Doctor-Patient Confidentiality: Chapter Seventy-Two

That’s what he’d said.

A fucking tumor.

At first, I wasn’t sure I heard him right. I mean, I couldn’t have. But then, he came and sat down next to me, his eyes focused and slightly cautious, with a sort of concern showing through the depths of icy blue that I’d never seen before.

And then he handed me the brown folder.

I took it warily, opening it with trembling hands and a creased forehead, still trying to wrap my mind around what he’d just said. My eyes shot to what was inside, and I was met with a handful of stills; about four or five pictures of my insides taken during the endoscopy. They all showed varying angles of the same thing; the apparent tumor. It was this disgusting purplish color, like it got beaten to a pulp in a bar brawl. It looked weirdly swollen and lumpy, like some sort of defective, lopsided balloon that was inflated in some parts and flat in others. It actually looked angry. But most of all, it looked out of place. It clearly didn’t belong there. And from everything Frost was saying, he obviously concurred.