Page 1 of Guess Again

Madison, Wisconsin Thursday, May 22, 2025

ETHAN HALL HAD BEEN THE OLDEST STUDENT IN HIS MEDICAL school class.

He was thirty-six when he walked into gross anatomy lab during his first year of med school.

Today, he was a forty-five-year-old emergency medicine physician.

Although he was without the years of experience other physicians in their forties sported, Ethan was more than competent.

He had finished first in his class and could have gone into any specialty.

He chose emergency medicine because his previous occupation had conditioned him to chaos, and somewhere along the way bedlam became imprinted in his DNA.

Years earlier he was a special agent with Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation and in charge of investigating crimes against kids.

For a while it was satisfying to put away the subhumans who committed such atrocities.

But the job had taken a toll.

He saw too much violence directed at society’s most vulnerable. A “win”

in his old profession still left a kid dead, a family grieving, and a perp getting three meals a day and a warm pillow at night.

During the ten years that he worked for the DCI, he’d lost faith in the human race.

He fell so far adrift that he had started to lose touch with the human condition.

It had been a decade-long slippery slope and dangerous spiral he needed to escape before the void swallowed him whole.

He decided a career change was necessary to keep his sanity.

So, he put in his notice and applied to medical school.

Now, as an emergency room physician, he was able to help his patients before they died.

It was a refreshing change, and something his life desperately needed.

For the first time in many years, Ethan Hall was a happy man.

He pulled the curtain to the side of ER Room 3 and found his patient sitting in the bedside chair.

This was unusual.

Patients were typically lying in bed when he entered the room.

Also odd was that this patient was not wearing a hospital gown.

The thirty-eight-year-old male, according to the chart, sat in the chair wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.

Taken together with the man’s long blond hair that nearly reached his shoulders, he could have been on the cover of a surfing magazine.

Ethan smiled.

“I’m Dr. Hall.”

“Hey, Doc.

Christian Malone.”

“Are you the patient?”

“I am.

I just can’t do the whole gown and the bed thing.

I mean, unless something was tragically wrong with me.

Then it’s fine.

But otherwise, it just takes away my dignity and makes me feel like shit.”

“Fair enough,”

Ethan said, tapping on the computer keyboard to bring up the man’s file.

“You’re having abdominal pain?”

“I was.

Not anymore.

Listen, I don’t want to waste your time.

I had a nasty pain in my back, so I came in this morning.

Your nurse told me it was a kidney stone. She said the doctor ordered pain meds, shot me up with morphine, and hustled me down to have a CT scan. But just before she gave me the morphine, the pain went away. Like from a ten to a zero in a matter of seconds. She insisted on giving me the morphine anyway because she said the pain had subsided only because I had found a comfortable position. But the pain never came back.”

Ethan pulled up the CT scan on the computer and saw that his patient had a kidney stone sitting in his bladder, indicating that it had already made the painful trek through the ureter.

“Yeah, see? It passed into my bladder,”

the man said.

“You a doctor?”

Ethan asked.

“No, just a tech guy from California.”

“California? What are you doing in Madison?”

“I escaped Silicon Valley and live here now.”

“Welcome to the Midwest.

I’m assuming this isn’t your first kidney stone.”

“Nope.

I’ve had two others.

Hurts like hell until it gets to the bladder, then I pee it out a couple of days later.

I tried to tell the nurse, but she shot me up with morphine anyhow.

Gotta admit, the buzz is pretty phenomenal.”

Ethan smiled.

Christian Malone, the thirty-eight-year-old Silicon Valley transplant, suddenly sounded like a Californian.

“Did you drive yourself to the ER this morning?”

“Yes sir.”

Ethan tapped on the keyboard as he entered notes into the chart.

“I can’t let you drive after we gave you morphine.

We’ll have to keep you for a few hours before I can discharge you.”

“I’ll call an Uber.”

“I’d have to watch you climb in the car.

Otherwise the hospital would be liable for discharging you while you’re under the influence of a narcotic.”

“Come on, Doc.

I feel fine.”

“Morphine is like that.

One moment you’re good, the next you’re high as a kite.”

“Can you make an exception? I’ve been here for three hours already.”

Ethan checked his watch.

“You’re the last patient of my shift.

How about I buy you a cup of coffee? If you’re still feeling woozy, I’ll drive you home myself.”

“Sure thing, Doc.

As long as I can get the hell out of this room.”