A Clean Bill of Health

Don Ernesto Fuentes had come to Toronto to see his granddaughter, to escape the Santiago winter and, as his daughter Carolina put it, to have a proper rest. He was seventy-four, a retired accountant who still balanced his checkbook to the cent, and he had never had a serious illness in his life. Within a week of arriving, he was quite certain he was dying.

The trouble began with a mild cough and a tablet. Carolina had set it up for him so that he could read the Chilean newspapers, but Don Ernesto, who had time on his hands and a suspicious nature, soon discovered that the internet would answer any question about the human body, and that the answers were nearly always alarming. A cough, he learned, could be a cold. It could also be one of forty-three other conditions, several of which had Latin names and one of which was named after a Swiss doctor. By Thursday he had narrowed it down to the Swiss one.

"Papa, you have a cold," Carolina said, for the fourth time. "You were on a plane for eleven hours." "A cold does not make your ankles swell," said Don Ernesto darkly. "A cold does not give you this feeling here." He pressed a hand to his chest, somewhere in the general region of his heart, or possibly his lunch. Carolina, who worked long hours at a bank and had no patience left for medical research, booked him an appointment with her family doctor and asked her daughter, Sofia, to go with him.

Sofia was twelve and fully bilingual, a skill she found useful mainly for winning arguments. She had been warned. "Grandpa's English is good," her mother told her, "but when he's nervous it goes a bit strange. Just help him." So Sofia sat beside her grandfather in the waiting room, reading a leaflet about flu shots, while he rehearsed his symptoms under his breath in a mixture of both languages.

Dr. Adeyemi was a calm woman with reading glasses on a chain and the manner of someone who had heard everything at least twice. "So, Mr. Fuentes," she said, "what brings you in today?" Don Ernesto took a deep breath. "I am very constipated," he announced, "and I think I have a rare disease." The doctor's eyebrows rose a fraction. Sofia put a hand on his arm. "He means he has a cold," she said quickly. "In Spanish, constipado means you've got a blocked nose. It's not the same thing." Dr. Adeyemi made a note and, to her credit, did not laugh. "It's a very common mix-up," she said. "Last month a patient told me she was terribly embarrassed, and it took us ten minutes to work out that she was pregnant."

They went through the symptoms one by one. The swollen ankles, it emerged, had appeared after the long flight and had already gone down. The feeling in his chest came, on closer questioning, mostly after Carolina's spicy chicken. The cough was dry, getting better, and worse at night. Dr. Adeyemi listened to his chest, took his blood pressure and looked in his ears, while Sofia translated the parts that needed translating, which were fewer than her grandfather expected. "And this Swiss disease," the doctor asked at last. "What made you think of that?" Don Ernesto showed her the tablet. She read the page with polite interest. "I see," she said. "Well, it's extremely rare. I've never seen a case, and I'd be very surprised if you were my first."

Sofia noticed something then. The doctor never once said "you definitely don't have it". She said things like "it's very unlikely", "I don't think we need to worry about that" and "it's probably just a virus, but come back if it isn't better in a week". Her grandfather looked unsatisfied, as though he had been sold half a product. Sofia leaned over and explained in Spanish that doctors here chose their words carefully, not because they were hiding something, but because they would not promise what nobody could honestly promise. "She's saying you're fine," she whispered. "In doctor language."

Then Don Ernesto said what had really been worrying him. He spoke quietly, in Spanish, and Sofia hesitated before she translated it. His own father had died of a heart attack at seventy-five. "He's afraid he's next," she said. Dr. Adeyemi put down her pen and talked to him for another ten minutes, longer than the appointment allowed: about his blood pressure, which was perfectly good for his age, about the tests his doctor in Santiago could arrange when he got home, and about the difference between a family history and a fate. Sofia translated every word, and some of the pauses.

On the way out, Don Ernesto stopped at the reception desk. "I have," he said carefully, "a clean bill of health?" The receptionist smiled. "Sounds like it." He was delighted with the phrase and used it for the rest of his visit: at dinner, on the phone to Santiago and once, memorably, to a man selling hot dogs. The tablet, Carolina noticed, now spent most evenings in a drawer. Sofia had taught him to use it for something better: video calls with his old friends in Chile, who all wanted to hear about the Swiss disease he had so narrowly escaped.