Watercooler talk, Mitz was saying that she went to the dentist yesterday and that he was treating her as gingerly as possible because he knew what had happened. What had happened? We too wanted to know. He was a drunk—or maybe that was Joni's story. I had just read a Lucia Berlin story, I told them. The one with the drunk dentist swishing with Jim Beam and having his granddaughter pull his teeth. Dentists as drunks, I said. It turns out that when Mitz was 6, she had a cavity and an image-obsessed dentist with either an inadequate amount of Novocaine or not enough know-how in administering it. Anyway during the drilling it hurt her something like hell and she yelled, screamed even, for her mother. The image-conscious dentist began to panic, about his image probably. He put his hand up over her mouth, her nose, telling her to shut up. How with the times, we all thought. Sparking similar interest, that was when Joni said she had a doctor once who pinned her down to get her strep swab and was so aggressive in getting the strep swab that he broke his little stick on the back of her throat. She hasn’t been to a male doctor since. In an attempt to relate, I thought of my doctor experiences quickly and came up with nothing. Philly thought about it and said that the only doctor story he had was something that had happened with his second psychiatrist. What had happened? Towards the end of a session, and for narrative focus and unity I'm assuming this was their last session together, Dr. Comey (sp?) told Philly that he could no longer be his doctor because he had Alzheimer's and he was going back to Chapel Hill to be with his family and before things got too bad he was going to kill himself. Philly assured us that this was all spoken very eloquently in psych-ese. Did he tell this to all his patients? we asked. Should he be telling his patients? Did this nullify all your previous experiences, Philly? Erase all your hard work like a corrupt hard drive? How did this really make Philly feel? And, importantly, was this on your time, Philly? In other words, did he wait until the end of the session to begin talking about himself? Because if he didn't, no offense to the doc, it really wasn't Dr. Comey's (sp?) time to be talking about himself at all. In that case shouldn’t it have had a patient-focused angle? Did he make Philly pay for the session? Philly, how did you settle the finances? The tough questions kept rolling. Is telling everyone you're going to kill yourself and then disappearing relatively the same as actually killing yourself? Relatively—we are quick to qualify with the hypotheticals. Did he do it? Should we look him up and find out what happened? How about some closure? How old were you when this happened, Philly? Did you offer him advice? Surely if ever there was a time to offer your shrink advice, we say, this was it. Grab the butt of that gun, become the eye of the beholder. Funny how this story became our story isn’t it? This is a chance for a therapeutic breakthrough of a different and rare sort. Maybe Dr. Comey (sp?) was an even better doctor than we thought. There—had Philly considered that?