Waiting for Daybreak (10 page)

“We were swamped upstairs. I swear, every kid in Atlanta has an
ear infection this week.”

“We were busy, too. So, any idea what the big meeting’s about?”

“None. But Helga has been especially uptight every time I’ve seen
her today. And given how uptight she usually is, that’s saying a lot.”

Just then, Helga Parker walked into the room, her plump face
even more serious than usual. Rachelle was right about that. “Okay,
people. I know you all have things you’d rather be doing right now,
so I’ll get directly to the point. Because of Glenda Prescott, we are
announcing a complete and immediate change in policy.”

Groans sounded all around. Busy as this HMO was, there were
some patients that everyone knew, because those patients were such
chronic complainers. Glenda Prescott was such a patient.

“She has been on Vasoretic for a few months now. When she
came in two weeks ago to get a refill, she was given Vasotec instead.
Apparently, she took it for a couple of weeks, then noticed some
swelling in her ankles.”

“Come on, Helga, tell ’em the whole story. It’s worth repeating.”
Josh Hart, the assistant pharmacy director, was as laid-back and jovial
as Helga was uptight and stern. “She came walking into administration
yesterday, screaming about how we were trying to kill people.
I asked her what was wrong, and she . . .” He started laughing and
took a moment to compose himself. “She pulled up her pant leg and
said, ‘THIS is wrong.’ ”

He snickered again. “Tell you the truth, I guess her ankles were
a little edematous, but not enough that I had a clue what she was
talking about.”

Helga grimaced. “A patient receiving the wrong medication is a
serious matter, regardless of whether or not it was a life-threatening
event. The fact is, if her ankles had not swelled, alerting her to the
fact that she was getting only the ACE inhibitor without the benefit
of the added diuretic, her blood pressure could have gone significantly
higher. We all know that.”

“Did her blood pressure go higher?” Rachelle asked.

“About five points systolic.” Helga drummed her fingers across
the thick chart that sat on the table in front of her.

Helga rapped her knuckles on the table for attention. “And she’s
started talking to one of those fast-talking TV lawyers. Likely there’s
going to be a lawsuit. Of course, our in-house legal team wanted a
copy of anything pertinent, just in case. I pulled up her file, and saw
PIA in the pharmacy comments of her profile. Anyone want to tell
me what that means?”

Dead silence. Furtive glances cast at each other, but no one
dared to look at Helga.

“Rachelle, how about you? What do you think it means?”

“It means pain in the . . . uh . . . backside.”

Several sniggers sounded from around the table.

Helga glared at the assembled group. “Since you were good enough
to tell me what it means, Rachelle, maybe you can be so kind as to
explain to me why you think this might have happened.”

Rachelle shrugged. “Just so everyone knows what they’re dealing
with when she comes to the window. You know to expect complaints
and problems, so no one gets caught unawares in dealing
with her.”

“This . . . PIA. Is it in other profiles, too?”

Rachelle looked around the table at her silent co-workers. “Probably.
Maybe a couple dozen or so?”

“A couple dozen?” Helga’s whole face quivered with the force of
the words. “A couple dozen of our patients have something derogatory
like this in their profile?”

“Not to be disrespectful, but we fill a thousand prescriptions a
day in this clinic. If only two dozen people are singled out as being
hard to deal with, then I think that says more about those people
than it does about us.”

Helga looked hard at her for a minute, as if she wanted to say
more but couldn’t think of a valid argument. She finally changed
subjects. “Anyway, back to the problem at hand. One thing we’ve
realized is that we have no idea who made this mistake. Paige’s initials
were printed on Mrs. Prescott’s bottle, but we all know that any
pharmacist in here could have been the one who actually did the
final check. So, we’re implementing some new policies—actually,
we’re enforcing the existing policy that we’ve been much too lax on.
Effective immediately, every single label must be hand-initialed by
the pharmacist who does the final check. Understood?”

Everyone around the room nodded.

“Great. This new policy will be enforced, effective immediately.

I’ll be coming around doing spot checks for the next few weeks, just
to make sure we’re on track.

“Any questions?”

Silence.

“That’s all for now, then. See you all tomorrow.” Helga walked
from the room, taking her thick file with her.

The grandfather clock chimed the hour, and still Paige had not touched the phone. Maybe she just needed a little practice. She finally picked up the phone and punched some familiar numbers.

Rachelle answered on the fourth ring. “Can my caller ID be correct?”

“Oh come on, Shell, you know it’s me.”

“She lives!” Rachelle sang out the words as if she were announcing the resurrection of Lazarus to an entire village. “I haven’t heard from you in so long, I’d started scanning the Tennessee obituaries.”

The familiar lilt of her old roommate’s voice hit Paige like an unexpected kick to the gut. Whether from joy or pain she didn’t know, but the force of the reaction doubled her over.
Put on a brave
face. Sound happy. You’ve got to do this now, or you’ll never make
it work on your parents.
She drew herself upright and spoke in a bright tone. “Yeah, well, it took you so long to answer, I thought you must be out for the night.”

“Going out is highly overrated.”

“Since when?” When Rachelle walked into a room, heads turned. In spite of her commitment phobia, she never lacked for a date, even on a Wednesday night.

“Oh, just thought I’d stay at home, recharge my batteries. Maybe watch a little TV—ESPN or something.”

“Aha! That’s it. It’s that Braves center fielder—what’s his name—Steve Jensen. And you’re sitting home to watch him play? Wow, this must be serious!”

“I don’t do serious.” She paused a split second too long to give her words credibility. “So, what’s up with you? How’s the new job?”

Time to get down to the practice session. “It’s going great. It’s a beautiful pharmacy in a quaint location, and I work with some great people. Couldn’t be better.”

“Translation—doing hard time. Beautiful place but minimum bonding with fellow pharmacy personnel.”

“How do you do that?”

“You’re easy.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I’m about to call Mom, and I don’t want her to worry.”

“She’ll worry anyway, that’s what mothers do. One small tip— leave off that ‘couldn’t be better’ part. It’s a dead giveaway.”

“Thanks.”

“And tell her I’m praying for her, okay?”

“I will.” Hopefully Rachelle’s prayers would get a few more results than Paige’s had lately.

The two friends exchanged another minute of small talk, then Paige was left alone with the phone again. She looked at the number written on yellow sticky paper stuck to the receiver—the line for the temporary apartment where her parents now lived. She picked up the receiver and punched the keys before she could think to change her mind.

Her mother answered on the first ring. “How’s my girl?” Shuffling noises came from the other end of the line, then her mother’s low whisper, “Norman, it’s Paige. Go get on the extension.” Her voice returned then, with full strength. “You didn’t answer my question. How are you?”

Keep it upbeat. Light. Happy. “I’m just fine. How are you?”

“Right as rain. I’m glad to get this thing started.” From the tone of her voice, Doris Woodward gave no indication that what she had started would almost kill her. Could kill her, in fact.

What had the doctor said? “The reason I have such a good success rate is that I will take you as close to death as I possibly can before I turn it around.” Paige thought of the massive chemo her mother was about to undergo before Aunt Opal’s healthy stem cells would be infused into her veins. The sickness. The pain. The hope.

“Paige!” Her father’s voice came from the extension. “How’s that job coming along?”

Paige would pull this off—she had to. “Still great. After the first week, I know it’s going to be even more than I had hoped. You got the money I sent from the signing bonus, right?”

“Sure did. Carried it over to Patient Accounts myself—three days before it was due, I might add. Maybe I had to ask ’em for a little financial help up front, but never let it be said that Norman Woodward doesn’t pay his bills on time. I’m going to do that every single month—pay early, I mean.”

Her mother said, “I can’t wait until I can come see that pharmacy myself. I bet it’s beautiful.”

Some things you just don’t tell your mother while she is in the fight of her life—things like an undercurrent of anger that you can’t understand, cold stares, and your fellow employees whispering behind shelves. “How about your place? What’s it like?”

“You should see this little apartment. It’s so cute. Reminds me of the place your father and I lived when we first got married.”

“Only thing it’s missing is the leaky roof,” her father said from the extension.

Paige laughed. “Well, that’s something we can be thankful for. How’s Aunt Opal?”

“Good,” her mother answered. “They drew her stem cells today and everything went well. They said she produced even more than they needed.”

“Didn’t surprise me none. She’s always done everything over the top—from Christmas decorations on down. Anyone who goes so far as to iron her skivvies is gonna produce extra stem cells, it just makes sense.”

“Oh, Daddy.” Paige laughed and then found her voice catch a little. “I wish I could be there with you.”

“You rest easy. Your mother’s in the best of hands here. I’m practically an expert in all of this now. You couldn’t ask for any better. Tomorrow they’re going to remove her old port and put in a . . . let me see . . . a central venous catheter. They’ll use it for chemo, blood draws, the works. And I guess I’m supposed to go to some sort of class about how to help take care of it.”

“Oh, Dad, it’s just so wrong that you’re mixed up in all this.”

“Nonsense. She’s
my
wife, isn’t she? Besides, this is more or less what I’ve done for the last forty years, unclogging drains and such. Only difference I see is the size of the pipes.”

Paige couldn’t bring herself to laugh, but she did smile. “Poor Mom.”

“Poor Mom, nothing. Downright lucky if you ask me.”

But they both knew better. There was nothing lucky about what Paige’s mother was about to go through.

chapter
sixteen

Clarissa sat in the coffee shop, thumbing through a magazine, pretending her lunchtime wasn’t long over. So what? Let Perky Paige handle the crowd for a while. After yesterday’s condescending tirade, she deserved it.

The magazine jerked from her hand. “Hello there.” Tony waved it in the air. “What are you reading?” He flipped through a couple of pages of
Vogue
before tossing it back on the table. “Very highbrow.”

“Tony! What are you doing here?” She jumped to her feet and threw her arms around him.

“I used the excuse that I needed to check the progress upstairs, but the truth is, I came to see my favorite niece.”

She swatted his arm. “I’m your only niece.”

“Even if there were a dozen, you’d still be my favorite.”

“Good answer. A lie, but still a good answer.”

“I’ll buy you lunch, what do you say?”

She pointed to the mostly untouched salad on the table. “Just ate. How about dinner?” At least something good would come from this day.

He rubbed his chin. “I’ll buy dinner if we can order pizza.”

“You eat entirely too much junk food. There’s a decent steak house just outside the city limits. It’s actually a pretty nice place, considering it’s in this dump of a town.”

“You’ve soaked me for one too many expensive dinners lately. I say pizza.”

She laughed and stood. “Well, come on, I have to get to work.

We can argue about it while I show you the latest upgrades in the pharmacy.”

When they walked in, the place was empty of customers, and no one seemed to be in the dispensing area, either. “Come on back.” Clarissa opened the door, wondering if Paige had tired of waiting for her and left for lunch. No, she would have seen her go by, and besides, Paige was too perfect to do anything like that. “Anybody home?”

“Dawn’s still at lunch. I’m back here.” Paige’s voice came from the back.

“What are you doing back there?” This was one of those times that Clarissa was glad for the Richardson gift of being able to carry on a perfectly normal sounding conversation in a perfectly normal tone, even when there was enough tension in the air to suffocate the average mortal. She’d talked to Tony on the phone about the situation but never let on how fully she was beginning to dislike Paige. Hopefully he’d see how unfair everything was on his own.

“Wiping down the shelves.” Paige, too, seemed to possess the gift for falsely light conversational tone. She emerged from behind the shelves, carrying a wad of paper towels in her hand. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t know we had company.”

“Paige, this is my uncle. Tony, this is Paige.”

Tony went perfectly still and simply stared at Paige. Finally, he took a step forward and offered his hand. “Uh . . . hello.”