A Big Little Life

I’d been the receptionist, and if John D. MacDonald, the writer, had hobbled to me, holding his severed foot in his hands, I would have had a thousand questions for him and might even have asked him to wait while I ran home and got some of his books for him to sign.
    Soon, I settled into a wheelchair, and a nurse rolled me out of the waiting room and into the ER proper. I told Gerda to call Trixie and tell her I was going to be all right, and Gerda agreed that she would.
    The nurse pushing the wheelchair was also a reader of mine. She said she had read everything I’d written and needed another book, and she asked if I would ever stop writing.
    “Not if I live,” I promised.
    The medical system was in gear now, moving right along. A minute later, I was in an ER bed, surrounded by a privacy curtain, listening to someone sobbing at the farther end of the room.
    A young doctor came through the curtain with the flair of a magician. He was handsome enough to join the cast of the television show ER , so I knew he must be a highly competent physician.
    Indicating the soaked towel that bound my hand, he said, “That’s a lot of blood.”
    “Is it really?” I asked. “I thought I might be overreacting to it since it’s, you know, my blood.”
    As he unwound the towel, he asked what had happened, and I told him about the fake-out maneuver in the roll-the-ball game that had gone so very wrong.
    “Oh,” he said, “a dog bite. I’ll have to report a dog bite to Newport Beach Animal Control.”
    I hastened to correct him, to explain that it was an accident, and to describe again how it had occurred.
    “Even so,” he said, “if there was a dog involved, the law requires me to report it as a bite. What’s the dog’s name?”
    Frantically considering whether to lie to him and give a false dog name, I did not immediately reply.
    When he saw the gash in my palm, he said, “This is a rather deep wound. We need to clean it out and look in there. It’ll need eight stitches, maybe ten. What did you say the dog’s name was?”
    If I gave him a fake name—say, Lulu—then I would have to buy another dog and name it Lulu and turn it over to the animal-control officers when they came to our house in riot helmets and bulletproof vests, toting tear gas and Uzis. Lulu would be innocent, she wouldn’t know why she was being booked for assault, and when she was sitting in the dog equivalent of Alcatraz, I would be sleepless with guilt for railroading her.
    “Her name is Trixie,” I said. “Listen, would a dog named Trixie ever bite anyone? She’s a good, good dog. She’s a golden retriever. She probably wouldn’t even bite a burglar if he was beating me with a shovel.”
    As we had been conversing, he had also been requesting from a nurse the tools and materials he would need to clean and close the wound. Now she wheeled in a stainless-steel cart bearing a collection of instruments that would have thrilled Hannibal Lecter.
    Over the years, a few dentists, a periodontist, an endo-dontist, a gastroenterologist, and two internists have told me that I have a very high pain threshold. Because I didn’t want to be anesthetized, I once endured, without Novocain or any painkillers, the three-hour extraction of a tooth with roots fused to the jawbone.
    Now the handsome young doctor, who wanted to send my Trixie to the slammer, told me, “Evidently, you have an unusually high pain threshold.”
    “I guess that’s a good thing,” I said, “though I still try to avoid situations that involve pain.”
    “I’m going to numb your hand anyway, so this won’t hurt at all. Is Trixie current with all her shots?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Rabies, Bordetella , corona, measles, mumps, the black plague, the virus that’s always turning people into flesh-eating zombies in the movies, all that stuff, everything, up-to-date.”
    “Who’s her vet?”
    I told him, and he knew who Dr. Whitaker and Dr. Lyle were. I asked, “What’ll animal control do when they get this report?”
    “I can’t say. I don’t know their procedures. I just know what I’m supposed to do in a dog-bite case.”
    Focused on his work, he remained silent for a longtime as he meticulously cleaned the wound, examined it, stopped the bleeding, and finally closed it.
    Although I was worried about Trixie, I was grateful that unlike the receptionist and the nurse, the doctor had made no reference to my books and was unaware that I was a well-known writer. I did