The Doctor is Out
It starts with a call. I know you're only covering tonight, she says, I just get it for back pain. It's this horrible ache. I'm on disability, see, but my niece, I picked her up to put her in the highchair at Burger King and wrenched something so bad and I've had to double up, and I'm going to run out early. Shallow breathing. I don't take it unless I have to, my doctor knows I don't, you know, abuse.
You explain prescription guidelines, patient with patients. You're a good man, a husband and father, Rotary Club, Elks, Blessings in a Backpack. If you had this kind of pain… I have two kids… To put food on the table, lunch in lunchboxes.
The cracking starts. You believed pain salutary—brought spiritual benefit—but now it has to be eliminated at all costs. The converted preach, about costs. Slick Lance sits in the office like he owns it (he does), spinning in your chair. He has the spiel: Is it possible to mistake schizophrenia for telepathy, I hear you ask. You laugh, trained to make others comfortable. Opioids are not addictive as long as you're prescribing for a patient in pain. He hypes free samples. You weren't born yesterday, but it feels good to give the warm fuzzies, have patients love you. You're a good man.
If you were a superhero, you'd be The Alleviator. You sponsor a Little League baseball team. But now they want blues and blue 30s, and you’re pushing heroin in a pill, 30-milligram tablets, fentanyl patches, spray, Subsys, meant for cancer, but hell we're all sick of something. You gig on the INSYS speaker’s program, tell jokes yourself: Someone asked me recently what I would rather give up, food or sex. I said, 'I'm not falling for that one again, wife.' 400 bucks for 15 minutes. You'll soon be Sackler-big. You're not altogether a bad man.
Doctor B., I'm in pain. Your face in the Register Mail betraying his patients and the public for personal financial profit. You've golfed with Trotter for ten years, sons won Regionals together, you were at his second wedding. Now it's flagrant drug dealing is all the more shocking coming from a licensed medical professional who has taken an oath to do no harm… Your wife gives you the cold shoulder. You overhear your daughter on the phone: Dad said one of his patients at least died doing what he loved… Heroin. Before the sentencing, you drive out to the lake. Nothing else left. The water grey and cold, wavelets coming at you. Skies full of crows. You swallow the lot with brandy. You won't spare them the irony of it. Let them feel your pain. These people need reminding how much of it there is in this world. One man can't medicate the world away. You want them to know that. You want them to know it hurts.
Image generated by Nightcafe Creator
FROM THE AUTHOR:
“We know a great deal about the many victims of the opioid crisis and about the corrupt corporate pharmaceutical conglomerates that facilitated it. I was thinking about the psychology of the middle-men, the prescribing doctors who must have known better, living American small town middle-class lives, and therefore I suppose about the sheer banality of evil. There are many stories like this.”
©2022 Rob McClure Smith
ROB MCCLURE’s fiction has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Manchester Review, New Ohio Review, and other literary magazines. His novel, The Scotsman, is forthcoming later this year. robmccluresmith.com