“It was nice at your place,” David said to me when we met at the ward. The night before, when we came back from visiting Lily’s parents, we had invited the guys over to help us finish the cake we’d brought home.
“So, what do you think of her?” I asked him.
“She’s wonderful, really,” he replied.
“Everyone was impressed by her. Don’t worry – I didn’t tell anyone anything unnecessary, not even Max,” he added, without me having to ask.
“In the end, they’ll find out,” I said. It was obvious David had already sensed, with his sharp instincts, how sensitive Lily was about keeping her medical condition private. I didn’t need to say another word.
“Tell me, is something going on with Shira?” I shifted the subject.
“Forget it – you know I’m tangled up with Nora,” he grumbled.
“At least say something to her, so she won’t get hurt.” I felt obligated to Shira, trying to keep my promise.
“I’ll deal with it today. Anyway, I never promised her anything,” David repeated the words that always seemed so clear to him – though unfortunately, they never seemed so clear to the women who trailed after him.
“Lily wants to buy a bicycle?”
“Has she lost her mind?!” he looked alarmed, as if he knew something I didn’t.
“I can’t stop her. She wants to live, to enjoy herself, to ride, to do everything – basically, to live.” I spread my hands in helplessness.
“I’m not sure she should be cycling in her condition. A month ago, the boss didn’t give her more than two years.” His blunt answer – putting it mildly – knocked the wind out of me.
“Who told you that?”
“Shira.”
“Yes, she looks amazing, but remember, she probably has an autoimmune disease with kidney involvement. Maybe right now she’s in remission, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?” David nodded gravely, his eyes fixed on me. These were exactly the things I didn’t want to hear. I’d begun to nurture hopes that Lily was healthier than everyone believed. The only real medical issue I’d seen was the small wound on her ankle, which she’d promised to take care of. Not once, in all the time we were together, did I sense she was suffering from any physical problem. Not in bed either, where we burned off dreamlike energy together. True, only a few days had passed since we’d moved in together – but during those days, she acted like a completely healthy woman. Maybe except for that one moment at the beach, when her wound had opened… I wondered: was love blinding me? Then I remembered what she’d told me when I first moved in with her – that there were things the doctors didn’t know. She hadn’t elaborated. Was she hiding something from them? From me too? And then came something every young doctor must go through. The suspicion that some patients, a small number of them, exaggerate the symptoms of an imagined illness, sometimes adding bizarre descriptions of sickness – mainly just to be hospitalized. Sometimes they even go as far as mixing blood with urine, or urine with blood, to make test results look so bad they absolutely require admission. We studied this in psychiatry lectures.
“Maybe Lily has Münchausen syndrome?” I shared my fear with David – and to my surprise, he admitted he’d suspected the same. He had even checked her records without anyone inthe department knowing. He’d gone down to the archives and reviewed her file himself. Everything there, he said, was real. No Münchausen. No imagined illness. All the tests pointed to a genuine autoimmune disease with clear kidney involvement. A real illness, not a fantasy. I didn’t know whether to breathe easier – or to be more afraid than I already was.
“You really suspected she had Münchausen?” David asked, catching the shifting look on my face.
“Look, the gap between the test results and the way she looks and behaves is enormous. David, she has no limitations!”
“True,” David agreed. “It does look like the remission is doing her a lot of good.”
Until when? I asked myself.
Chapter 16
Blood Pact
That evening, Lily welcomed me with a Middle Eastern dinner she had prepared: Arab-style salad, scrambled eggs, several kinds of cheese, yogurts, and coffee.
“I had a tough day,” I told her during the meal.
“Me too,” she replied.
“So what happened with you?”
“Lily,” I decided to be direct and held both her hands. “You know that you…”
“That I what?”
“I don’t know how to put it, but anyone who doesn’t know you would never guess you’re sick.”
