10
" Lucy is no longer embarrassed, can talk about anything with him. In the beginning, it was a different story, a horror and humiliation that a benign pituitary macroadenoma—a brain tumor-was causing an over production of the hormone prolactin that fooled her body into thinking she was pregnant. Her periods stopped. She gained weight. She didn't have galactorrhea, or begin produce milk, but had she not discovered what was wrong when she did, that would have been next.
"Sounds like you're not seeing anyone." He slides her MR films out of their envelopes, reaches up, and attaches them to light boxes.
"Nope."
"How's your libido?" He dims the lights in the office and flips on the light boxes, illuminating films of Lucy's brain. "Dostinex is sometimes called the sex drug, you know. Well, if you can get it."
She moves close to him and looks at her films. "I'm not having sur gery, Nate."
She stares dismally at the somewhat rectangular-shaped region of hy pointensity at the base of the hypothalamus. Every time she looks at one of her scans, she feels there must be a mistake. That can't be her brain. A young brain, as Nate calls it. Anatomically, a great brain, he
says, t cept for one little glitch, a tumor about half the size of a penny I don't care what the journal articles say. No one's cutting on me
How do I look? Please tell me okay," she says.
Nate compares the earlier film to the new one, studies them side by side. "Not dramatically different. Still seven to eight millimeters. Nothing in the suprasellar cistern. A little shift left to right from the infundibu lum of the pituitary stalk." He points with a pen. "Optic chiasm is clea Points again. "Which is great." He puts down the pen and holds up two fingers, starts with them together, then moves them apart to check her peripheral vision. "Great," he says again. "So almost identical. The lesion isn't growing."
"It isn't shrinking."
"Have a seat. "
― Patricia Cornwell , Book of the Dead (Kay Scarpetta, #15)
13
" Preoccupied by whipping egg whites with a whisk and ruminating about what she must deal with today, she's startled by an ominous thud against an upstairs window.
"Please, no," she exclaims in dismay, setting down the whisk and run ning to the door.
She disarms the alarm and hurries out to the garden patio where a yel low finch flutters helplessly on old brick. She gently picks it up, and its head lolls from side to side, eyes half shut. She talks soothingly to it, strokes its silky feathers as it tries to right itself and fly, and its head lolls from side to side. It's just stunned, will suddenly recover, and it falls over and flutters and its head lolls from side to side. Maybe it won't die. Foolish wishful thinking for someone who knows better, and she carries the bird inside. In the locked bottom drawer of the kitchen desk is a locked metal box, and inside that, the bottle of chloroform. "
― Patricia Cornwell , Book of the Dead (Kay Scarpetta, #15)
