Sleigh Bell Dreams (Mistletoe Meadows Sweet Christmas #1)

Chapter 17

Social media post on Mistletoe Meadows official site by admin:

Hello neighbors and residents of Mistletoe Meadows, I’m excited to let you know that we had another episode of the Secret Saint and his charitable projects. If you haven’t noticed, maybe you didn’t know that Mr. Gregory has been laid up, and it looked like the Christmas decorations were not going to be put up around town. The township had not decided what to do, but Secret Saint to the rescue. Decorations on Main Street are up and working, and this reporter thinks that it won’t be long until the rest of them are up as well.

Photo of Main Street with the Christmas lights up. Photo credit: Dr. Terry McBride

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“I’ve heard Dr. Vivik’s wife is doing terribly. I saw them in church on Sunday, and she looked just awful.” Mrs. Hoover sat on the exam table, her hair perfectly coiffured and her glasses perched on her nose, with a silver chain that hooked on one end and went around her neck before hooking on the other.

Terry nodded. She heard this at least seventeen times today, from basically every patient she saw and sometimes from the folks who came with them as well.

It had gotten hard to think of something to say other than, “I saw them, too, and you’re right. She looks frail.”

She didn’t want to gossip about the doctor and his wife, and she felt like she was being pumped for information. She was glad that she hadn’t spoken to them any more than what she had. She would have had a hard time trying to say that she didn’t know when she did, and she wouldn’t want to lie. But what else was there to say?

Go visit them? Send him a note, and see if he writes back?

She didn’t even know what they might need. Other than healing obviously.

“All right, Mrs. Hoover. I’m going to call in this prescription, and it should clear up that sinus infection in no time. But if it doesn’t, you give my office a call, and we’ll make sure that you get back in here for something different. You’ve had this antibiotic several times already, and it’s usually effective, but there’s always that chance.”

“I just want to get rid of it. The holidays are right around the corner, and I do not want to be sick over Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

Terry nodded, typing on her iPad and making sure that she did everything accurately. She messed a couple of things up, but her administrative assistant, Camille, and her nurse, Ashley, had both been great. Dr. Vivik had said that they were both excellent. And he had been right on the money. She’d been in contact with them several times before she had come, but not nearly as much as what she wanted to be. Still, they were helping her learn the ropes and had been patient when she’d not done everything perfectly.

She only had another hour until closing, but they would probably end up working a while after that until they got all the patients seen, since she’d been a little slow.

“Do you have any more questions for me?” she asked as she straightened up from the chair and stood, watching Mrs. Hoover.

“No, dear. Thank you very much for seeing me immediately.”

“Not a problem. Call anytime,” she said. She had a couple of people cancel, and one that didn’t show. They were still going to bill the one that didn’t show, but collecting the money could be tricky. They said right on their literature that if an appointment wasn’t canceled twenty-four hours prior, they reserved the right to bill them for the missed appointment. And this appointment hadn’t been canceled at all. However, Camille had told her that they typically called the day before and reminded people of their appointments. A lot of their patients were older and couldn’t keep track of when they were supposed to do what.

So maybe they wouldn’t bill them, but she would make sure from now on that the calls went out, and if people didn’t cancel and didn’t show up, they were going to get billed.

She nodded her head, just to confirm, although she doubted that she’d ever do it. She just didn’t have a heart for it.

It was hard enough to bill people for their actual appointments. It felt like kicking someone when they were down to demand money from them when they were sick. That was one thing that she hadn’t considered when she decided to do her own practice. Someone else had always been in charge of billing wherever she worked before. This was her first experience with it. Dr. Vivik had walked her through it and had told her he would be available to answer any questions. She wasn’t afraid to ask him, although she did want to make sure that it was a legitimate question before she bothered him considering the condition of his wife.

She walked out and checked her iPad for the next patient’s room and looked at their chart on her iPad before she knocked softly and walked into the room.

“Hello, Mrs. Dylan,” she said as she walked in. She remembered Mrs. Dylan from the cafeteria at school.

“They told me that Dr. Vivik wasn’t going to be in and I was going to be seeing a new doc, and I heard through the grapevine that was going to be you, Terry. But I just didn’t believe it. Imagine, all those years ago you were in school, in the lunch line, and now here you are, my doctor.”

“Well, it’s a privilege to be your doctor, Mrs. Dylan. And it’s good to see you today. This is just a checkup, right?”

“It is, although I expect you’re going to be ordering blood work for me, since I lost my paper and didn’t go in and get it done before I came.”

“That’s not a problem. We’ll get you an order in, and you can get it done anytime it suits you in the next thirty days. Will that work?”

“It sure will, although who knows what could happen in the next thirty days. Why you heard that the Secret Saint has already done another good deed, and it’s not even after Thanksgiving!”

“You’re talking about the lights on Main Street,” Terry said without looking up from her iPad where she typed, sending a message to her nurse asking for her to order blood work for this patient.

“No. That’s old news.”

“Really?” She lifted her head. She was supposed to be the reporter on the Secret Saint, and this was the first whiff she had that something new had happened. “What?”

“Well, things have been going on. The first is, Mrs. Rosario claims that the Secret Saint came and got the squirrel out of her house. I’m not sure I believe that, because I heard that her grandson was the one who got it out, and she does have a tendency to exaggerate.”

“All right,” Terry said, thinking about Judd after the mention of the squirrel. Interesting that she hadn’t really thought about squirrels before. Now all of a sudden, every day she heard about a different one.

“And we also heard that Bethany Vance’s niece had a nice little gift delivered to her house this morning. It was a medical bed. One that they hadn’t been able to afford to buy, and they hadn’t been able to get one through any of the other insurance providers. It was a very timely gift, and I have to say whoever the Secret Saint is, they are very well-connected.”

“Wow. I’d say they’re connected. I’ve known about Bethany’s niece, but I hadn’t realized that she needed a medical bed.” That was a detail that whoever was the Secret Saint had been able to finagle, and she hadn’t. Interesting.

She wondered again who it could be, but before she set her iPad down, she made a note to herself to make sure to make a post about both of those things. Whether the Secret Saint had gotten the squirrel out or not, she could leave it as an open-ended question. It didn’t say that she had to present only cold, hard facts. It was supposed to be a fun thing that helped the community band together.

“Well, they have one now, and there was a note on it that said that it would be paid for as long as they needed it, and gave an address and a phone number for where they could call whenever they needed to send it back. It was signed the Secret Saint.” Mrs. Dylan had lowered her voice and leaned forward like she was giving a particularly juicy morsel of gossip.

Terry resisted the urge to ask her to straighten up so she didn’t fall off the exam table.

“Wow. I love this town,” Terry said, realizing that she didn’t have good news like this at any of the other places she’d worked. It really brightened people’s day to hear about good things that were going on, and it made her especially happy that Mrs. Tucker had hunted her down and asked her to do it, because she actually had to focus on it.

God obviously knew that she was going to need good news in her practice. Because she’d already had to tell someone today that they had cancer and tell someone else that their scan had shown an abnormality and they needed to go back.

Another person had been sent immediately to the ER, because her symptoms mimicked a heart attack, and she had no idea what they were doing in the clinic, other than people sometimes did that. Thinking that any health place could provide the same level of care, and they didn’t realize that the clinic was much, much different than an emergency room.

She wanted to shout from the housetops, “If you think you’re having a heart attack, go to the ER!”

Regardless, it hadn’t been an easy day. But she supposed it had been typical. And she was going to have to get used to it.

Checkups were the best though. She made good money from them, and they weren’t hard.

“All right, all the stats the nurse gave me look good. Your blood pressure is within a normal range, and I don’t think we’re going to change your medication for that. We’ll see what your cholesterol levels are when we get the blood work back. They were a little high last time.”

She continued to work, finishing up with Mrs. Dylan and ending her day on a positive note, doing a physical for a kid who was going to get his driver’s license. That was fun, to see the excitement in his eyes and to remember how she had felt when she was finally able to drive. It had been a good time.

She smiled again as she locked the door and walked away from her clinic. Camille and Ashley had left almost as soon as the day had been over, but she had stayed, making sure everything was prepped for the next day and thinking about the few mistakes that she’d made, things she wanted to do better. She supposed eventually it would become a routine job for her, but she didn’t want to not do her very best.

As she stepped away from the clinic and contemplated the walk home, she thought about what she was going to stop and get for supper, and then she remembered. She didn’t have to cook supper. Judd was going to do it. And she was looking forward to it.