The Care and Handling of Roses With Thorns by Margaret Dilloway

backtracks in the hallway to my door. “Oh, hi, Gal. Didn’t see you there.” She bats her eyes innocently, smooths down her red bob. Her pale skin looks greenish under the fluctuating fluorescent light. One of the bulbs flickers and hisses.
    “That’s because you weren’t looking.” I smile, clutch the scratchy bleached sheet so hard it hurts. “When are you going to have a kidney for me?”
    “When you take the test again.” She presses her clipboard against her chest and doesn’t make eye contact, instead focusing on the closed blinds to the right of my head. It’s terrible to have your own surgeon not even like you. But I don’t care if we never exchange Christmas cards; I just want a working kidney. “We have to do it because of your leg graft. Otherwise, if we put a new kidney in, your blood flow may be compromised. The kidney will die. You know I can’t perform the transplant unless you get a good blood flow test.”
    She has delivered all this in a monotone, still not meeting my eyes. I’ve met plenty of doctors with a poor bedside manner, but Dr. Blankenship takes the cake. I spread my hands apart. “I’m giving you my permission to do it anyway. Doesn’t that count for something?”
    “I know what you’re saying, and I know what the protocol tells me to do.”
    “So I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
    She squishes her mouth into a smile, wrinkles deepening in her cheeks. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you when you’re on the IVP dye, unless you think it will.”
    I shut my eyes for a second.
    I know I am allergic to IVP dye, the same way you would know you were allergic to bees. The first time I had a reaction, I was twelve, and I didn’t even know what IVP dye was. My breathing slowed, my throat swelled, and I got a rash on my face. I don’t remember much of it, other than what my mother’s told me. Besides, my point is, how could I have a psychosomatic reaction to IVP dye when I wasn’t even aware they were pumping it into my veins?
    The doctor who used IVP dye then told my mother that if I was allergic, and if I had it again, I’d probably die.
    “What if the first time you got stung by a bee, you swelled up and your throat closed?” I asked Dr. Blankenship the last time we had this conversation. “Would you go around trying to get stung again on purpose?”
    She laughed me off. “This is entirely different. Apples and oranges.”
    “More like apples and apples,” I said. “Maybe Granny Smith versus Red Delicious. But they’re both apples!”
    Now, as I sit here with my eyes shut, this memory welling into me, Dr. Blankenship tries again. “We can try it and take you off right away if something goes wrong. I am sure it’s not the dye. Nothing in our studies suggests that such an allergy is even possible.”
    The same old song. “This conversation feels oddly familiar, Doctor.”
    “Good morning, Mr. Walters.” Dr. Blankenship’s tone silkens. Walters walks by.
    Walters pauses. Today he’s in pressed white linen pants and a light blue T-shirt, carrying a Panama hat in his hands, looking like he’s off to vacation in the Bahamas instead of going to dialysis. “Surgery this morning, eh? Going to have one of those kidneys for me pretty soon, I hope?”
    “I bet within the next couple weeks.” She’s all smiles.
    He gives me a courtesy wave. “And how are we this morning?”
    “I don’t know about ‘we,’ but I am fine, thank you.” I speak through a clenched jaw.
    He walks on.
    Dr. Blankenship turns back to me. This time, she actually finds it in her to meet my eyes. Hers are a watered-down green, the charcoal circles underneath not quite covered by her concealer. “Gal, please. I want to get you a kidney as badly as you do. But I have to abide by the rules. If you’re in danger of rejecting it, then I can’t give it to you.”
    “What about him?” I nod toward Walters’s retreating back. “He could drink it to death. Stop taking his blood