Chapter 6: Tennessee, Present Day

I looked down at my iPhone at the message that had just arrived. My patient from Chicago had just arrived and he and his family were waiting in my office.

“Damn,” I thought to myself, “They are 15 minutes early.” I hurried across the medical campus to get back to my office.

The Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville is a nationally renowned medical facility. It is the largest single employer in Nashville, and over 80% of the employees of the University work for the hospital. It is famous for its advanced treatment centers in a number of areas, including cancer treatment, which was my area of specialty. I was, it shouldn’t surprise anyone, a hematologist-oncologist; that is, I worked with patients suffering from various blood cell cancers.

I crossed 21st Street to the building where my office was located and found the family waiting for my arrival. I introduced myself to them, including the patient, a young man named Phillip Adams, who was 28 years old. His father, George, was a wealthy man who insisted that his son had to be treated by ‘the best’. So their family physician had inquired with his colleagues and they had agreed that he ought to come to Nashville to have me treat his son.

Here, I must confess, the politics of being at a university medical center came into play. I had been ‘requested’ — read ‘commanded’ — by the Chief of Medicine, to handle the Adams family as diplomatically as possible. It seems that they were hoping to tap Mr. Adams for a large donation and my treatment of his son was considered to be a great opening for the moneygrubbers (pardon me: ‘University Development’ staff) to use. So I was going to do what I could, within reason, not simply to treat the son, but to satisfy the father.

My process starts easily enough, the same as it has for hundreds of years, truth be told. I took young Phillip into one of the rooms and took several vials of his blood. Actually, I didn’t draw the blood; my nurse/phlebotomist took it for me as I spoke to Phillip.

And that was all that was needed initially. I escorted Phillip back out to his family and told them that I would have more information by late that afternoon, which I would let them know the next day.

The family, obviously anxious, asked if instead of waiting until the next day, I could join them for dinner and share my findings. Actually, I had nothing planned that I couldn’t postpone, and keeping in mind the Chief’s admonition, I accepted their gracious offer.

I returned to my office where, as I had expected, my nurse was waiting with the vials of blood that she had drawn.

Maria de Leon was a Latina in her mid-thirties, single and quite beautiful as well as curvaceous. She was one of my current batch of cognoscenti — the small number of people who knew that I lived an ‘unusual’ lifestyle, but were willing to submit to me in exchange for the rewards that I could give them.