She always comes in a puffy vest. Even in the summer, she wears it.

“Your office gets so cold,” she giggles in complaint.

I tell her I am sorry I am late. She says I am not, but I apologize every time because one time I was, and I never want her to remember.

She has lost weight and is thin. She lives alone in independent living, but “I still wash my own floors,” she declares. “I have a bucket and a rag, and I do them all as well as the blinds. I’m getting slower, but I do them. Others hire people. I do mine,” she swears.

“They should hire you,” I post the ad, and she giggles a don’t-be-silly back.

“Did you write your book yet?” she inquires when my back is away from her typing. Something about her asking is like a tsunami of realization ending in an eagle’s eye tracking and a slurp of a thick and perfectly comforting vanilla milkshake. Something of knowing she had decided at 87 to drive across the country to take her great-grandkids to Six Flags by herself and drag them on a roller coaster with her makes me so proud she might ask me about MY guts. Something about her 92 now and wearing rouge lipstick and a perfect heart necklace, I move to listen to her heart of hearts on a February 3 makes me mentally scurry and scour the internet for my writings to see if AI could read everything I have ever written and write a story no one could tell was not written by me but sounded like me.

Could AI take hold of medicine and humanity and
cease in one week to invite and challenge the cathartic growth of writing?

Could I die never written my book, but my book being written by someTHING, assuming everything it found out about me out there to assume my voice? So many things can kill humanity, but the replaced artist digitized and plagiarized will be the furious death of cleaning our own floors on our frail hands and knees… and the blinds too.

Could AI know to apologize for a lateness that never happened to wall off the betrayal of one that did happen a decade ago?

Could AI know to touch a heart pendant and move it away to listen for the true beats that inspired the gift of love? Would it cheapen the epiphany that gold and stone are forever, but the beats and winding down on a little loyal lady laughing while warm in her thoughtfully selected puffy jacket will one day cease to come in to see me?

Would I read everything with suspicion and watch the world grow more hollowed out and stupid as young people never write for themselves nor subject themselves to the rigor of edits and the crucible of red ink, negating their lesser voices to unearth the stronger one rising from knees scrubbing floors they call theirs? In a week’s time, youth stops waiting for its future, stops allowing it to unfold, having already decided the future is already written for them easily by AI. “It’s all been said,” they assume.

Somewhere is a capable young woman wanting to learn to derive the equations of quantum physics to marry it to music and make a quantum leap to something wholly human and extraordinarily brilliant, for the chasm it should not have crossed, having no graft point. She dies a little and tries less, the time-consuming errors, because she heard AI solves her problem yesterday in minutes.

“Oh,” she ponders, “the floors are clean,” and schleps away the sloshy bucket and hangs a dry rag.

My lovely patient is waiting for my answer as I return to the room outside my flurry and fuss. I roll my chair over to face her and tear up.

“Not yet,” I confess, “but I’m going to, and I’m going to find a way to talk about you and say how you made it happen when everything threatened to steal the moment away from me. I was thinking the book could write itself these days, but then what of you? How would AI know of you, so exquisite a person whom I have adored and admired and who has invited me to care for her?” I share my realization, and she blushed with a lover’s joy.

I love medicine. I love being a physician. Artificial intelligence will never take my love or lovers. Not even close. Come find me, AI. Come, scour the internet. You will always be my vague shadow at dusk, and I your alluring master and muse, barely unraveled but fully unattainable. ☤

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Dr Irene Landaw is a graduate of the High School of Music and Art, SUNY at Purchase (BA), and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons(MD).

She retired from Pediatric primary care at Kaiser Permanente in 2017, where she served as Immunization Champion and Chief of Physician Well-being.

She continues to serve on the Wellbeing Advisory Committee of her county medical society.

Dr Landaw trains medical teams in communication techniques around HPV vaccination for the American Cancer Society.

She is enjoying her retirement from clinical medicine by nurturing her creative side with her trusted canine companion by her side.

She is an avid indoor and outdoor gardener, an ardent iPhone photographer, and she also creates unique beaded jewelry (follow her on her Instagram @Gemweaver, and for custom pieces email her at RWB_ISL@hotmail.com