“Your blood count is dangerously low,” the doctor said over the phone. “I’m sending an ambulance to take you to the hospital because you certainly cannot drive.” Her voice was calm but determined. The woman on the other end of the line was quiet for a moment, then said: “OK, I’ll go, but I don’t need an ambulance. I have a friend who can take me.”
The 73-year-old woman called her closest neighbor, who lived a half a mile down the road in the rural village Salisbury, Conn. They talked every day, and she had described how tired she felt lately. Her friend encouraged her to call her doctor, even offered several times to take her to the emergency room at nearby Sharon Hospital. The woman always declined — I think I’m feeling better, she would say. But now even she had to acknowledge that she did not look or feel like the person she’d been — someone who, until she retired two years earlier, taught science to rowdy middle schoolers. Finally, she said when her friend answered the phone, she was ready to go to the E.R.
The woman wasn’t sure when she started to feel bad; a month ago, maybe two. “At my age,” she told me recently, “you can’t expect to feel good every day.” But a couple of weeks before the call from her doctor, something happened to make her wonder if her symptoms were about more than just getting older. It was early on a morning in June, and she had come to the veterinarian’s office to pick up a medication for her elderly dog. On the way back to her car, she ran into a friend, and as they stood chatting casually about dogs and children, the woman suddenly turned pale. She swayed dangerously. Her friend grabbed her and, throwing an arm around her shoulder, helped her back into the building.
A veterinary assistant rushed out to help. The woman sat slumped in a chair, her face drained of color, her eyes strangely unfocused. Her blood pressure was abnormally low. As she slowly came back to herself, her first response was embarrassment. She didn’t like being the center of attention, and there she was, surrounded by worried faces. “I’m all right, really I am,” she said over and over. But she knew, and they knew, it wasn’t true. She sipped the water she was given, and color seeped back into her face. When she felt well enough to stand, her friend offered to drive her home.
