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"When we know more. Can you say how long he's shown such rage?" |
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"Not long. Just the last few weeks." |
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He had known Matty since infancy and had never noted or heard Terry complain of aggressive behavior or irritability. "It's not a chronic problem." |
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"This is why I'm worried about drugsthat he'd been taking them because he can't cope with the changes in his body." |
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"It's possible. The urine test results will be back with the blood tests. If he's on something, it'll show up. Can you think of anything else?" |
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Calvin shook his head. And Terry just stared at her hands for a long moment without reaction. Then in a voice so low that Tojian could barely hear her, she said, "What's happening to him?" |
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It was such moments that recalled for Mitch Tojian the dark backroom of pediatrics, the one behind the cut knees, the influenzas and the ear infections. And the door nobody wanted to open. In medical school an old professor once cautioned the class that pediatrics could be the sweetest of specialties, and the most hellish. It was telling parents that their children tested positive for the AIDS virus; it was following a child's demise from the spot on the lung to the last desperate dosage of morphine before the lymph nodes cannibalized themselves; it was looking into the big, trusting eyes staring up from the pillows asking you when they could go home and not knowing that the leukemia raging through their bloodstream would lay them waste in two months. Mitch had prayed he'd never let himself become so intimately involved, that he'd maintain the chilled professional distance, that self-protective zone. But it never worked. From the limited anatomical observations he had madethe signs of precocious puberty, the optical anomalies and night visionand the description of Matty's fits and lack of recall, Mitch's guess was a structural defect in the pituitary gland or an impinging tumor. |
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"I can't give you a diagnosis, but something in his system is producing an excess of steroids and other hormones. Let's wait until the tests are back." |
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