My nurse wiped my brow with a handkerchief. These kinds of operations required my full focus, and I couldn’t break the sterile field just because I was starting to perspire. After nearly fifteen grueling minutes, we were finally approaching the crucial point, and my patient needed my complete attention.

The patient lying on the table was Madison Smith, although I had built enough of a rapport with her over the past few weeks to know that she preferred “Maddie.” She was shaping up to be one of my most challenging cases so far, but I was hopeful that this operation could allow her a complete recovery.

I took a half-step back from the table, then indicated the patient’s torso with a jerk of my head.

“Nurse, clamps.”

“Yes doctor, clamps.”

I took a second to admire my nurse’s appearance as she stepped forward into my field of view. In the operating theatre, I made her dress for practicality rather than titillation, but Candee was a woman who could titillate under virtually any conditions. I’d had her stock up on scrubs so that she could maintain some veneer of professionalism, but she’d purchased them two sizes two small for her voluptuous frame. Just so that “her doctor had some eye Candee while he was hard at work helping so many women.”

Not very professional, if you asked me.

But it was hard to fault the way that she looked in her scrubs. The plunging neckline showed off her ample assets, and she’d taken a scalpel to her pants until they stopped at mid-thigh. As she bent at the waist over the operating table, they perfectly outlined her heart-shaped butt. She swayed from side to side as she worked, hoping to entice me into a slap or a pinch, but I’d been supervising her for long enough that I was wise to her tricks.

“Focus on your work, nurse. Or Miss Jacobson won’t be the only staff member wearing a chastity belt.”

Cora Jacobson was one of our more intransigent patients. Her promising career as a lingerie model had been derailed by a particularly bad bout of CMS – or compulsive masturbation syndrome, for the laymen among you. She had been sneaking off to restrooms and jilling herself silly a dozen times a day and was starting to get a reputation in her industry as “unreliable.” Desperate to salvage her career, she’d begged for my help in curing her.

When she first walked into the office, I understood why Cora had enjoyed such success as a model; she was a vision to behold. Her ash-blonde hair made the most charming contrast with her sun-kissed skin, and she was the perfect blend of willowy and curvaceous. The green sundress that she wore on our first visit hugged her hips and showed off an impressive vista of tanned cleavage.

I like to think I give all of my patients my full attention, but I decided right there that I would make every effort to help her recover her life, her career, and her self-respect, no matter how invasive the procedures or therapies were.

I first tried a simple dose of negative reinforcement. Pairing a pleasurable sensation (like frigging herself silly) with an unpleasant or disgusting one was a time-honored way to link the two together in her brain, and to break the cycle of positive feedback that had made her such a shameless little mastubatrix.

I’d sat her down in my office and told her that, going forward, she would engage in certain “rituals”, both before and after every bout of self-pleasure. Before she was allowed to touch herself, I wanted her to say, out loud, my medical assessment of her. Then, once she was finished, she would be required to clean off her own juices by sucking them from her fingers. My hope was that this combination of shame and disgust would link masturbation in her brain with sufficiently unpleasant stimuli that she would be able to exercise more self-control in the future.

As I explained these requirements, she seemed skeptical at first. But all I had to do was carefully explain that if she wanted to get her glamorous (and lucrative!) modeling career back, these measures were necessary. I could tell that she was desperate to reclaim her life, so she solemnly promised to follow my instructions, no matter what.

She looked so earnest, nodding her head and promising to implement my guidance, that I couldn’t resist having a little fun with her. I told her to sit in my waiting room and wait for my staff to finish processing her discharge papers. I then discreetly phoned Candee to let her stew in the waiting room for as long as it took. I watched her through one of the high-definition cameras that my predecessor had installed all over the office, hoping against hope that Cora would be able to rise above her baser impulses.

After twenty minutes, she started to gently rock back and forth on her plastic seat, fidgeting with her phone and tapping her foot.

After a half-hour, she was biting her lip and starting to idly trace circles around her nipple with one hand; it was clear she was about to succumb to temptation and engage in another one of her “episodes.”  

At this point, there was quite the audience built up in the increasingly-full waiting room. My nurse had anticipated that I would be enjoying watching Cora squirm and hadn’t called any of the other patients back to the exam rooms so that I wouldn’t have to divide my focus. How thoughtful of her; I really needed to get around to giving her a raise.

Finally, after an agonizing forty-three minute wait, Cora couldn’t stand it anymore. She slumped down in her seat, hooking one leg over the chair’s plastic armrest and hiking up her dress with one hand, baring her smooth pussy to the rest of the room.

I noted, with some surprise, that she wasn’t wearing underwear. I suppose that it was understandable, given her condition. I could imagine that any kind of impediment to masturbation had quickly been discarded as an unacceptable hindrance. Still, this seemed like a bad-faith way to dress herself, given her choice of profession! How could you trust a lingerie model to advertise products that she didn’t even use in her daily life? Physician, heal thyself!

Cora was now fully exposed to the other women in the waiting room, who were scrupulously avoiding eye contact. These kinds of displays were not wholly unusual in my practice; many of my patients couldn’t avoid exhibiting some of the behavioral symptoms of their conditions, and they tried to respect each other’s dignity where possible. Still, this was brazen, even by my clinic’s standards.

I could tell that she wanted to start fingering herself, but I had explicitly forbade her from doing so unless she first vocalized my official diagnosis of her, loud enough for everyone in earshot to hear. This was the first test of her treatment; would she be able to restrain herself from touching herself if she knew that public humiliation was the guaranteed outcome? I held my breath, rooting for her to succeed.

She cleared her throat, awkwardly. With an uncomfortable look around the room, she announced in a wavering voice,

“I’m a needy little slut who can’t stop playing with myself.”

At this, several of the other women in the room suppressed a giggle. Public masturbation was one thing (indeed, I had prescribed that very activity to some of my patients as a coping mechanism to deal with their overactive libidos) but proclaiming your intentions beforehand? That was simply not done.

With a gasp of pleasure, Cora starting frantically rubbing at herself, one hand fingering herself with such vigor that I was slightly concerned about chafing. The other hand snaked up her torso to grab one of her breasts and twist her nipple through her dress. After less than a minute, she arched her back, let out a low moan, and collapsed back into her seat, gingerly withdrawing her fingers from herself with an audible “plop” and holding them up in front of her face.

Her index and middle fingers glistened with her own juices and I could tell that she was uncomfortable with taking part in yet another of her degrading little “rituals” in public. But she drew in a ragged breath and popped the two fingers in her mouth up to the knuckle, closing her eyes as she gently sucked.

(On a side note, the audio capture and fidelity on the microphones installed throughout the office was incredible. I was starting to appreciate the foresight of my predecessor in installing such high-definition equipment. Between the 4k resolution cameras and the automatic cloud storage, I judged the entire setup money well-spent.)

I was a little disappointed in Cora’s wantonness, but I hadn’t really expected that my treatment would work in the very first instance; curing a deeply-rooted disease like CMS might take some time. I texted Candee to discharge Cora from the waiting room (although God knows Cora had already left plenty of discharge behind on my waiting room chair.)

Candee had watched the entire incident from behind the reception desk with a knowing smirk on her lips. When she called Cora up to give her the paperwork, she managed to be upbeat, yet reproachful.

“We’ll see you back here next month, Miss Richardson. Try not to abuse that greedy pussy of yours between now and then!”

Shamefaced, with her two fingers still in her mouth, Cora nodded and walked out.

I’ll admit that I didn’t give Cora much thought over the intervening weeks; I had a few challenging patients come up and had to give their cases considerable time and effort. Nonetheless, when Cora came back into my office, I hoped to hear some good news about her condition being ameliorated.

The news was decidedly more mixed. At first, she had been successfully deterred from self-abuse by the shame of having to enact her rituals in public. Unfortunately, it seemed that my patient had quite the humiliation kink, and that having to announce her depravities to my waiting room had instead created an even stronger positive feedback loop between self-abuse and pleasurable stimuli in her mind.

Luckily, she had enough of a self-preservation instinct to keep her hands to herself in public. Instead, over the past month, she had virtually withdrawn from the world, resorting to Doordashing food and other necessities to her apartment in between frenetic masturbation sessions, only stopping for long enough to fall into a fitful slumber plagued by erotic dreams.

Her seclusion had come with several consequences: she had no-showed for several important photoshoots, her manager was no longer returning her calls, and her banking account was on the verge of being overdrawn. In short, she was in considerably more dire straits than when she first arrived at my office.

A lesser doctor might have felt some self-doubt at this point. After all, I’d taken someone with a manageable, if embarrassing, condition and turned them into a pleasure-addled recluse.

But in these kinds of complicated cases, it was rare to diagnose and treat a patient correctly on the first try. After all, it was called practicing medicine for a reason! Only with repeated effort could I hope to give this young lady the treatment that she so desperately needed.

My second hypothesis was that she was simply sexually inexperienced. Her lack of familiarity with intercourse had left her sex-starved, reliant on masturbation to make up for her unsatisfactory sex life. In a fit of altruism, I’d cleared my afternoons and tried to simply “fuck the femgooner out of her.” I’d booked her into the clinic for a 2pm appointment every business day for a week straight. We’d tried her therapy in every position I could think of; pinned against the wall, on the break room couch, and bent over my examination table.

The last one was, admittedly, my favorite. There was just something about hearing her hands clench and crinkle the butcher paper with every thrust that made me proud that I was using my talents as a healer.

(Obviously I had Candee lick up any wet spots that we had left afterward and reset the room; I was running a medical practice, not a bordello, and proper sanitation was paramount.)

I was worried about Cora regressing over the weekend, so I even stopped by her apartment on Saturday to fuck her brains out in her own bed. Who says doctors never make house calls anymore?

As I dressed myself after driving her to her third screaming orgasm, I told her that I expected to see her in my office the following Monday and was expecting to hear another success story.

Instead, she had stepped into the clinic and burst into tears. Apparently, she had spent her entire Sunday lying in bed, feverishly touching herself to memories of our escapades over the past week. I’d made the problem dramatically worse, instead of better; a rare failure of my medical judgement.

I had to admit that more radical measures were necessary. I informed Miss Jacobson that, going forward, she would be wearing a chastity belt that would limit her ability to engage in that kind of “self-pollution.” There were several locking models that could be used to keep even the most dedicated female onanist safe from themselves; I would maintain the key for her and unlock her when she saw fit.

She’d protested at first, of course. Her entire motivation for coming to see me was to save her career; how could she possibly continue to model lingerie if she was wearing a bulky stainless steel chastity belt? She started to get herself worked into quite a lather, talking about how her career would be ruined.

Female hysteria is never pleasant to witness, and it must be dealt with appropriately. I stepped forward and put my hand on her cheek, slipping my thumb into her mouth and letting her suck to soothe herself. After a few moments, after her complaints had turned to throaty murmurs, I spoke to her.

“Cora, I’m the only one who will decide what treatment you need. This isn’t the kind of thing where you get a vote. But if you’re really worried about your career, I’ll see if there’s something that I can do. Would that make you happy?”

In my judgement, the chastity belt was the only feasible solution going forward; the poor girl was simply incorrigible. Or in-Cora-gible, if you’ll pardon the pun. If left to her own devices, excessive masturbation would continue to strengthen the positive feedback loop until she ended as a pleasure-addicted fuckpuppet, scarcely able to function.

Also, maybe she would go blind or something? I vaguely remembered hearing that masturbation caused that. But, then again, my eyesight survived my teenage years, so that couldn’t be totally accurate. I might need to check the latest literature on the subject. 

In any event, Cora had to be locked away from touching herself for her own good, and the only ones who could be trusted to maintain the key would be me or my staff. She didn’t have any close family or friends, and even if she did, there was always the risk that she could coax them into unlocking her for long enough to relapse. Better for everyone if a reliable and impartial medical professional kept the key.

That meant she would need to check into the clinic several times a day to be unlocked for daily necessities like personal hygiene. Under strict supervision of a nurse, of course. It would hardly do for her to be able to engage in some self-dalliance while she was unlocked for showering, so I put a note in her file to have Candee supervise her bathroom routines going forward.

This was a very intrusive form of therapy that required an enormous time commitment. Stopping by my office three or four times a day was hardly feasible in the long term, and what was the silly bint supposed to do outside of business hours or over the weekends? No, this called for an inpatient approach.

I told Cora that her repeated failures at sticking to her treatment regimen meant that her previous career was no longer a viable option. In fact, in my medical judgement, she was no longer capable of managing her own affairs at all. Fortunately, I had the perfect solution.

Starting tomorrow, she was going to be my new receptionist!

My practice was booming, and I was continuing to treat complicated cases (like the patient currently on my operating table) that required Nurse Candee as a second pair of hands. It was essential that someone be available at the front desk to manage intake and who could be better than our very own success story? If patients had any concerns about the efficacy of my methods, Cora could explain how I had helped to free her from her own worst impulses, when other physicians would have given her up as a hopeless case. On my recommendation, she was going to break her lease and put her belongings into storage before reporting back to my clinic.

She balked at the suggestion that she uproot her life and take a job as my receptionist. I was starting to be annoyed at her stubbornness, in all honesty. A little bit of spirited defiance was well and good in a woman, but I expected them to show the appropriate level of deference to my medical expertise.

“If I don’t have an apartment, then where will I, uh, sleep, doctor?”

I waved away her concerns.

“I can’t be expected to manage every minor detail of your care, Cora! That’s why God invented nurses, for trivialities just like this! Ask Candee where she sleeps when she’s not working – I’m sure she has a cot stashed somewhere around this office!”

“Okay, and you’ll, like, pay me and stuff while I’m working for you?”

The office finances were admittedly tight after I withdrew some funds for a clinically indicated down payment on a medically necessary Ferrari.

“In the short term, Cora, you’ll be working for room and board.”

I held up my hands to forestall her protests.

“I know, I know, it’s a tough sell. And I expect a bright and chipper smile greeting every one of our patients when they walk through our clinic doors. I’m sure that level of motivation can be tough to sustain without a competitive salary package. But I’ve come up with an unmatched employee incentive program. For every ten gold stars that you earn, I’ll give you an entire hour out of your belt, to engage in the most depraved and carnal self-exploration that you can imagine. Sound fair?”

“And I get one of those gold stars whenever I inprocess a patient, or at the end of every workday, or…?”

I didn’t let my smile waver.

“I’ll give them out to you whenever you sufficiently impress me.”

For some reason, that didn’t seem to mollify her in the slightest. Well, if she didn’t want to accept my medical and professional advice, that was her right.

“I don’t want you to think that I’m browbeating you into this! You’re welcome to decline this job offer, and we’ll still get you fitted for a chastity belt and manage your care going forward. That part is non-negotiable, I’m afraid.”

I reached out and took her hand in mine, trying to channel my most soothing and reassuring voice.

“But even if you don’t take this receptionist job, I’m sure we can look at your progress and see about giving you some time out of your belt in, say, five or ten years. You wouldn’t mind holding out that long, would you?”

Her brief look of horror was quickly replaced with an eager smile. A bit forced, in my opinion, but I’m sure she would seem more natural with time.

“When do I start, doctor?”

After adding Cora to the team, Candee seemed to be in better spirits. With a full-time receptionist, Candee didn’t have to run back and forth to the waiting room to check patients in, and could focus on supporting her doctor in any way I required. I also think that she enjoyed having a subordinate again, although I’m not sure Cora was quite as grateful for her supervision.

With Candee’s mood buoyed, I took a risk and asked her what exactly she had done to make the “consultant” mad the last time that he had seen her. She seemed like she was about to shut down again, but I managed to snap her out of it.

“Focus, nurse. It could be important to my practice. I know it was difficult, but I trust that you’ve learned from your mistakes. Just tell me what you did that made the consultant so unhappy.”

Her eyes locked on mine.

“Yes, doctor.”

She took a deep breath, steadying herself against the wall with one hand and wincing, like the memory of having angered a man was causing physical pain to her. For all I knew, maybe it was.

“I… I should have known better than to waste his valuable time. He was getting ready to leave the clinic for urgent travel. I was scared. How was I supposed to run a big operation like this? I’m just a dumb, ditzy, drippy nurse! I asked him if he had any other instructions, in case he was delayed getting back. He slapped me then, for asking stupid questions.”

She held a palm to her cheek, as if remembering the blow.

“But he must have thought it was funny I asked, because he turned around in the doorway before he left and gave me one final command.”

She took on a dreamy, far-off look in her face as she continued. “He told me, ‘Tell you what, sweetcheeks. If I’m not back in a month, you can hand this place over to the first man who walks in.’”

She smiled, then.

“And the first man to walk into the clinic was you, doctor!”

She ran a flirtatious finger down my chest.

“When I came into the waiting room and saw you on the floor, I knew that you were just the big, strong man to take over and help show your naughty little nurse how to service our patients. And obviously, if you were going to oversee a medical practice, you had to be a doctor. Does that make sense, doctor?”

------------------------------------------------------------

I shook my head to bring myself back to the present. There was no use thinking about the past when I needed to be focused on our current patient.

“Nurse, clamps.”

Candee glanced at me.

“I’ve already applied the clamps to our patient, doctor. See?”

She gestured to the nude girl restrained on our operating table. Maddie Smith, eighteen-year-old cheer captain. One of our tougher cases, but I was confident that this procedure had the best chance of giving her a normal life.

True to Candee’s words, there were a pair of steel alligator clips already attached to her nipples. The chain running between them shook gently as she writhed on the table, moaning in helpless arousal. Still, I didn’t want Candee to know that I’d lost my place while I was daydreaming about another one of our patients. I gestured impatiently towards the girl’s nipples.

“If I say ‘clamps’ when they’re already affixed, then obviously I mean that you should take them off and reattach them. I thought you said you were a professional?”

Candee’s eyes were downcast and she looked suitably abashed.

“Yes doctor. Sorry doctor.”

“Never mind. Let’s try that again. Nurse, clamps.”

“Yes doctor. Clamps.”

Our patient squealed as Candee took the clips off her tits just long enough to allow the blood to rush back in before reattaching them, the ends biting into her tits.

“Nurse, suction.”

“Suction, doctor.”

Candee knelt between the patients’ legs, and pressed her lips against the woman’s clitoris, her hollow cheeks and moving jaw showing that she was providing as much stimulation as possible.

I was working on a medical theory that persistent and undesired sexual fantasies could be cured through, essentially, a “female factory reset.” With careful coordination and exploration of a given patient’s erogenous zones, we could force a woman to undergo an orgasm so intense that it would permanently reshape her neural pathways, allowing her libido to settle on another target instead.

That theory was being tested for the first time on Miss Maddie Smith, our latest patient. Despite being a virgin, she suffered from a recurring sexual fantasy that was causing her some distress. After a thorough questionnaire about her masturbation history and some careful testing of her response to various sexual stimuli, I felt prepared to proceed with the operation.

Candee had been providing suction for almost three minutes now, and I could tell that Maddie was nearing a climax. I grabbed my nurse by the ponytail, pulling her mouth away from Maddie’s pussy. A single thread of drool hung between Candee’s lips and our patient as Maddie desperately humped her shaved cunt at the air, trying to get more stimulation and begging me to use her.

“Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease fuckmefuckmefuckmefuckmefuckme”

I nodded. Her language was atrophying, likely due to her body prioritizing blood to her cunt over her brain. She was in a perfect receptive state. Now was the critical moment. I stood between her parted legs.

As Maddie continued to incoherently beg to be penetrated, I stepped forward. The chain running between her breasts had fallen slack, pooling around her flat stomach. I picked it up in one hand and tugged gently, getting her attention.

“Maddie, I need you to focus on me. Look directly at me, now.”

She opened her eyes for the first time since we’d laid her down on the table. She took in me, the blonde bombshell standing at my side, and the operating room that she was about to lose her virginity in. As she glanced down at herself, I saw her eyes widen at her own desperately needy body, breasts heaving and cunt slick with her own juices.

Inwardly, I cheered. Any of those things would make an excellent trigger for her libido to latch onto. Now, all that I needed to do was complete the operation.

I grabbed her thighs and buried my entire length in her virginal cunt. Maddie squeezed her eyes shut again and arched her back, nearly rising from the operating table in a frenzy of ecstasy, but I managed to hook her heels over my shoulders to keep her stable. As she thrashed and moaned, I started to pump in and out of her, faster and faster as her throaty begging became ever-more incomprehensible.

“Nurse, go and make out with the patient. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

That part was, admittedly, not strictly medically indicated. But her constant pleading babble was starting to grate on me. Really, Maddie should be glad that her first kiss was with such a caring medical professional.

After a few minutes, I judged that her brain had virtually dissolved into girlsoup and she was ready to be creampied. I kept a tight grip on her nipple clamps, keeping the chain taut as I emptied myself into her pussy.

The room fell silent, with no sound except for our ragged breathing and the steady beep…beep…beep of the monitor that I’d had Candy set up. For the ambience, you know?

I stood there, still inside her, as I panted and gradually withdrew myself. If I was right, this kind of sustained orgasm should have blasted every last unwanted thought right out of her head, effectuating a complete cure of her mental issues.

Candee was still making out with the patient, so I cleared my throat.

“Candee, if you don’t mind…”

She straightened up immediately, breaking their liplock with a loud pop.

“Yes doctor? Do you need me to… clean her up? Or can I help get you ready for round two?”

I waved my hand.

“No need for any of that, nurse. Between your hard work and my medical expertise, I’m fairly confident that we gave this patient the strongest orgasm her fragile female mind could handle. Any stronger, and we might have wiped her language cortex. You can still talk, right Maddie?”

Our patient managed to prop herself up on her elbows and nodded slowly.

“Mmmmmm-hmmmmmm.”

“Perfect. Nurse Candy, the patient’s legs may be a little wobbly, but you can help support her to the recovery room. I’ll be in shortly to talk with her.”

Candee delicately lifted Maddie off the table before throwing the girl’s arm around her shoulder. The two of them hobbled away through the operating room doors, where I took a moment to admire Maddie’s shapely ass through her patient gown.

I wasn’t normally a sentimental man, but I felt my heart stirring at the teenager’s situation. Maddie was only a high-school senior, and her father had recently passed away. Her mother and her were now alone in the world, and the poor girl was struggling with unwanted sexual fantasies to boot.

I hoped that my treatment would provide some solace, and that her mother and her could continue rebuilding their life.

After I changed out of my scrubs and took a shower, I walked back to the recovery room. Maddie was lucid already and talking to Candee. The two of them share an awkward glance as I walk in.

“Well, Maddie? Did the treatment work, or are you still dealing with unwanted sexual fantasies?”

Maddie breaks the silence first.

“I’m sorry doctor, I know your treatment was flawless! I think there’s just something wrong with me – I must be broken. I just have these disgusting recurring desires of… of… I can’t even bear to say it!”

I stroke her cheek, feeling a stirring of admiration in my chest. This girl was so strong, coping with such immense personal tragedy as well as her medical issues. I just wish that I could do more to help her.

“Go on, sweetie. What have you been thinking about?”

“I keep imagining that my mother gets re-married to another man. And I think about my stepfather and I… having sex!”

Her eyes start to well with tears.

“I know that it’s wrong, but I just can’t help myself! No matter what I do, it all seems to come back to this… repulsive fantasy of mine! When I shower, it seems pointless, knowing that I’ll never have a stepfather who can help soap me up. I can barely motivate myself to get dressed knowing that I’ll never see my underwear discarded on the floor of my bedroom as my stepdaddy pounds my cunt in my childhood bed. And when I’m drifting off to sleep at night, I… I…”

She trailed off.

“Go on, Maddie.”

In moments like this, I truly feel the immense weight of my chosen profession. Still, though I might not be able to cure every one of my patients, I owed it to this young girl to lend her a kind ear.

She starts talking again, faster and with more energy. “I... I... I fantasize that my new stepdaddy uses my tight teen body in every way imaginable! That he fucks my brains out side-by-side with my mother until he’s broken us down into a couple of whorish slave-sisters.”

She buries her face in her hands and starts to cry.

“And the worst part is… I know it will never come true! What man would ever be willing to marry my mother, knowing what a disgusting slut of a daughter she raised?”

I stroke my chin, deep in thought. Then I call our front office number on my cell. Someone picks up instantly.

“Powers’ Women’s Health Clinic, how may I direct your call?”

I had previously told Cora that I was subtracting a star every time she let a phone call go to the second ring. Glad to see that had provided adequate motivation.  

“Cora, who is the emergency contact listed for Miss Maddie Smith?”

I heard her tap at the computer keyboard.

“Her mother, Stephanie Smith.”

“And is her mother a patient here?”

“She was previously a patient, but fell outside of our new intake guidelines, so we chose to refer her to another clinic. I can text you her patient file from her last appointment.”

I glance at the picture coming through to my phone. The family resemblance is immediately apparent from the picture on the screen. Stephanie Smith is a 36-year-old MILF with the same curly brown hair as her daughter, and I can tell who Maddie had inherited her looks from.

I turn back to Maddie, who is now looking at me with a mix of confusion and dawning hope.

“Cora, go ahead and have Stephanie come into the office later today.”

“Yes doctor. What should I tell her the issue is?”

I smile at Maddie, that plucky young girl who’s been through so much.

“Tell Stephanie… it’s about her daughter’s health.”