Part 34
"You both look exhausted," David said. Zander was asleep. David went out into the waiting room to see Brenda and Donna sitting on the couch.
"I'm better now," Brenda said. "It's less scary knowing what it is and that something can be done about it."
Donna agreed. "You look a little weary, too," she said to David.
"Do I?" he asked. "I'd really like to get the baby in for an EKG."
"I'll talk to Carly," Donna volunteered. "I was thinking about calling her to bring Ginny in anyway, to see Alex."
"Thank you, Donna," David said, as Donna got up to go and call.
Cameron came out of the elevator.
"There he is," Brenda said, making sure Cameron could hear her, "the lifesaver. I would have thanked him, but I guess now he thinks he has the total right to put Zander down forever."
Cameron ignored her, and went to the open door of Zander's room.
"Sleeping," Brenda called to him.
Cameron looked at her. He went into the room anyway.
He came out after another second.
"Still here," he commented, as he saw David.
"Yes, we're still here," Brenda said to him, "we care, see."
David was getting a bad feeling about the immediate future interaction between Brenda and Cameron.
"You know he's not supposed to have any stress," Brenda said to Cameron.
"I'm a doctor, and I know that," Cameron said.
"You didn't know that down at the country club," she said.
"I didn't know he had this condition and could never have guessed, or I'd have known by then. As for Alexander, he had handled far more stress before countless times."
"You made sure of that," Brenda answered.
"Did you expect me to encourage him?" Cameron argued, "every time he did something dangerous?"
"No, but you could have encouraged him in general, and you didn't, did you?" She stood and went up to Cameron. "You are encouraging towards Peter," she added accusingly.
"Like most children, Peter needed encouragement. Alexander, on the other hand, needed to learn to question his own judgment. He still does."
"There must be a more affectionate way to do that," David said, wanting to say something to get the two of them distracted from the spiral they were in before Brenda got mad enough to tell Cameron all about his lack of biological paternity.
"Why are you so interested?" Cameron again asked this question of David.
"The better question is why do you think it so strange anyone is interested?" David retorted, standing up, too. "Most people love to talk about their kids. Other people don't have to be 'so interested' as you put it, for normal parents to talk about their kids. They're so interested themselves that they don't even notice how interested someone else might be. Hell, they usually bore you to death without your having to show any interest whatsoever. And I mean bragging about them, not going on about them having to learn to question their own judgment or any psycho-babble like that. I think Brenda and I are merely fascinated by how wrong your approach is."
"Spoken like a true inexperienced parent," Cameron sneered. "How many children have you raised?"
"I don't have to have raised any to see that there's something wrong with the way you deal with Zander," David said.
"The question is why are you here," Brenda addressed Cameron. "You know he's not supposed to get stressed out. You know that you never do anything else. So why are you here? You had second thoughts and would now rather kill him?"
"No. Obviously if I had known he was in this condition, I would have seen him a little differently, but I had no way of knowing. He is a lot like me. And I know how I got straightened out."
"You're kidding," Brenda said. "You'll consider yourself successful when you've made him into as miserable an SOB as you are?"
Cameron could not answer all these questions at once and walked off, muttering that he didn't have to answer their questions, and that they didn't know what they were talking about.
About twenty minutes later, Cameron walked back down the hall. He stopped, because he could hear their conversation. He stood for a moment, wondering where to go rather than back to the waiting room with them still there.
"I know he's going to say he shouldn't have more children," Brenda said. "They could inherit it, couldn't they?"
"Each child has his or her own fifty/fifty chance," Hayward said. "Like being a boy or a girl."
"Fifty/fifty," Brenda repeated. "He's not gonna like that."
"You could try arguing from the positive side," Hayward said.
"What's that? Fifty percent don't have it?"
"That, and that if they did it could be detected and treated, and they are better off than he ever was, because up till now he didn't know about it."
"Yeah, I guess there are people out there in the world, living their lives, with no idea of this time bomb," Brenda said. "Like Zander was."
Cameron thought sarcastically how amazingly perceptive Brenda was. He wanted to go, but was somehow stuck, fascinated by her opinion of Alexander.
"That's worse," Hayward then said. "You only have to convince Zander of that."
Brenda smiled. "I'll try," she said. "And you don't have it. So people who don't have it can pass it on anyway. I could."
"It's not that common, but that's true, there are people out there passing it on without knowing it, too. All in more danger, because again, they won't look out for it."
"It's amazing how this can all be understood. I think I'll take a class in genetics. And your father was worse off than Zander or any of Zander's children. He didn't know at all."
"Most likely. We can't be completely sure he had it, but now we can look back and say he probably did. But without his dying the way he did, we wouldn't be so sure Zander has it."
"Can't you tell from the EKG?"
"With a really high measurement, but his is even at the high end of normal. Some people will have a measurement well over .50, you won't have to question it, but if it is like Zander's at .47, you want some other factor to be sure. Of course when he passed out like that, we'd probably want to treat him, at least with beta blockers. Even having it, sudden death isn't necessarily likely, but death is death. Can't take a chance with that when taking some pills is all you have to do. If that weren't the case, if the worst possible thing was only dizziness or something, we could let it go for most people who didn't have symptoms."
"Is it somehow not as bad a case of it with a lower measurement? Then your heart's timing isn't as badly off."
"I don't think we look at it that way. Maybe a little off and as bad as way off when it comes to the chances of missing a beat and then going into this really dangerous state of ventricular fibrillation. Probably there have never been enough people known to have this condition to have a study that would be able to account for that."
Cameron walked off, frowning.
What the hell did it matter whether Hayward or his father had Long Q-T Syndrome? What the hell did it matter whether Hayward's father had died or how?
Then he remembered the paternity test in the chart.
It couldn't be. Donna was just not the type. But he began to try to fix in his mind exactly what years he and Donna had known Hayward in Florida.
He went back into the room. Alexander was still asleep.
Cameron grabbed the chart and went out with it.