Chapter 2 - One Dose Left
Calla tried to leave the dining room.
Alden caught her wrist as she passed his chair. “Sit down.”
“Don’t grab me.”
“Then tell us who you called.”
Calla pulled free but remained beside the table. “Mom.”
Maris gave a sharp shake of her head. “You called me because you were upset about the tires.”
“I called because the pharmacist scared me.”
Elise unfolded the notice. The printed language was clinical, but the pharmacist’s handwritten note at the bottom was not.
Patient recently hospitalized for pulmonary embolism. Pickup person advised that interruption may create immediate risk. Emergency bridge offered and declined after phone consultation with family.
“Why did you decline it?” Elise asked.
Calla rubbed her thumb over the cracked edge of her phone case.
“Mom said you had one pill at home.”
Elise turned to Maris.
“I asked whether she had checked,” Maris said. “She told me she thought you did.”
“That’s not what you said,” Calla replied.
“Calla.”
“You said Dad had already promised the money for my tires.”
Alden pushed his plate away. “Your car wasn’t safe.”
“My lungs weren’t safe,” Elise said.
He looked at her then, and she saw the same expression he had worn throughout her childhood whenever two people needed something and he had already decided whose need would count.
“Elise, it was supposed to be one day,” he said. “The pension deposit clears Monday.”
“The prescription was due Friday.”
“You were sitting at home. Calla has to drive to work.”
Elise’s fingers went numb around the paper.
She had moved into Alden and Maris’s house after leaving the hospital because her second-floor apartment in New Haven had no elevator. Alden had insisted she would recover faster with family nearby. He had helped organize her bills, driven her to appointments and suggested she route her short-term disability payments into the old joint checking account they had opened when she was in college.
“You don’t need to worry about money while you’re sick,” he had told her.
Now he was explaining why Calla’s commute mattered more than preventing another clot.
Elise stood too quickly.
Pain tightened beneath her ribs.
She gripped the edge of the table until the dizziness passed.
Alden rose. “Sit back down.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” Calla whispered.
A deep ache had been building behind Elise’s right knee since the previous evening. She had blamed it on lying around too much. Now the calf felt warmer than the other one.
She picked up her purse.
Maris blocked the doorway. “You’re not driving in this condition.”
“I’m going to the emergency room.”
“You’re being dramatic.”
Elise looked past her toward Calla.
“You have my car keys.”
Calla’s mouth opened.
Then she reached into her pocket and handed them over.
“I’ll drive,” she said.
At Hartford Hospital, the ultrasound technician spent too long examining the same section of Elise’s leg.
The emergency physician later explained that the clot had extended. It had not traveled to her lungs again, but the missed medication had created exactly the danger the pharmacist warned about.
Elise received a replacement dose before midnight.
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When the doctor asked why she had stopped taking the medication, Elise looked through the glass wall at her father, stepmother and stepsister sitting in the hallway.
“I didn’t stop,” she said. “Someone else decided I could wait.”
