Terri's eyes. The emergency room nurse looked up from the young woman, her eyes pleading for Terri to do something miraculous quickly. She pointed to a large hemorrhage on the woman's arm, just above the blood pressure cup.
    "I did that," the nurse said. "With the blood pressure cup. I'm afraid to squeeze the bulb. Pressure, no matter where I place it on her body, and no matter how gently I do it, immediately produces hemorrhages."
    Terri moved quickly to her side and examined the woman's neck and chest. Her eyes were open, but they were glassy, the pupils barely dilating. She stared up at the ceiling light. Petechia appeared up and down her arms and legs and over her stomach and chest. It looked as if some madman had come along with a dark-blue Magic Marker and poked her body for hours and hours.
    "There's barely blood pressure," the nurse warned.
    "My God…" Terri brought her stethoscope to the young woman's chest, but before she could suggest a therapy, she heard the young woman's heartbeat thump into silence. She looked at the nurse and then started CPR.
    Nothing helped. Death had too tight a grip.
    Terri felt her own face whiten in disbelief.
    "How long… was she like this?" she asked the nurse.
    "I don't know, Doctor. The ambulance and the police just brought her in. She was found in a motel outside of Monticello. What is it? What killed her?" the nurse said, grimacing. She pulled herself away from the dead young girl as if she had already concluded whatever killed her was highly contagious.
    Terri shook her head. The symptoms were clicking off against a computerlike memory bank, and what resulted made no sense.
    "I don't know," she confessed. "Not without the blood work. There are too many possibilities. You better call the coroner," she said softly.
    This was almost a nonstop trip