“Thank you, Abby”

“What for Jake?”

“For inviting me tonight. I came because you said you had a plan in the works and I enjoy seeing you in action. This exceeded all my expectations. I’ve been with Harry through a lot of tough times over the past few years and seen him lose a lot of the people that he loved. To be there with him when he gets one of them back is very special to me.”

I looked over at Harry and mom, sitting next to each other at the end of the table with dad. Harry was telling mom a story from the old days, about some of their old coworkers, and mom was listening intently. I’d never seen Harry so animated, so full of life.

“He does seem pretty happy.”, I answered, as I watched a trickle of sweat run down the side of Harry’s face. Why was he sweating? I looked closer and realized that his face was redder than before and he looked sick. Unconsciously, Harry right arm massaged his chest. I scanned him and I straightened up involuntarily. My mind raced through my options for what seemed like minutes but was probably only a few seconds, before I decided what I needed to do.

I left the table and returned a few moments later with a stethoscope in my hands. I didn’t need it for anything, but it made for a great prop and it would help explain how I knew certain things. I walked over to Harry’s side and interrupted his story.

“Harry, I need you to sit back for a few minutes and relax. You need to focus on your breathing.”

“Abby? What’s going on?”

“Harry. You’re sweating in a cool room, you’re short of breath, your face is turning red, and you’ve been having mild chest pains for a little while now. I need you to relax before you have a stroke.”

I held his wrist and pretended to be checking his heart rate and asked him if he had high blood pressure.

“Yes, my doctor has had me on medication for several years now. Abby, I’m fine. I get this sometimes. I goes away in a few minutes.”

I put the stethoscope on and reached over to unbutton the top buttons of Harry’s shirt. “Hey! Don’t you think that you should buy me dinner first?”, Harry joked.

“I just did. Now be quiet and let me have my way with you, old man.” I listened to his heart. It didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t know already or pretend to do with his wrist, but everyone had come to expect that of a doctor and it gives people a sense of comfort.

“Why do have a stethoscope anyways, Abby?”

“My boyfriend and I like to play doctor and it was on sale on eBay for ten dollars. I couldn’t not buy it. Don’t worry, I clean it with an alcohol swab after each use.” I heard a chortle from Jake and Mark turned pink. I did get a nice face-palm from dad. Mom on the other hand ignored my comments and asked if Harry was ok.

“No, he’s not. His symptoms could be caused by over seventy-five different things. I’m going to see if I can narrow them down.” I proceeded to take his medical history, going down a mental checklist that I’d scanned in one of the medical textbooks.

“I’m almost certain that it’s coronary heart disease, probably caused by clogged arteries.”

“Well, you don’t have to keep wondering. You’re right. My doctor diagnosed it using ultrasound a few years back. He gave me some medication and told me to change my diet.”

“Have you been taking your medication?”

“Most days.”

“Did you change your diet?”

“I tried it for awhile. It was awful and I didn’t want to live that way. I chose to live life on my own terms.”

“Let me see if I can translate that into English. You chose to continue clogging your arteries and cut your life expectancy down by twenty or thirty years.”

“It’s not that bad, Abby. I’ll be fine.”

“Have you been getting any exercise lately, Harry?”

“No.”

“Because you’ve been too tired and I bet it’s been getting worse. Much worse. Your heart is working too hard because it has to push blood through arteries that are getting smaller and smaller. With less blood circulating through your body, your organs are getting less oxygen. Oxygen is what keeps us alive. It’s what our body uses to repair itself. The less you get, the less you live. Once your artery is completely blocked, and I think it’s not too far from that right now, you’ll have a heart attack. If it doesn’t kill you, it’ll probably leave you impaired in some way and then you and I can sit down and you can try to tell me about how you’ve chosen to live life on your own damn terms. Only you won’t be able to because you probably won’t be able to talk and your hands won’t work properly.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Abby…”

“Don’t ‘Abby’ me. You’re not fine and you know it. There are several options available to treat this condition, all with excellent success rates. You have your own medical school at your disposal. You know how good the doctors there are. Why haven’t you gone in for surgery?”

After it became apparent that Harry wasn’t going to answer me, Jake answered for him. “His mother and his first wife both died due to surgical complications. His mother from an infection and his wife from a mistake. A few of our friends passed away under similar circumstances. He doesn’t believe he’ll survive any surgery.”

“Not your story to tell, Jake.” Harry was glaring at Jake.

“No, it isn’t. Only you weren’t going to say anything and Abby isn’t the kind to let you get away with it, so I stepped in to save everyone the time. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry and I take it back. Everyone, please forget I said anything.”

“I think I’ll head on home now. Hannah, thank you for dinner. I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that you’ve been returned to us.” With those words, Harry got up and took a few steps towards the door before losing his balance and falling to the ground. Dad and Jake were by his side in moments and started getting him up.

“Bring him to my room, dad.”

“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?”, Mark asked.

“There’s nothing they can do for him if he refuses any surgical intervention. He’ll be more comfortable here and I have something that might help him.”

Everyone turned to look at me. “Staring at me won’t get him better. Go on, get him to my room and lay him down.”

Dad and Mark ended up half carrying, half dragging Harry to my room and laying him down on my bed.

“Harry. I have a non-surgical treatment for your clogged arteries, but I won’t use it on you unless you give me the go-ahead. I won’t waste it if your intention is to die.”

Between half breaths, Harry said, “There are no non-surgical treatments for this.”

“Actually, there are a few. They’re not backed by clinical studies and they’re mostly anecdotal, but they do exist. They also need months to take effect. My therapy is faster. Do I have your permission to go ahead?”

“If there’s no surgery, then I give my permission.”

“Great. I need everyone except for dad to clear out.”

When the room cleared, I shifted Harry to R1 and turned to dad. Before I could say anything, he asked, “Can you really help him?”

“Sure. That part’s easy. The hard part will be making it look like I did something that isn’t completely impossible. I’m going to need to do a lot of handwaving and fancy hocus pocus.”

“You’re going to hide your abilities by doing ‘magic’?”

“No, I meant that figuratively. In medicine, if you want to do magic, you just have to label it as ‘Eastern’ medicine. Nobody here seems to understand it, but they all pay lip service to how they believe it’s on par with Western medicine. I’ll need to go to the kitchen and pull together some ingredients and chop them up and mash them into a paste. I’m really glad that my mortar and pestle arrived already. That makes this sort of thing look official.”

“You’re too young to be this jaded.”

“Well, it’s true. Anyways, I do believe that many of the Eastern medicines work. It’s only that none of them work for this.”

“What will you do with your paste once you have it?”

“I’ll pretend to mix it with some orange juice and make him drink it. Then I’ll send him back to L2 and remove the plaque from his arteries. It won’t cure him right away, there’s been damage and some shrinking to his arteries that I don’t know how to fix, but they won’t be blocked anymore and he’ll have closer to normal blood flow. Compared to how he feels now, he’ll feel incredible when I’m done.” I had dad go back to the position he was in when I send Harry to R1 and I brought Harry back. I told Harry I was going to get everything ready and that I’d be back soon.

I left my room to rummage in the kitchen noisily for various ingredients. I grabbed a few of the spices from our new spice rack and some flour. I had to get mom to show me where the measuring bowls were and I put each of my ingredients into my mortar and pestle. Mark and Jake were in the Parlor with mom and I only had to make some noise. I poured a glass of orange juice and carried it and my concoction back to my room. As I passed the entry to the Parlor, I noticed Mark sitting next to mom and he was doing something with his phone.

“Don’t you dare, Mark!”, I said as I realized what he was about to do.

“Don’t you have a life to save?”

I growled in frustration and stalked back to my room. Harry and dad were both giving me questioning looks.

“Mark’s about to show mom the fire video. After I finish saving Harry’s life, I’m going to kill Mark. Karmically speaking, that should balance everything out, no?”

“There are cultures that believe that when you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for that life forever.” When did dad become sure an expert on cultures?

“Oh good. I saved him and now I’ll be responsible for ending his life. Perfect.”

“I’m not sure if you’re interpreting their vision correctly.”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take.” I spooned a few tablespoons full of my mixture into the orange juice, making sure to send said mixture into L2 before the spoon make it into the juice.

“Here you go. Drink up!”

Harry looked at the orange juice dubiously. Then he sighed and drank it all down.

“That didn’t taste bad at all.”

“Of course not. Why should it? If I gave you something that tasted awful, then you’d never want to take down anything else I gave you.”

“I don’t make the rules, Abby. When someone gives you a home remedy to take, it always tastes bad. That’s how you know it’s working.”

“If you say so. Doesn’t make sense to me. Seems like that would undermine your trust in your physician. I’ll make it taste bad next time, if that’s what you want.”

“No. No. This was good.”

“Excellent. Now I’m going to count back from ten and when I get to one, you should be feeling all better.”

“Seriously?”

“No. That would just be silly. Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three.” At three, I sent him into L1 and followed him there. I started wrapping small packets of arterial plaque in a field and shifting them to L2, where thanks to stasis they fell to the floor in easy to sweep up bits. There were a few arteries that were almost completely blocked and several that were only partially blocked. My work with getting rid of tiny cancer cells made this seem simple in comparison.

Twenty minutes later, I brought us both back to reality and Harry said, “Two, one. Why’d you stop. You were just getting to the good part.”

“You’re done. All better. You can get up now.”

“But you didn’t do anything. You just counted down from ten and stopped after three.”

“It’s been about twenty minutes since I said three, Harry. Try sitting up.”