Thomas nodded and appeared to be thinking. Hoping to restore his good humor, Cassi added, “Robert really appreciated your intervening on his behalf.”
“I know,” said Thomas, suddenly smiling. “I didn’t do it for his benefit, but if he insists on seeing it that way, it’s fine with me. Now I think we should go to bed.”
As he tenderly guided her upstairs, Cassi wasn’t sure just what she read in his extraordinary blue eyes. She shivered, not entirely sure if it was with pleasurable expectation.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
CASSI HAD NOT BEEN a hospital inpatient since college. Now with medical school and internship behind her, it was a very different experience, just as Robert had suggested. Knowledge of all that could happen made the process far more frightening. Since she’d ridden into the hospital with Thomas, she was there far too early to be admitted. In fact, she’d been told she would have to wait until ten before the proper clerks were available. When Cassi protested that people were admitted all night long through the emergency room, the secretary just repeated that Cassi had to come back at ten.
After spending three unproductive hours in the library, much too nervous to concentrate on anything more demanding than Psychology Today, Cassi went back to admitting. The personnel had changed, although their attitude hadn’t. Instead of smoothing the way through the admitting procedure, they seemed intent on making it as harrowing as possible, as if it were a rite of passage. Now Cassi was informed that she had no hospital card, and without one she could not be admitted. A disinterested clerk finally told her to go to the ID office on the third floor.
Thirty minutes later, armed with a new ID which looked suspiciously like a credit card, Cassi returned to admitting. There she was confronted with another seemingly insurmountable problem. Since she used her maiden name, Cassidy, in the hospital because it was the name on her medical degree, and since Thomas had taken out her health insurance under Kingsley, the secretary claimed they needed her marriage certificate. Cassi said she didn’t have it. It wasn’t something she’d imagined she’d need to be admitted to the hospital, and surely they could just call Thomas’s office and get it straightened out. The clerk insisted the computer had to have the certificate. She was only the machine’s handmaiden, or so she said. This impasse was finally solved by the admitting supervisor who somehow got the computer to accept the information. Finally Cassi was assigned a room on the seventeenth floor, and a pleasant woman in a green smock, with a badge that said MEMORIAL VOLUNTEER, escorted Cassi upstairs.
But not to seventeen. First Cassi was taken to the second floor for a chest X ray. She said she had just had one six weeks ago during a routine physical and did not want another. X ray claimed anesthesia would not anesthetize anyone who was not X-rayed, and it took Cassi another hour to get the chief of anesthesia to call Obermeyer, who in turn called Jackson, the chief of radiology. After Jackson checked Cassi’s old film, he called Obermeyer back, who called back the chief of anesthesia, who called back the radiology clerk to say that Cassi didn’t need another chest film.
The rest of Cassi’s admission went more smoothly, including the visit to the lab for standard blood and urine analysis. Finally Cassi was deposited in a nondescript light blue hospital room with two beds. Her roommate was sixty-one and had a bandage over her left eye.
“Mary Sullivan’s the name,” said the woman after Cassi had introduced herself. She looked older than her sixty-one years because she wasn’t wearing her dentures.
Cassi wondered what kind of surgery the woman had had on her eye.
“Retina fell off,” said Mary, as if noting Cassi’s interest. “They had to take the eye out and glue it back on with a laser beam.”
Cassi laughed in spite of herself. “I don’t think they took your eye out,” she said.
“Sure did. In fact, when they first took my bandage off I saw double and thought they’d put it back in crooked.”