Attire: silks, caftans, soft comfy goddess stuff.” Tess had sent me an invitation I couldn't refuse. It began by defining goddess as “a woman of extraordinary beauty and charm, greatly admired or adored.” Tess fit that description perfectly, though I didn't fully realize it until more than a year after she first showed up in my office.
It all began on a summer afternoon, when the combination of aromatic blossoming trees, new platform sandals, and a margarita made Tess particularly susceptible to Ninth Avenue's potholes: a fall brought her to the nearest emergency department. Her x-ray film showed a through-and-through humerus fracture, but that paled in comparison to the mass hovering in a sliver of lung coincidentally captured at the film's edge. She was sent home with some pain pills, an orthopedics appointment, and the strong recommendation that she follow up with her internist about the “abnormal finding.”