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We’re losing ground.”
    Larry cut the redneck jive.
    â€œThere must be something you can do to fix me!”
    â€œI’m sure there will be, once we have results from the bronchoscopy, once we understand what’s causing this. That’ll be soon, very soon.”
    â€œYeah, I hope so too, doc. Well, thanks for trying.”
    Larry extended his hand. Kevin clasped it and gave an encouraging pump.
    As he got up to leave, Kevin took a card out of his pocket and examined it. Larry saw his own name printed on the back.
    â€œIs there any family member, any friend you want me to contact?” Kevin asked.
    Larry closed his eyes and turned his head away.

VII
    A T TEN IN THE morning, Gwen Howard was lucky enough to find a parking spot just four blocks from City Hospital. Walking toward the main entrance, she thought about Kevin Bartholomew, how engaging and appealing he had been on the phone yesterday. Had they been flirting?
    Stop it, Gwen ordered herself. He’s got to be at least four years younger than me.
    Since her divorce, she had dated enough to learn the hard way that men could handle being with a woman who was two, maybe three years older. Any more was inevitably a deal-breaker. Gwen concentrated on the building she was entering.
    Though she had already been inside several times to check on sick clinic patients, the place still unnerved her. This modern version of City Hospital with its closed wards and individual rooms was nothing like the brick towers that stood here when she was an intern. The house staff and nurses seemed to work in isolation. It was too white, too bright, too silent for her. Nothing like the old hospital’s raucous open wards where she had become adept at sticking intravenous catheters, spinal needles, and bone marrow trephines into desperately ill people. The constant, colorful chatter, even the patients’ complaints, had been public reassurance that she was doing her best, all that anyone in her position could be expected to accomplish.
    But will my best meet the bar here? Poor Larry Winton was a case in point. Being purely objective, she had to conclude he was in the ICU with respiratory failure because a few weeks earlier, when she saw a tinge of blue in his nail beds and considered calling an ambulance, she had also imagined an emergency room physician complaining about yet another patient unnecessarily sent over by an idiot clinic doc who didn’t know what real cyanosis looks like.
    â€œChrist,” she said aloud in the empty elevator. “I should have just bit the bullet and called 911. The sub-specialists here would have had plenty of time to figure it out by now.”
    Gwen hadn’t gone into the new ICU on her previous visits. Her self-confidence sunk lower as she looked at the modern equipment. It was all foreign, from intravenous pumps to wall-mounted oxygen valves and chest tube drainage systems. The ventilators had dials to control parameters she had never heard of. It made her re-think applying. How long would it take her to come up to speed? The patients she cared for rarely had anything worse than a bad cold or a sexually transmitted disease. And if she was accepted into the residency, it would mean being here triple the hours she now worked, so much time away from Eva.
    Yet Eva did seem to need her less. She was thriving in fourth grade and happy to play in an after-school program until six on the days Gwen worked. And Gwen knew she could find a college girl with a car to cover the nights and weekends on call. It wouldn’t be that expensive. Parenting certainly wouldn’t get easier once Eva started adolescence. In any case, Gwen’s days at the Haight-Ashbury clinic were numbered if she didn’t acquire a specialty credential. Health department doctors like her would soon be required to be boarded, and eligibility for a board exam required completing two additional years of hospital training after internship. The clincher