Dollie the Doctor's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Dollie drove to the clinic before dawn with the notebook on the passenger seat. Four numbers, four signatures, one exhausted graduate student's credentials. Enough to prove the water was poison. Not enough to prove the water was making her patients sick. She parked under the pale blue siding of her clinic and read the notebook again. A council member would ask the obvious question. Where is the doctor's evidence? Numbers on pipes were not diagnoses in bodies. She had eight hours. She unlocked the front door and turned on the lab lights. Four charts sat on her desk from the week before. Cough. Tremor. Fever that spiked and fell. She had ordered basic panels on all four and filed the results without knowing what to look for. Now she pulled the sheets and spread them across the exam table. She ran her finger down the columns. Hemoglobin low in three of four. Basophilic stippling flagged on the smear notes for Harold and one other. Kidney markers creeping past normal. She had seen these numbers and called them nothing. Read together, with lead in the water, they were a case. She still needed the one test that named it. Blood lead level. Her clinic did not run it in-house. The county lab did, and the county lab opened at seven. She called at seven exactly. She told the tech she needed four rushed blood lead panels back by ten. The tech said twenty-four hours minimum. Dollie said the word emergency and named the federal reporting threshold. The tech went quiet, then said she would talk to the director. Dollie called Harold next. He agreed to come in at seven-thirty and to phone the other three. By eight all four patients sat in her waiting room. She drew the tubes herself, labeled each one, and drove them to the county lab in a cooler on the passenger seat. She waited in the lab parking lot with the notebook on her knees. At nine-forty her phone rang. The director read the four values aloud. Thirty-eight micrograms per deciliter. Forty-one. Twenty-nine. Fifty-two. The reference range topped out at five in adults. He said he was required to report the results to the state within the hour. She drove to the council chamber with the printed sheet still warm from the fax machine. She laid the water numbers and the blood numbers side by side on the table before the five members. She named each patient's symptoms and matched each one to a known effect of lead. She said the word poisoning out loud. The council voted before lunch to shut off the affected mains and issue bottled water to the listed addresses. They also voted, over her objection, to keep the finding confidential until the state investigator arrived Friday. Four days of silence. Four days for the rest of the old neighborhood to keep drinking from taps she now knew were killing them.