24 Hours

“Anesthesiology Associates,” said a woman, her voice tinny in the cell phone speaker.

“Is this the answering service?” asked Karen.

“Yes ma’am. A-1 Answer-all. The clinic’s closed.”

“I’d like to leave a message for Dr. Jennings. This is his wife.”

“Go ahead.”

“We already miss you. Break a leg tonight. Love, Karen and Abby.”

“With sugar and kisses on top!” Abby shouted from the backseat.

“Did you get that last part?” asked Karen.

“With sugar and kisses on top,” repeated the bored voice.

“Thank you.”

Karen hit END and looked at her rearview mirror, which was adjusted so that she could see Abby’s face.

“Daddy loves getting messages from us,” Abby said, smiling.

“He sure does, honey.”

Fifty miles south of Jackson, Will settled the Baron in at eight thousand feet. Below him lay a puffy white carpet of cumulus clouds, before him a sky as blue as an Arctic lake. Visibility was unlimited. As he bent his wrist to check his primary GPS unit, a burning current of pain shot up the radial nerve in his right arm. It was worse than he’d admitted to Karen, and she’d known it. She didn’t miss anything. The truth was, she didn’t want him flying anymore. A month ago, she’d threatened to tell the FAA that he was “cheating” to pass his flight physicals. He didn’t think she would, but he couldn’t be sure. If she thought Will’s arthritis put him-and thus the family-at risk while flying, she wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever she had to do to stop him.

If she did, Will wasn’t sure he could handle it. Even the thought of being grounded put him in a black mood. Flying was more than recreation for him. It was a physical expression of how far he had come in life, a symbol of all he had attained, and of the lifestyle he had created for his family. His father could never have dreamed of owning a three-hundred-thousand-dollar airplane. Tom Jennings had never even ridden in an airplane. His son had paid cash for one.

But for Will the money was not the important thing. It was what the money could buy. Security. He had learned that lesson a thousand times growing up: money was an insulator, like armor. It protected people who had it from the everyday problems that besieged and even destroyed others. And yet, it did not make you invulnerable. His arthritis had taught him that. Other lessons followed.

In 1986, he graduated from LSU medical school and began an obstetrics residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. It was there that he met a surgical nurse with stunning green eyes, strawberry-blond hair, and a reputation for refusing dates with physicians or medical students. After three months of patience and charm, Will persuaded Karen to meet him for lunch, far from the hospital. There he discovered that the cause of her dating policy was simple: she’d seen too many nurses put medical students through school only to be cast aside later, and others caught in messy triangles with married doctors and their wives. In spite of her policy, she dated Will for the next two years-first secretly, then openly-and after a yearlong engagement, they married. Will entered private practice with a Jackson OB/GYN group the day after his honeymoon, and their adult life together began like a storybook.

But during the second year of his practice, he began experiencing pain in his hands, feet, and lower back. He tried to ignore it, but soon the pain was interfering with his work, and he went to see a friend in the rheumatology department. A week later he was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, a severe, often crippling disease. Continuing as an obstetrician was impossible, so he began to investigate less physically rigorous fields like dermatology and radiology. His old college roommate suggested anesthesiology-his own specialty-a three-year program if the university would credit Will’s OB experience and let him skip the internship year. It did, and in 1993, he began his anesthesiology residency at UMC in Jackson.

The same month, Karen quit her nursing job and enrolled at nearby Millsaps College for twenty-two hours of basic sciences in the premed program. Karen had always felt she aimed too low with nursing-and Will agreed-but her decision stunned him. It meant they would have to put off having children for several more years, and it would also force them to take on more debt than Will felt comfortable with. But he wanted Karen to be happy. While he trained for his new speciality and learned to deal with the pain of his disease, she racked up four semesters of perfect grades and scored in the ninety-sixth percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test. Will was as proud as he was surprised, and Karen was luminous with happiness. It almost seemed as though Will’s disease had been a gift.