Lightning by Danielle Steel

tomorrow. I really can't do anything for the next week or ten days. I was hoping to come and see you after that.”
    “That would be a very foolish decision,” he said bluntly, denying everything Sam had said to her, or perhaps confirming it. Maybe he was just protecting himself from malpractice, she told herself. This way, he had warned her. “Why don't you come and see me today, and then we'll know where we stand. And if we need to, we can set the biopsy up for a week from next Monday. Would that suit you?”
    “I …yes … it would …but …I'm very busy today. My trial starts tomorrow.” She had already told him that, but she was feeling desperate again, and very frightened.
    “Two o'clock this afternoon?” He was relentless, and she found herself incapable of arguing with him. She nodded her head silently at first, and then agreed to come to his office at two p.m. Fortunately, his office wasn't far from hers. “Would you like to bring a friend?” The question surprised her.
    “Why would I do that?” Was he planning to hurt her, or render her somehow unable to take care of herself? Why would she take a friend to meet a doctor?
    “I find that women very often get confused when confronted with difficult situations and large amounts of information.”
    “Are you serious?” If it weren't so shocking, she would have laughed. “I'm a trial lawyer. I deal with difficult situations every day, and probably more ‘information' than you deal with in a year.” She was not amused by his comment.
    “The information you deal with normally is not about your own health. Even physicians find facing malignancies of their own difficult and upsetting.”
    “We don't know that I have a malignancy yet, do we?”
    “You're quite right, we don't. Will I see you at two o'clock?” She wanted to say no, but she knew that she shouldn't.
    “I'll see you then,” she said, and hung up, furious with him. Part of her reaction was the hormones and part of it was that he was the potential bearer of bad news and she feared him deeply. And as soon as she hung up, she called one of her paralegals in, and gave her an unusual project. She gave her all three names Dr. Anderson had given her, and told her to find out about their reputations. “I want to know everything about them, any dirt, any good stuff, what do other doctors think. I'm not sure who you should call, but call everyone, Sloan-Kettering, Columbia Presbyterian, the medical schools where they teach. Call everyone you have to. And please don't tell anyone you're doing this for me. Is that clear?”
    “Yes, Mrs. Parker,” the paralegal said meekly, but she was the most industrious worker assigned to Alex and she knew she would get her the information.
    And two hours later, she already had the scoop on Peter Herman. Alex was about to leave when the girl came hurrying in and told Alex that he had a reputation of being cold to his patients, but he was the best there was surgically, and there was something to be said for that. One of the hospitals she'd called, and the most illustrious, said he was extremely conservative but one of the best breast surgeons in the country. And the early reports on the other two were that they were almost as good, but not quite, and even more unpleasant to their patients than Peter Herman. Both of them were supposedly prima donnas. And Herman supposedly liked dealing with doctors and not patients, which was probably why John Anderson liked him.
    “At least he knows what he's doing, even if he's no Prince Charming,” Alex commented as she thanked her paralegal, and asked her to continue to follow up on the others. And as she took a cab to his office, she wondered what he would say to her about the gray mass on the mammogram. She had had a range of views now, Sam's optimistic one, and John Anderson's far more ominous one, which Sam said was probably nonsense. She liked Sam's view of it a lot better.
    But unfortunately, Peter Herman did not share.