She greeted us warmly, but didn’t spend time on chitchat. In a back room overlooking Lake Michigan, she stripped off my bandages with quick, skilled fingers. She clicked her teeth in annoyance, partly with me, for getting it wet in the shower, partly with the surgeon who’d stitched me up. A sloppy job, she announced, adding that we were going to go over to her clinic where she would put me together properly; otherwise, I’d have adhesions that would be hard to work out once the wound healed.

We had a little argument over who would drive: Lotty didn’t think I could be trusted with only one good arm, and I didn’t think she could be trusted, period. She thinks she’s Stirling Moss, driving the Grand Prix, but the only similarities I can see are the speed she travels, and her belief that no one should be in front of her on the track. Morrell laughed as we argued but voted for Lotty: if I didn’t feel like driving when she finished, we’d be stuck at the clinic without a car.

In the end, neither the drive nor the restitching was as big an ordeal as I’d feared—the former because the main streets were so thick with Saturday shoppers that even Lotty had to go slowly. At her clinic, a storefront about a mile west of my apartment, in a polyglot neighborhood on the fringes of the North Side’s new construction, she shot Novocain into my shoulder. I felt a faint tugging as she cut the old stitches and put new ones in, but either because of her skill or the anesthetic I could actually move my arm pretty easily when she finished.

With Lotty lying back in an easy chair in her office, we finally got to April Czernin’s woes. Lotty listened intently, but shook her head with genuine sorrow over the limited help the Czernins could get.

“The insurance really only covers ten thousand dollars of her care? That’s shocking. But it’s so typical of the problems our patients face these days, being forced to make these choices of life and death because of what the insurance does or doesn’t pay.

“But as for your girl, we can’t take her on as a Medicaid patient, because she’s not indigent; as soon as the billing department finds out she has insurance, they’ll do exactly what the university did, call the company and be told the policy won’t cover the defibrillator. The only thing I can suggest is that they try to get her involved in an experimental trial, although the treatment for Long QT is pretty standard at this point, and it may be hard to find a trial group anywhere they can afford to travel to.”