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practices were more likely to kill you than heal you. Then again, some ghastly measures, like leeching, turned out to be rather useful. Hirudotherapy (the fancy word for the medical use of leeches) made a comeback recently because it can aid postoperative patients who run the risk of blood clots from venous congestion. I’m not sure why bloodletting lasted so long, but there are surely things we are doing right now that one day might seem barbaric. I’d like to say it’s inserting bags of silicone into the chest wall. But I think big tits (or
proportional breasts
, as they were described in my plastics rotation) are here for the duration.
Enough about medieval medicine. Have you thought about my offer? Why don’t you come for a visit and you’ll see.
Anna
     
    After medical school in St. Louis, Anna was accepted into a residency program in Boston, and so she returned to the cold embrace of her family. Colin was there, which helped, but it wasn’t like she ever saw him. Within six months, she met a man who’d come into the ED after being bitten by his girlfriend’s dog. She looked at his chart. Nick Charles was the name he gave. He must have shown ID and proof of insurance at registration, but she still didn’t believe it.
    “Nick Charles. Really?” she asked.
    “My sister’s name is Nora.”
    “No.”
    “Yes.”
    “Were you teased in high school?” Anna asked.
    “Only by teachers,” Nick said as Anna examined the dog bite.
    “I would have teased you.”
    She treated Nick’s wound and gave him a tetanus shot, and he returned a few days later with flowers and asked her out. It was considered highly unethical for physicians to date patients, and she told him so. Two weeks later, when the wound was a ghost of its former self, he was waiting outside the hospital after Anna’s shift (and he couldn’t have learned her schedule without dedicated effort). He asked her out again, this time adding that he was no longer anyone’s patient. She asked about the girlfriend and the dog. He had dumped both shortly after the bite. He reminded her that life was short. Anna didn’t particularly like this ploy, the constant allusions to 9/11 by people who hadn’t been touched by it at all. But Anna liked his name and so she said yes, although whenever anyone asked how they’d met, she’d say they began chatting at the local farmers’ market (even though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d bought fresh produce). The appeal of Nick Charles was simple: he was nice and he wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer, which somehow seemed important, at least in terms of disappointing her mother. Nick Charles did something with computers, but Anna never asked enough questions to really understand his career. (If Kate had met him, she would have found out that he worked on a compiling team that transformed source code into another programming language, and then she’d be able to explain what that meant.)
    Nick didn’t mind Anna’s lack of interest in his job. Most people, other than his colleagues, lacked interest in it. After they’d been dating for six months, Nick thought they should move in together, but Anna put him off. He couldn’t understand, since she had a two-bedroom apartment and was hardly ever home.
    Anna had never felt right about leaving Kate behind. She couldn’t leave her in Santa Cruz after what happened, but then, after she’d dragged her to St. Louis, she didn’t want to leave her in St. Louis, because it was St. Louis. Kate was twenty-seven, alone in the Midwest with just a handful of friends, or acquaintances, depending on how you looked at it. She was on a career track to become the manager of a coffeehouse. Anna couldn’t help but feel responsible. That extra room in Anna’s apartment was for Kate. She wasn’t taking in anyone else.
     
TO : Anna
FROM : Kate
RE : Bloodletting
I don’t know what it is, but modern medicine holds no interest for me. I talked to George the other day on the phone.