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

“Your office gets so cold,” she giggles a 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 perfect vanilla milkshake. Something about 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 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 to never have written my book but my book being written by something assuming everything it found of 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 needs… and the blinds too.

Could AI know to apologize for a lateness that never happens to wall off the betrayal one that did 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 is forever but the beats and winding down on a little loyal lady laughing while warm in her thoughtfully selected puffy jacket?

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 strong one on knees scrubbing floors they call theirs, waiting in a future they never allowed to be birthed?

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 for she hears AI solves her problem yesterdays ago 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 head in a flurry and fuss. I roll over to face her and tear up.

“Not yet. 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 who I have adored and admired and who has invited me to care for her?” I share my realization and she blushed 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.