THE THIRTY-SECOND ESTIMATE, of course, referred only to the time needed to perform the CT scan. The time needed to review the results was another matter. My nurse assured me that I’d been tagged an urgent priority. Still, it was pushing 5:30 p.m. and I had read Vogue cover to cover, called my mother, and placed an online grocery order with Safeway by the time Marshall Gellert strolled in.
He was a slight, intense man in his fifties. He perched on the edge of a stool, scrutinizing me with hawklike eyes colored an almost--otherworldly shade of blue. But what you noticed were his hands. They never ceased moving. As he spoke, they danced up and down his thighs, darted into his pocket, produced a pen, and twirled it across his knuckles in tight, precise loops. He seemed unaware. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Those fingers might soon be slicing a scalpel into my neck.
“Dr. Zartman was adamant that I should see you immediately.”
“He can be pushy that way.”
The hawk eyes bore down. “I’ll admit it’s an extraordinary case. The survival rate for being shot in the head would be one in several thousand, at best.”
I nodded. What could one say?
“Extraordinary that your brain stem wasn’t injured. I’ve got your whole file.” He opened a purple folder on his lap. The profile from yester-day’s Journal-Constitution peeked out from near the bottom. He’d done his homework. “The cranial computed tomography indicates no neural damage. The foreign body is just below the left side of the foramen magnum—”
I held up my hands. “In plain English, please?”
“Sorry. The bullet’s one point three centimeters long. Roughly half an inch. Lodged below the opening where your spinal cord passes through and connects to your brain. Here we go.” Mounted on the wall beside us was a flatscreen monitor. Dr. Gellert reached over to flick it on. After a moment, the sharpest image I’d yet seen came into focus. A stark outline of my skull, my teeth, and the bullet, glowing white as usual.
“What’s unclear is why it may have shifted after all these years. If indeed it has.”
“Will thinks my spine has compressed.”
“Will?”
“Dr. Zartman, I mean.” I let my hair fall across my face to hide my blush.
“Well, that’s a decent theory. At any rate, your symptoms certainly suggest movement of some sort. Which makes you a more urgent candidate for intervention than if it were causing you no trouble.”
“Your advice, then, is to go ahead and remove it? But I’ve been told it’s surrounded by nerves and blood vessels.” I frowned at the screen. “Even to my untrained eye, it looks awfully close to my spinal cord.”
“It couldn’t get much closer,” he agreed, a tad cheerfully for my liking. “Ms. Cashion, the truth is that with an injury like this, there are considerable risks to any course of action. Including leaving it put.” He flipped the pen behind his ear, wiggled and stretched his fingers. “I always like to look at comparables. Tricky in your case. As I said, the odds are maybe—maybe—one in five thousand that you should even be alive and walking this earth. Still, there are documented cases of people surviving gunshots to the neck or skull. I pulled some recent ones that may be instructive.”
He plucked a photograph from the folder. It showed teenage boys in yellow jerseys, kicking a ball around a scrubby field. “A soccer team? I don’t follow.”
“Bear with me. This is one of my favorites. It’s from June. This past summer. Those boys are playing on a field in Bosnia. Same field where an unfortunate goalkeeper was playing when he started complaining that his head hurt. Article cites a Sarajevo newspaper, says the goalie completed the match, but—I’m quoting here—‘He soon complained of a stiff arm and had difficulty speaking. He was driven to a local hospital, where doctors were shocked to see that a nine-millimeter bullet was clearly lodged in his skull.’
“The good news is, he’s fine.” Dr. Gellert held the article out to me. “They got it out. But here’s my favorite detail: Local police arrested a guest at a nearby wedding. Guy thought it would be a good idea to celebrate by firing his pistol into the air. They found another twelve shells scattered around the soccer field. Could have wiped out the entire team. God love the Balkans.”
I smiled politely and handed back the paper.
He started stuffing it into the folder, then froze. “Hang on, I take it back. That’s not even the best bit. Listen to the kicker: ‘For the record, Krtalica only conceded one goal while playing with a bullet in his head.’ One goal! Can you beat that?” Dr. Gellert was clearly enjoying himself.
I tried to steer the conversation back to my predicament. “Of course, that’s a totally different scenario from mine—”
“Of course, of course.” Gellert cleared his throat. “And check the source: Yahoo News New Zealand. Perhaps not a paragon of accurate medical reporting. That’s the problem with most of the cases I turned up. They tend to happen in rural China, or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Impossible to authenticate. But, this one.” He shuffled through the folder again. “This one is interesting.”
On the page before him were two black-and-white images that looked remarkably like the CT scan of my own head. A bright-white bullet, unmistakable, resting atop a neat stack of vertebrae.
“New England Journal of Medicine,” said Gellert. “As reputable as you can get. Three years ago, this guy walks into a cardiology clinic in Moscow. He’s eighty-five years old, needs treatment for heart disease. The doctors spot something odd and ask him about it. The patient reveals that at the age of three, his older brother accidentally shot him with a pistol.”
“Three? That’s the same age as I was.”
“Mm-hmm. And same as you, he exhibited no clinical or radiographic evidence of neural damage. He was a successful engineer, won the Soviet State Prize. All while walking around with a bullet in his neck for . . . what would that be? Eighty-two years.”
“So did they remove it?”
“Nope. Didn’t seem to have done him any harm.”