"No, Marc, she's doing it when she's awake. To get attention."
Chris mentioned the matter of the shaking bed, Which had happened twice more and was always followed by Regan's insistence that she sleep with her mother.
"Well, that could be physical," the internist ventured.
"No, Marc, I didn't say the bed is shaking. I said that she says that it's shaking." "Do you know that it isn't shaking?"
"No"
"Well, it might be clonic spasms; he murmured.
"Who?"
"Any temperature?"
"No. Listen, what do you think?" she asked. "Should I take her to a shrink or what?"
"Chris, you mentioned her schoolwork. How is she doing with her math?"
'Why'd you ask?"
"How's she doing?" he persisted. "Just
rotten. I mean, suddenly rotten." He
grunted.
"Why'd you ask?" she repeated
"Well, it's part of the syndrome."
"Of what?"
'Nothing serious. I'd rather not guess about it oven the phone. Got a pencil?" He wanted to give her the name of a Washington internist.
"Marc, can't you come out here and check her yourself?" Jamie. A lingering infection. Chris's doctor at that time had prescribed a new, broad-spectrum antibiotic. Refilling a prescription at a local drugstore, the pharmacist was wary. "I don't want to alarm you, ma'am, but this... Well, it's quite new on the market, and they've found that in Georgia it's been causing aplastic anemia in..." Jamie. Jamie. Dead. And ever since, Chris had never trusted doctors. Only Marc. And that had taken years. "Marc, can't you?" Chris pleaded.
"No, I can't, but don't worry. This man is brilliant. The best. Now get a pencil."
Hesitation. Then, "Okay."
She wrote down the name.
"Have him look her over and then tell him to call me," the internist advised. "And forget the psychiatrist for now."
"Are you sure?"
He delivered a blistering statement regarding the readiness of the general public to recognize psychosomatic illness, while failing to recognize the reverse: that illness of the body was often the cause of seeming illness of the mind.
"Now what would you say," he proposed as an instance, "if you were my internist, God forbid, and I told you I had headaches, recurring nightmares, nausea, insomnia and blurring of the vision; and also that I generally felt unglued and was worried to death about my job? Would you say I was neurotic?"
"I'm a bad one to ask, Marc; I know that you're crazy."
"Those symptoms I gave you are the same as for brain tumor, Chris. Check the body. That's first. Then well see."
Chris telephoned the internist and made an appointment for that afternoon. Her time was her own now. The filming was over, at least for her. Burke Dennings continued, loosely supervising the work of the "second unit;" a generally less expensive crew that was filming scenes of lesser importance, mostly helicopter shots of various exteriors around the city; also stunt work; scenes without any of the principal actors.
But he wanted each foot of film to be perfect.
**********
The doctor was in Arlington. Samuel Klein. While Regan sat crossly in an examining room, Klein seated her mother in his office and took a brief case history. She told him the trouble. He listened; nodded; made copious notes. When she mentioned the shaking of the bed, he appears to frown. But Chris continued:
"Marc seemed to think it was kind of significant that Regan's doing poorly with her math. Now why was that?"
"You mean schoolwork?"
"Yes, schoolwork, but math in particular, though. What's it mean?"
"Well, let's wait until I've looked at her, Mrs. MacNeil."
He then excused himself and gave Regan a complete examination that included taking samples of urine and her blood. The urine was for testing of her liver and kidney functions; the blood
for a number of checks: diabetes; thyroid function; red-cell blood count looking for possible anemia, White-cell blood count looking for exotic diseases of the blood.
After he finished, he sat for a while and talked to Regan, observing her demeanor, and then returned to Chris and started writing a prescription.
"She appears to have a hyperkinetic behavior disorder."
