squeezed her left knee in practised fashion. He shifted his hands quickly to the right knee, squeezing and comparing it with the left. Then he tried pushing her left knee downwards towards the bed. The pain caused Vera to jerk her right foot beneath her other leg to protect it.
‘Ouch!’
‘Okay, okay. Take it easy. It’s going to be difficult if you don’t let me examine you properly.’
He pulled her right foot out and moved the healthy leg out of the way. ‘What about this direction?’ More carefully this time, he tried to bend Vera’s knee by pushing her lower left leg backwards. That didn’t work either. ‘Are you sure you can’t straighten out your leg or bend it either?’ The doctor looked at her in concern and felt the fluid-filled joint yet again.
‘No, I can’t.’
‘And you’re still using crutches.’ He turned towards the computer screen and read from it. ‘After almost eight weeks?’
Vera heard the doubt in his voice. ‘Yeah, I know, it’s strange. But it’s healing really slowly.’
‘You can stand up. Show me. What happens when you try to walk on it?’
‘I can support myself on it a little bit, like this.’ She stepped cautiously and fumblingly forward on her bent, stiff leg. ‘But I know that it isn’t normal; maybe we need to do an MRI to find out what’s wrong?’
The doctor looked disapprovingly at her.
‘Or maybe laparoscopic surgery?’ she tried, but she could tell by his body language that this wasn’t the right thing to say either. Vera suddenly remembered a messy situation that had occurred about six months ago. The team had been faced with several difficult-to-diagnose patients who had fled from the South. Camilla had pulled her off to the side and warned her against drawing too many of her own conclusions around the doctors. ‘You take care of anesthetics; let them do the diagnosing.’ Then Camilla had whispered kindly, ‘Not because you can’t, but they’ll soon figure it out for themselves; you’ll see.’
‘No, an additional examination is not appropriate at the moment,’ said the doctor firmly.
‘But there’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ pleaded Vera.
He told her to get dressed and turned towards the computer. She wondered what he was writing in her medical records. He ended the appointment with a quick handshake, and his white coat rose on his chest as he sighed. ‘Once the swelling has gone down you’ll be able to move it. You’ll see. I’ll put you down for another visit on November 5th, but my guess is that you won’t need it. I suspect that by then you will have trained the knee and regained stability on your own.’
Vera understood that the doctor was trying to cheer her up. Or, as Pierre used to say in his charming French accent, ‘The foremost duty of a médecin, is to amuse the patient, while she will naturally heal herself.’
But Vera was not amused. The doctor’s decision gave her a sick feeling in her stomach. The fifth of November! She left obediently, staring down at the yellow tape on the vinyl floor that led her to the next stopping point, the well-meaning physical therapist. She gave Vera a sheet of paper containing pedagogically illustrated exercises to do. Vera knew that she couldn’t even do half of them.
Vera was surprised. Her mother usually slept late after a night shift at the nursing home. But today Gunilla had set the table with four kinds of bread, three different sandwich fillings, tea, yoghurt and cereal.
‘How did it go at the psychologist’s?’ asked Gunilla.
‘Oh,’ Vera said evasively, ‘I’m finished with that. Finished working through the trauma.’
‘Are you sure? I agree with Erika. You aren’t yourself at all!’
Erika, Vera’s athletic best friend since school, had graduated from college with a degree in information technology and moved to Sydney. She had come home over the summer with some guy named Tom whom she’d met when she was surfing in the South Pacific. But Vera and Erika had only seen each other twice…
Vera put down her teacup. The memory of her friend’s uncomprehending effort to help her – ‘Come on now! You’re usually bursting with energy!’ – left her with a feeling of emptiness. Vera had thought a lot about the last thing Erika said before she left: ‘Where’s the old Vera?’
‘I noticed that you’ve hardly touched your medicines,’ her mother continued, pushing away her yoghurt bowl. ‘Not the Stilnoct or the one that helps against depression.’ Gunilla sounded reproachful.
Vera sighed. ‘It was nice of you to… get all that stuff for me, but I listen to music to help me sleep.’ They ought to prescribe Fleetwood Mac and Debussy, she thought and continued, ‘I’ve almost stopped having nightmares.’
‘You and your father and your music!’ Gunilla looked at her uncomprehendingly.
I don’t know what I would have done without it.
They were quiet for a minute, then Gunilla asked: ‘What about that course you’re taking? What is it about?’
‘I guess you could say it’s about the development of the modern economy and how to understand it,’ Vera said as she put a piece of bread in the toaster.
‘Economics? Not medicine?’
Vera sighed and refrained from trying to explain, something she had become quite practised at.
Gunilla looked at her daughter. ‘How are you? Are you at least eating enough?’
Vera nodded.
‘This studying, you aren’t borrowing money to finance it, are you?’
Vera shook her head.
‘Well, then you’re going to have to work in the fall, aren’t you?’
‘I’m going to take Economics I in the fall.’
A deep frown formed between Gunilla’s eyebrows, and Vera quickly added, ‘But I’m happy to work extra in the evenings and on weekends.’ She had been planning to do that anyway. Even if she usually didn’t need much money, you couldn’t live on nothing, and she hated being financially dependent on other people.
‘Uh-huh. Since you’re going to be in town anyway, do you want me to check if they need help at Solbacka?’ Gunilla wondered.
‘Yeah, sure, do that. But don’t promise anything, because what if I’m not better in the fall?’ She gently felt her left knee.
‘Of course you’ll be fine in the fall! If your knee were really that bad then they would have operated on it right away; you know that! You just have to stick it out, and then you can start working, and well… everything will go back to normal. You’ll see.’
Vera was almost finished eating when Gunilla finally forced out the question that she badly wanted answered. ‘What really happened between you and Adam when you came home in May?’
The
