Behind Closed Doors

14. An outside view

I message Arthur, asking if he can bring me a pain au chocolat when he is in for his check up and write down all of the medication changes for my patients

Arthur calls me instead of responding

"Hey there Arthur" I say happy to talk to him

"Good morning" he says in his morning voice

"Why are you awake this early?" I ask confused

"I fell asleep right after we hung up and now I can't sleep anymore" he responds

"Well, I slept a full 6 hours too. Thank god for that" I say and grab my water to drink

"Great! Anything else planned for today other then my appointment?" He asks me

"Yeah after my students present their cases to me, I got a knee prosthetic to do" I tell him

"Ouch, glad that I had it easy with the cast" he says

"Yeah... how's your leg anyways? We spend so much time together being distracted that I never asked"

"It was a good distraction tho... and yeah, it doesn't hurt anymore so im so ready to get this thing off" Arthur says and I giggle

"Yeah I can imagine, I will hang up now. I cant let the students wait for long" I tell Arthur

"Alright, ill see you later" he says

"Bye bye, see you later" I say and hang up with a smile before I head out to the conference room

"Alright, Start presenting" I say and sit down on the chair infront of all the scans of the first patient

"Patient a, we first got signs of changes in the blood pressure, it slowly lowered while we also read that there were neurological symptoms, sudden mood switches and with the MRI we diagnosed a brain bleed from the left hemisphere of the brain, most likely in the centrum for emotions" the first student says pointing on the brain bleed on the MRI

"Well done, now what is the next step?" I ask them

"An operation to stop the bleeding and to take away the pressure on the brain" she responds and I nod

"Great, first patient is treated. Now next one" I say and they take all the papers off the wall and hang up the next one

"High blood pressure, nausea and a terrible headache like the patient described could've been numerous things. However we also got the information about the stiff neck and pain in the eyes which is typical for a cerebral aneurysm which we were able to diagnose using the scan in the part of the frontal lobe" he says and I smile and nod "course of treatment would be aneurysm clipping within the next 24 hours"

"Perfect, so well so good" I say and they present the next two patients diagnosing them with a tumour and a case where the brain function is switched, where the brain isn't contralateral, meaning that the information from the right side of the body stays on the right side of the brain and doesn't switch to the left side like it does for most of the population

"Well done so far" I say "now the last patient"

They hand me the lab tests and Felix starts talking

"This one was confusing for all of us, the lab results were perfect, so was the report of how the patient was feeling. We also looked at the family history of the patient to find any form off mental illnesses and it didn't make sense since everything was clean. So our first instinct was that this was a trap and it was actually a healthy person, just to see if we would miss diagnose a patient mainly on feeling" he says and I smile, knowing that he is right

"So what did you settle on?" I ask

"Well, I realised the leukocytes were slightly heightened which is a small sign for an infection so when we got the scan we got oven more confused. The patient has a pretty big benign tumour pressing on the frontal lobe, which should cause mood switches, changes of emotions, migraines and could cause a lack of emotions in some cases" he says and hands me the MRI scan, proving his diagnosis and I just stare at it

"Thank you, that would be all. Why don't you all go back to your department and see if you can help" I say not looking away from the MRI scan in my hands, its the same one the student were looking at with the radiologist

"Okay?" They say confused and leave me sitting alone in the conference room and I grab the other MRI scans, confused of where the clean one is but once i got all 5 scans in my hand and none of them are clean the realisation sets in, there was one case per diagnosis but two tumours

I look at the dates that are barely visible on the bottom left of the scan and notice that one of them is from yesterday, my scan from yesterday...

Oh.. my... god...

Im just sat there, staring at the tumour I called a beauty yesterday. Well god be damned can I ever just have something go my way...