Excerpt from Part One:

Dear Harold, Thank you for asking me to see this pleasant 47-year-old lady with bleeding hemorrhoids.

Plugged into the Dictaphone, Joelle types quickly. Frank is young for a staff doctor, only in his mid-thirties, but his writing style conveys a certain old-school flavour. Female patients are ladies he invariably describes as interesting or pleasant—the ladies, not their condition or disease. Joelle’s fingers sometimes get mixed up.

Across from her desk hulk the metal filing cabinets with the patients’ charts. Above them hang posters of a colonoscopy procedure. The colourful cartoons show a doctor guiding an endoscope up an intestinal track much like a miner with a lamp exploring a tunnel. Patients can more or less bear the cartoons. They avert their eyes from the magnified photos of real bowels, the glistening carmine and royal blue of live viscera. Frank believes in education, but honestly, Joelle sometimes thinks, his photos and posters must only tighten all those sphincters about to have an exam. A painting of a sailboat would make more sense.

She frowns as she types. Focuses on the words that herald varying degrees of doom. Polypectomy. Adenocarcinoma.

A few times this morning she felt the prickling of tears and had to blink wildly. Marc didn’t say anything yesterday, nor this morning. Though he’s always matter-of-fact before work. Shower, coffee, and toast. Already dressed in nursing scrubs. Glancing through the paper he folds and takes with him.

He can’t have forgotten her birthday because they’re going to his parents’ on the weekend. Yesterday, when Diane phoned to ask if she wanted to go out to celebrate, the four of them, Joelle said that Marc had already made plans. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Diane that he hadn’t mentioned her birthday yet.