Stone Babies

By David Hellerstein

Synopsis of Stone Babies

A young doctor in New York City, Dr. Jay Sones has just finished training as an obstetrician and infertility specialist. For over a decade he has been working at Manhattan Medical Center, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side, first as a medical student, then as an obstetrics resident, then as an Infertility Fellow, treating women with fertility problems and doing ground-breaking research with his mentor, the world-renowned Dr. Leon Witt.

After years of sleepless nights in which Jay has delivered innumerable babies and treated almost every type of difficult pregnancy, he has become an expert obstetrician-gynecologist. In several years of Infertility Fellowship, working with the temperamental and brilliant Dr. Witt, Jay has survived a different kind of apprenticeship, becoming a medical scientist who can participate in the amazing advances of infertility research. After years of sacrifices--financial and emotional--Jay is ready for the rewards of "real life."

He prepares to open up a private practice in Manhattan in partnership with his friend and colleague from the hospital, Dr. Alli Daniel. For a while it looks like life will be perfect--an Upper East Side practice, the opportunity to continue doing research with Dr. Witt. And, most of all, some time for a personal life, for love and romance, with his sometimes-girlfriend, Janine Stern. Janine, who is elegant and intriguing and quite successful (she runs a large consulting firm), has her eye on Jay's future, though he is content to remain in the present--dinners at elegant restaurants, nights at her East End Avenue penthouse, leisurely Sunday brunches together after running the Reservoir in Central Park, not to mention occasional romantic weekend in her Connecticut country house.

*

Just as Jay's new life begins, though, disaster strikes. One weekend afternoon, while working in the research lab at Manhattan Medical Center, Jay's partner, Dr. Alli Daniel, is assaulted and nearly killed. Then Jay's application for Admitting Privileges at Manhattan Medical Center (which will allow him to deliver babies and treat patients there) is denied. And out of nowhere, he is caught up in a vicious malpractice suit.

To make ends meet, Dr. Sones takes jobs in New Yorks dreaded outer boroughs. There is The Lamb, a beleaguered hospital in the South Bronx, and Brooklyn Womans Care, or BWC, a storefront clinic in the slums of Brooklyn. At The Lamb, he delivers baby after baby, enduring brownouts and shootouts, and squalid operating rooms and thirteen-year-old mothers having their second or third babies. And in Brooklyn, Jay sees a different side of urban medicine, working in the front lines in what can only euphemistically be described as a "clinic" but is really the private preserve for Eddie Polito, better known for his prior professions of refuse removal and stolen car redistribution.

Nonetheless, The Lamb and BWC pay the bills. And when your fancy Park Avenue practice is bleeding money, and when your lawyer is running a $250 per hour meter with no end of billable hours in sight, cash is king.

And so Jay Sones's dreams of a glamorous medical existence rapidly fade into oblivion.

There is more, though: As he runs from one patient to the next, and from the squalor of urban poverty to the glamorous world of his wealthy girlfriend, Jay's suspicions grow that the three disastrous events are related--that there is a connection between Alli's attack and the malpractice suit and the way in which his privileges were denied at Manhattan Medical Center.

Then things get nasty. Jay becomes persona non grata at Manhattan Medical Center, banished from even setting foot in the Infertility Center. Dr. Witt turns from chilly politeness to open hostility. And then Jay himself is sucker-punched, unexpectedly caught up in the inc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 18, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469117461

David Hellerstein

David Hellerstein, M.D. is a New York physician and writer. His books include Battles of Life and Death (essays); a novel, Loving Touches; and a memoir, A Family of Doctors. His work has appeared in Harper's, Esquire, North American Review, Fiction, and the New York Times Magazine. He is Clinical Director of the NY State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Hellerstein's web-site is: www.hellerstein.net.

Book preview

Stone Babies

David Hellerstein

Copyright © 2001 by David Hellerstein.

Library of Congress Number: 2001116563

ISBN #:                    Softcover                    0-7388-6732-2

ISBN #:                    Ebook                         978-1-4691-1746-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations contained in critical articles or reviews. For information, email [e-mail] or see www.hellerstein.net

Portions of this book have been previously published in different forms in The North American Review, MD Magazine, and Medical Heritage

All of the characters and events in this book are fictional. Any resemblance herein to real people, living or dead, or real organizations, is purely coincidental.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

Part I

One

Two

Three

Four

Part II

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Part III

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Epilog

For Sarah, Ben, and Jason, and, as always, for Lisa

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always

substance and increase, always sex,

Always a knit of identity, always distinction,

always a breed of life.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Part I

The Fertility Center

One

He awoke to heat, unbearable heat, and the thumping of machinery nearby, and to one of the nurses calling him to get up, get up, Room 2 was having late decelerations, and when he stood he nearly fell over. Must have been asleep all of twenty minutes, after a night of God knows how many deliveries, and he was totally dehydrated—reeling, dazed, bewildered—despite having chugged cup after cup of lukewarm orange juice all night.

Sister Jolie stood outside, yelling at him:

First child, mother began laboring three a.m., back labor, external monitor shows dropping pulses, she’s hemorrhaging now, pressure’s falling, you’d better get out here fast!

He stumbled, willed himself into awakeness. His greens were crumpled, and his shoes—when he jammed his feet into them—were soggy from the madness of last night. How many babies had he already delivered this shift? Nine? Twelve? Two babies delivered in the hallway, one in the supply room. A flood in Delivery Room #3. A brownout during the last C-section that lasted nearly ten minutes—and they stood there praying that the emergency generator would kick in before the woman died. And then, while he was holding the woman’s uterus in his hand, the boyfriend, a cheerful drug dealer, wouldn’t stop rapping about how he had dusted a rival gang member, first shot, then stabbed, then throttled with bare hands, how he wouldn’ go ta sleep.

Now Jay came out into the nursing station, blinking at the red Bronx dawn, and squinted over the chart. It was stifling out here, palpably hotter than the windowless call room where he had been sleeping—here you were under the full glare of the morning sun.

Sister Jolie led him down the long marble-floored corridor into Delivery. Pulled a mask onto his face, tied a heavy blue gown behind him. The woman was howling, and when he came around the table he began howling too: the umbilical cord hung down between her legs. Prolapsed.

Get oxygen, 100%!

There’s no oxygen, doctor, Sister Jolie responded.

Then we’ve gotta set up for a C-section.

I don’t have the staff. No anesthesiologist. Only two nurses for the whole floor.

Then what am I supposed to do?

Deliver it fast.

He did. Rather, the mother did. Reacting to the heat, the screaming and clanging, she grabbed the sides of the delivery table, and with a great rush of fluid expelled her child into Jay’s midsection.

Meconium! Fetal distress! Jay roared. Where’s pediatrics?

Not in yet! shouted Sister Jolie.

He stopped swiping at the mother’s wet bottom and turned his attention to the baby, searching for some kind of suction apparatus. He fell back on holding the baby upside down, ripping off his gloves and sticking a bare, none-too-sterile finger into its toothless mouth, then smacking it until it wailed.

All right! he whooped, euphoric, crazily ecstatic.

The mother wept in gratitude. Drenched in sweat, Jay leaned over and presented the glistening purplish-black infant to her.

A perfect baby boy!

He nearly passed out: the mother, with puffy tearstained face, and neat pink barrettes holding back cornrow braids, was a girl no more than 14 years old.

That was how the day began: in Hell.

It didn’t help that the air conditioning at Sacred Lamb Hospital had died weeks ago. Early summer had been mostly cool and overcast, so the AC had hardly been missed; but now, the last week of August, 1991, a record heat wave had surged through the New York area, and halted once its epicenter reached Jerome Avenue. Up and down the Cross Bronx Expressway, angry motorists cursed outside their stalled cars; in the streets below, half-naked brown bodies splashed through the few still-spurting hydrants. EMS workers pulled octogenarians, shriveled and delirious, from steaming brick tenements. And day and night, the gleeful rattle of automatic weapons echoed through the streets.

The tropical front—bloated and overheated as the nation’s post-Crash economy—billowed and swelled until the tall, ugly, yellow-brick Victorian buildings of Sacred Lamb Hospital shimmered like bakery ovens. Stifling was hardly the word—it was more as if the Sun herself rested gently against the hospital’s leaky old mansard roofs, incubating some mutant offspring into the wretched landscape of the South Bronx.

*

After they got the girl and her baby to Recovery, Sister Jolie brought Jay up to speed for the coming day. A’wanza, the head labor nurse, had called in sick—again. Two floor nurses were out, deaths in the family. And the young residents Jay usually supervised had been pulled from L&D yet again, to cover the General Surgery service—one of whose staff doctors had been arrested for falsified credentials, and another rang last night from a pay phone outside New Delhi, to relate that he’d been deported.

The day began.

Eight women were in various stages of late labor, complicated and simple, sweltering and groaning.

And every hour, more arrived. Perhaps it was the ungodly New York heat, for from Morrisania to Highbridge, from Hunt’s Point to Morris Heights, came woman after woman, swaybacked, enormous-bellied, screeching with each contraction—Dominican, Puerto Rican, Irish, Polish, Chinese, Senegalese and Mississippi black. Babies, babies, babies. Babies popped out in stairwells and elevators, in storage closets and machine rooms. It was an incredible, awful godlike high, as though every time he touched his hands to a belly he brought forth yowling new life.

Juice and coffee for breakfast. A cigarette for lunch, looking out onto the parking lot at a burning Sacred Lamb ambulance (spontaneous combustion) which sent a spectacular orange cloud into the hazy air. There were twelve, fourteen, nineteen deliveries over eighteen hours. Late-afternoon, ten New York City police officers appeared on the floor, guns drawn, sweating through their light-blue shirts: they’d gotten the message of officer in distress.

Not here! called Jay. Walkie-talkies shrieked: and the cops ran for C-14, the Hospital President Father Coughlin’s suite.

Another crazed gunman! sighed Sister Jolie.

And finally, as the red sun deflated behind the hulks of ruined tenements on the horizon, and the delicate scent of ganja wafted through the rotted round-arched windows of L&D, there was a pause, and Jay was able to shower away a night of sweat and exultation. The next shift, namely, Dr. Karnow from Vladivostok, arrived. And Jay was able to pull on his suit and tie and go out through the steaming parking lot, shoes sinking into melted asphalt, and head for the stifling island of Manhattan, searching for respite.

*

Well, look who’s here! Back from the heart of darkness!

Becky Okum, Eurobond trader, squealed and zoomed over to hug Jay. Her husband Mike, star of the Initial Public Offering markets, punched his shoulder.

The cool, cool darkness of Janine Stern’s apartment. Full of friends.

Edmundo Jarquet and Jakki Furagama sitting on the couch discussing the Mets—or was it The Met? Louise Encard, New York Post Page Six reporter and tireless busybody, emerging from the dining room with a radicchio-and-endive salad, and running over to kiss him. And Janine Stern, gold earrings and sequined blouse glittering—her black hair pulled straight back, her skin seared to almost-Iroquois darkness—rushing forward to kiss Jay juicily on the mouth.

It was a great party, a perfect release from months of L&D, from the entire past year. The past year’s disasters had been followed by months of isolation—and then, when reality set in, when Jay realized the enormity of his commitments and the precariousness of his finances, by panic. First there was the lawsuit. Then Alli. And then the mess around his application for hospital privileges at Manhattan Medical Center. And afterward, months of frenzied attempts (by moonlighting at one hospital and clinic after another) to pay his malpractice premiums and the overhead on his Park Avenue office. Recently, though, Jay had begun to stanch the rapid outflow of funds. Not entirely—the waiting area in his Park Avenue office was still empty most hours—but at least business had grown to the point where he could pay the interest on the interest on his loans. And cover his receptionist’s and nurse’s salaries, and have enough left over to gas up his Subaru.

Which called for celebration.

Janine’s party was a perfect way to revel. The CD player reverberated with Talking Heads, hazy partygoers danced on the terrace, a startling bouquet made the air glow above the Steinway baby grand, and the dining table sang with artful arrangements of mesquite-broiled shrimp and chalupas, and the charred flesh of endangered aquatic species, and crystal bowls of ceviche and guacamole. It was perfect. Everything he had missed during his endless years of medical training, everything he had yearned for throughout his Queens adolescence—all the riches of Manhattan, and more.

Lustful vapors filled the air-conditioned, high-ceilinged rooms of Janine’s apartment. Everyone looked stunning, tanned, prosperous, at least five years younger than their birth certificates would allow. Especially Janine Stern—she looked not only more graceful and lithe than ever, but also more desirable than Jay recalled; less calculated and over-deliberate as the more cognizant parts of his cerebrum usually knew her to be. Dare he think it—she even looked sexy.

The exception to this glamour was Jay Sones, MD. Jay caught a glimpse of himself in the antique gilt-framed mirror over the dining room buffet, saw shards of Sonian flesh in a crystal obelisk that rose above the flowers on the piano. The good doctor looked stubby and disreputable, even diseased. His complexion was saturnine.

Ducking into a bathroom, Jay scrubbed the South Bronx off his face—the fifteen year old, pregnant by her stepfather; the young mother riddled with syphilitic lesions, giving birth to a twitchy coke baby; the thirty-three year old multiple rape victim who had watched her husband murdered; the five months pregnant speedball junkie, no prenatal care, popping out a 1500 gram baby girl… Jay’s face reflected The Lamb. He slapped his cheeks to introduce some color. A futile attempt, however; he looked merely bruised.

On his way back into the party, Elly Townsend, a blond tax lawyer, pulled Jay aside to ask some medical advice.

Sorry to bother you, she said nervously, but I’m really scared.

Black silk rubbed his bare forearms. Jay took her hand.

Last weekend, she said, "I bumped myself in aerobics class. In the shower I noticed… not only did it hurt, but now… now this lump was growing. She inhaled sharply. Can—can I ask your opinion?"

He followed her into Janine’s study. A huge aquarium, phosphorescent with fish, cast tremulous turquoise shadows across them. Elly pulled aside the strap of her dress. Her lovely shoulder was warm in his right hand; he reached out and touched her bare, lovely breast with his left. A hard bump rose beside the nipple—mobile, exquisitely tender. She looked fearful.

Nothing, he said at last, nothing but cellulitis.

As he described the remedy—warm soaks, heat, Advil—her anxiety began to fade.

If it doesn’t get better in a few days, give me a call, advised Jay. You might need a prescription. While she readjusted her dress he reached into his suit-jacket pocket, where he kept a thick stack of engraved business cards for just such eventualities. He peeled one off. He was sweating. I think maybe I have… yeah, here’s one of my cards. Give a call if it’s not better by Monday.

"There you are! Turning my study into a satellite clinic! Suddenly Janine was at Jay’s side, grabbing his shoulder. Elly, watch yourself with this man! He comes to parties claiming to be a doctor, he takes girls away to examine, and they’re usually found floating in the East River!"

Elly winked at Jay, and Janine dragged him back into a glare of halogen and crystal.

Honestly, Jay, please don’t seduce my guests!

Jay leaned forward and kissed her.

Janine’s arm stayed around him for most of the evening, though Donna Hastings, who bought oil tankers for Chemical Bank, dragged Jay off to ask about PMS, Anne Fellowes, an historian, needed a refill of birth control pills, and a platinum-blond music video producer whose name he couldn’t quite catch had a litany of worries about her fibroids. By midnight the stack of business cards had become noticeably smaller without considerable effort on Jay’s part. After each foray Jay would return to Janine’s side and she would proprietorially put her arm back around him. Around two o’clock the guests left.

Then, for the first time in fifteen months, Jay and Janine made love.

The only way to describe making love with Janine Stern was that it was like being acquired by a corporate raider. That is, having been carefully scrutinized and evaluated, your balance sheet toted up, your liabilities shrewdly estimated, your future growth potential researched, after courtship and tender offers, your assets were suddenly seized, whether you were ready or not. And yes of course you would like it, because suddenly bought out, you were floating in gold.

Anyhow, that was the fantasy, the promise. Actually, their love-making that night was rather awkward—he was exhausted, she was wired, jittery—and their final sweaty ecstasy felt earned, not given.

*

The next morning, before heading up to the Bronx, Jay went to check on Alli, as he did even now, three or four times a week. Crossing murky Park Avenue, he hurried over to Madison, then uptown through the steaming, airless streets.

He entered the new building of Manhattan Medical Center, full, as usual, of the exile’s ambivalence. The Bronx was only five or six miles north of here, but it might as well be in another universe. Each time he returned here, especially after a day at The Lamb, he was awed by the building’s sheen, by the cool expanses of slate floor, the vast serenity of the sky-lit atrium, the decorousness of fresh flowers and original works of art—which, combined with the obsequiousness of the security and housekeeping staff, made MMC seem more like a museum or cathedral than a hospital. A feeling of yearning spread over him too, so familiar from childhood in Ridgewood, Queens, and from college as a full-scholarship student at Yale—sweeping away, at least temporarily, the horrors of the Bronx.

Then, as the elevator rose toward the Ninth Floor, these feelings were replaced by the knowledge that he was entering a realm where disease had the upper hand, where recovery was rare. He had become an obstetrician, after all, after almost completing an entire internal medicine residency, because the chronicity of medical diseases, of heart disease and diabetes and strokes and emphysema were too depressing; he had yearned for a career specializing in hope, in birth, in renewal.

But the Ninth Floor at the new MMC building, known euphemistically as a long-term neurorehabilitation facility, was for those patients who were, on the whole, dying too slowly. They were too hopeless for intensive care, and yet some form of vegetative life persisted within them, some flickering of brain activity induced the doctors to keep monitors and IV lines turned on and the respirators clicking. Here, success might be measured by a patient regaining an ability to snap his fingers or say a single word, or to eat from a spoon without spilling, or to remember what happened fifteen minutes ago.

The elevator arrived at the ninth floor. At the atrium, a woodwind quintet on a balcony was playing Vivaldi, and patients were lined up in their wheelchairs, listening or dreaming, bearing their flaccid limbs like trophies. A middle-aged woman with a slack expression held a life-size, naked baby-doll one arm of which had been ripped from its socket. On a gurney, head elevated, a nonagenarian lay motionless as a Pharaoh. Jay passed by and entered the unit. Her room was right off the nursing station.

Alli lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. She turned, hearing him, and asked, confusedly, Do I know you?

It was their ritual.

I’m Jay Sones, I work with you at MMC, I’m your partner, he repeated.

Of course, she said. As?

What? The faint smell of urine filled the room, reminiscent of the paraplegic ward at the VA hospital.

Work as—as what?

Remember, we’re in practice together, I’m in Ob-Gyn, just like you. We specialize in infertility.

Her hair had been washed and brushed, but was flattened, somehow matted. He could see the scars under her right ear, contusions, abrasions, neatly-sewn lacerations. Effects of trauma. Her right temple, where a table-top centrifuge had been smashed repeatedly against her skull, was still concave. Someday, maybe, plastic surgery.

Suddenly she began to cry.

I have to get out of here, she wailed, as if his presence brought inchoate half-memories unbearably back to her. Before he could think of what to say, she began mumbling.

What? he said.

I was dreaming…

And?

A black butterfly—it wouldn’t take off… I think it was afraid of me.

She began to climb out of bed.

Where are you going?

"I have to get more memory!"

He sighed. Reached forward. Held her, held her arms, to restrain her, to reassure her.

She screamed: "Stop!"

He slumped in a chair.

I didn’t tell, she was saying. Grabbing and grabbing me when no one was there… he kept doing it, everywhere!

He didn’t know if he could take it anymore, the descriptions of what had happened to her that night months ago. He had been through it so many times, with the hospital lawyers, the police department, the DA’s office, had read innumerable accounts in the newspapers and magazines, had seen grotesque replays enacted on TV screens… but she could not stop talking about it, even though nothing she said made sense anymore.

Suddenly she sounded composed, eerily logical: Jay, do we have patients to see tomorrow?

He paused, invented: No, I’ve got it covered, you’re… you’re not on the OR schedule tomorrow.

The sheets had slipped aside; he saw her bare legs, thighs. Her calves were becoming atrophied—too many months lying in bed, not enough physical therapy. Her left hand was spastic from brain damage, the result of trauma or perhaps surgery.

Then Cammy, the Jamaican aide came in. What a noise, Alli! You must be more polite when you have company. Hello Dr. Jay, you can see Alli’s not too happy today.

I know.

"She always be trying to get out of here—she keep talking nonsense about reading black butterflies and the witch from Snow White and whatever!"

Jay stood, began to back away. It was true. She couldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of this. Or was it he who couldn’t tolerate more? I gotta go, Alli, see you tomorrow.

Cammy followed him off the unit, and toward the elevators. The musicians were packing up their clarinets, disassembling their flutes.

Dr. McCall, the neurologist, came by today—he said they may be transferring her to the nursing home any day now…

She’ll die there, he said.

Cammy touched Jay’s shoulder, a touch of warmth, of futile reassurance, and then was gone.

He stood there waiting for the elevator. Someone touched his shoulder again. He turned. Cammy?

But it was Alli, limping, her gown flapping open behind her. How fast she moved, instinctively recalling the hospital layout, able to move like an intern late to morning rounds—slipping through the hospital corridors and up and down stairwells. No wonder she was always escaping from the Neurology Unit, no matter how closely Cammy and the other aides watched her.

Time to go back, he said.

Cammy appeared, and reached for Alli. The elevator arrived, and the door opened. As Cammy led her off Alli pulled away, reached toward Jay, handed him something.

Throw this away, Jay, she said.

As the elevator descended, he opened his hand. A crumpled piece of paper, a scrap of note paper with a large black ink stain on it. He looked at it, and was about to drop it in the garbage. It looked vaguely like a black butterfly. Instead he put it in the pocket of his white coat. He walked on, through the Medical Center, then along the sweltering Manhattan streets, bucking up his courage for Labor and Delivery.

*

When he got home that night, the red light on his answering machine was blinking; he replayed the messages from Janine, from some hospital lawyer or other, he listened, hardly noting them, then he collapsed into bed.

He slept fitfully, dreaming of Alli Daniels, of past moments with her, of working beside her in the laboratory and the procedure room, of walking into the Park with her at lunchtime with take-out Chinese or Mexican food, watching joggers and bicyclists going by. He recalled many of the patients they had treated, the women they had successfully implanted, the babies they had brought into the world. The surgical procedures where he had assisted her (or vice versa) in removing ovarian cysts or fibroids, again in the service of restoring fertility. And then—more troubling dreams. Her bare pale skin, her shoulders, her warm laugh. Then he began sweating, trembling, seeing her beaten, bloody, just as he had found her, blood everywhere, across the laboratory floor. He saw before him, like an afterimage of staring at the Sun, a black butterfly, not just an inkstain but a crude drawing—a shimmering icon.

What the hell did it mean, always touching me? That was not the usual—something must be disturbing her today. Perhaps she had overheard talk of the move to the nursing home. But it made no sense. The man accused of attacking her a year ago last April—who was now incarcerated at Riker’s Island, awaiting trial—may well have been living in Manhattan Medical Center for months, wearing the greens of an intern, a surgeon, eating leftovers off patients’ trays, sleeping in vacant On-Call rooms or machine rooms, evading Security by hiding in sub-sub-basements or ventilation shafts. The District Attorney’s office believed that he had lived there for two years or more, so familiar-looking that no one thought to question him. But her response, the way she screamed, it made it sound as though she knew her attacker. Almost as though he was the attacker. It didn’t make sense. He was sorry he even touched her today.

But what difference did it make? Dr. McCall said that there was over 90% likelihood that the damage was permanent, that the loss of short-term memory, which caused her mind to ratchet back and forth over an interminable present, asking the same questions a thousand times but unable to store new information in her mind—that it would never get better.

Then why did he keep paying her share of the office overhead? Why couldn’t he do the logical thing and take a new partner in his practice?

Why—as Janine Stern asked, so sensibly, in a hundred different ways—did he drive himself into debt, and close to the edge of insanity, hoping for the impossible?

If he could answer that question… if only he could. Then he might have a chance of starting anew.

Two

Why did he become a doctor to begin with? He often forgot, especially on days like this, but there was something noble in it, some greater purpose. Something about helping people, something about healing, something about science—some vague claptrap that was quickly enough beaten out of most prospective docs before they finished medical school, or at the latest, during the first months of internship. In theory, some part of it would return once you’d breathed the fresh air after training.

The past year had done nothing to return Jay to his college idealism; if anything, it had spun him around, shaken him, left him utterly confused and baffled.

Why did he become a doctor to begin with?

In calm moments, when he looked back across the events of the past year, Jay concluded that it was all about love. Love of doctoring, of healing, of bringing babies into the world, whether simply by easing them from a swollen uterus, or whether by jiggering them alive with a flurry of hormones, by extractions and implantations of ova and sperm. Pergonal, Zygenal and other magical fertility enhancers, Petri dishes, test tubes and laparoscopes–the God-like power of bringing fertility to the childless—that was what he loved in medicine.

And beyond that, there was Dr. Alli Daniels, who should now be his partner, and with whom he had been