Sweet Salt Air by Barbara Delinsky Read Free Book Online

like nothing was wrong?
    “Hey,” she said the instant he picked up, “I’m sorry. I thought she’d never go to bed. Tell me again what happened.”
    “My left leg went numb,” he said quietly. “I was just getting up to leave at the end of a team meeting.”
    At the hospital, in clear view of doctors and nurses who knew him. Nightmare .
    “I sat down again and picked up my cell, like I had a call, while everyone else left. The numbness let up after a few minutes, but my leg’s never done that before.”
    “Maybe it just fell asleep,” Nicole said hopefully. “That happens to me all the time, and if it went away—”
    “It was numb, Nicki. Not asleep. Not trembling. Plain-out numb. That means this medication is not working.”
    “Maybe it just needs more time,” she tried.
    “It’s been three months. It either works or it doesn’t.”
    “Maybe the numbness is a side effect of the drug itself. You often have those.”
    “Numbness isn’t a side effect. It’s a symptom.”
    “But it’ll pass.” She had to believe that. He saw the best doctor, took the best drugs.
    “New symptoms are not a good sign.”
    “Did you call Peter?” Peter Keppler was a neurologist. His office was in New York, where they could visit him without Julian’s world knowing.
    “He says it could be a fluke, but, cripes, this is getting scary.”
    Julian had multiple sclerosis. The MS diagnosis had come four years earlier, and though he felt near-constant fatigue, his symptoms, mostly blurred vision and tremors, remained intermittent and mild. Still, the diagnosis was devastating for a surgeon who was not only entering the prime of his career, but in a specialty where the tiniest wrong move of the scalpel could damage a fetus.
    So, with the ink still wet on his diagnosis, he had stepped back from the work that he loved. When he scrubbed up now, it was to teach other surgeons the technique for which he was known. No one questioned this; it was a natural progression in a brilliant career. Nicole knew that, but it was little solace when she saw how much Julian missed not doing the work himself. Saving the lives of unborn children was heady stuff.
    But there was no choice here. If he had continued to operate knowing he was impaired, he would have risked not only patients, but reputation and self-respect.
    The key was controlling the disease, to which end he had tried every gold-standard treatment, but nothing had slowed the frequency of his symptoms. Adding to Nicole’s own misery was his insistence on secrecy. Since no one at the hospital knew, she wasn’t allowed to tell her friends, her personal physician, even her mother.
    “Peter is the best, Jules,” she said now. “There’s always something else to try.”
    But he was discouraged. She could hear it in his murmur. “We’re running out of options,” he said, and he would know. An academic at heart, he had read every theory, every study, every paper there was to read on MS.
    Nicole had married a positive guy. She didn’t know what to do with this one. “I’m flying home tomorrow,” she decided.
    “No. You need to be there.”
    “I need to be with you.”
    “I need to be alone.” He had said that before, and no matter how he tried to soften it, it hurt. “I love you, baby, but sometimes I’m so concerned about you that I can’t think about what I need to do. Right now, I need you there doing your book.” There was a meaningful pause. “You haven’t told her, have you?”
    “You made me promise not to,” Nicole charged, releasing her frustration in this peripheral way. “Do you know how hard that is? I mean, talk about awkward. There were a dozen times when it would have been totally appropriate to share it—like when I realized I hadn’t told her Cecily Cole was dead, which has major impact on this cookbook, but I must have been so preoccupied each time she and I talked that I hadn’t said it. I mean, who’s she going to tell, Jules? She doesn’t