Love Language – Sheldon Lee Compton
November 2, 2025
Even when the blood thinners made him colder, Colin kept taking them. Better a beating heart than a warm body.
First it was turning the heat on in summer. This resulted in the house resting at a temperature of about eighty-two degrees at all times. Visitors stopped coming. Then he bought several electric blankets, one for bed, one for the living room, and one kept in the bathroom.
He stopped showering because as soon as the warm water stopped, he might as well have been standing in a deep freezer. Bathing was cut out a short while after that. Being wet in general became a problem, because being wet, of course, brought the chill on even stronger. He told his colleagues it had been taking him several hours to warm up afterward.
There was no one moment when Colin let go of the idea that his freezing was only being caused by his blood pressure medication. The truth of it came slowly until fully realized, like a slow and sneaky belch.
The doctor had told him the bisoprolol would thin his blood and he might therefore become cold more easily. But he knew others who were on blood pressure medicine and they weren’t balled up in a ninety-degree house covered in heating blankets in mid-August.
Then came September. By the end of that month, and into October and continuing on through the winter, Colin never got warm. Had there been saunas in his area, he might have tried them. Maybe not. He’d be unsure what to do and likely scared if he went to one and still found himself freezing.
He felt silly for even thinking about something like that. But not more silly than he was cold. He decided to call the doctor for another appointment the next day.
“All I know is I’m cold all the time,” he told the doctor. “It’s as if I were truly frozen to near death.”
The doctor was a bright lady, quickly intelligent, and Colin respected her every word. When she spoke it was in a firm manner and direct, with more baritone than would be expected from such a tiny body.
“Of course we will run your labs, check that everything is in order there before we look any further,” she said. “If all is fine and well on that front, we will go from there. Perhaps some scans.”
“Scans?”
“Yes, of some sort.”
“Of some sort. Okay then. Surely this isn’t only a matter of my thinned blood. We can safely assume that much today, yes?”
“I am not in the habit of assuming anything at all, you know this. However, I do look at all the facts, and you are currently prescribed blood thinners. It is taken into account.”
“I genuinely don’t know how much more I can bear. Shouldn’t we be concerned about hypothermia? Do my lips seem blue?”
Colin pooched his lips out. The doctor looked at them the way children might watch live lobsters in a restaurant’s front lobby tank. Colin was struck with the strange notion she might actually kiss him.
“There is no discoloration.”
Colin opened his eyes. The doctor was now standing near the door, her clipboard raised to her chest. She offered a strained smile, said the nurse would be in to see him out, and left the room.
Idiot. What an idiot you are, he thought. But he couldn’t shake the image of her leaning ever so slightly forward and lightly kissing him. The mere thought of it sent a tingling sensation through his chest. He pulled his shirt open and placed his hand on his chest. It was warm! Warm for the first time in months.
When the nurse arrived to show him out, Colin asked if he could just briefly tell the doctor one more thing.
“She’s already in with another patient. You can wait outside and I’ll let her know when she steps out, though.”
He sat in the waiting area watching a crime show on the small television mounted near the ceiling until the front desk attendant motioned him back. The doctor was waiting on the other side of the door; she seemed hassled.
“I’m sorry I know you’re busy. So sorry. I only wanted to ask…well, I thought I’d ask if you possibly…if you’d like to have dinner sometime.”
The doctor stood motionless and stared at him quizzically.
“Yes, so. Would you like to have dinner with me?”
“I am afraid it does not work that way,” she replied. “Doctor,” she patted her clipboard, “and patient,” she gripped and patted his arm.
He wanted to say he could get another doctor, that he’d work it out however he could, but instead he walked out. In the elevator he rubbed his arm. There was the faintest tingling where she had just touched him, a wishful, growing warmth.
The cold got worse. He bundled himself, called in sick, actually put a space heater under the bed covers with him so he could fit in at least a few hours of sleep. And the doctor never left his mind. Two weeks after his visit, he called her office.
“Could I speak with the doctor, please?” he asked when the attendant answered.
“Yes. What can I help you with?”
His heart raced. He wanted to tell this attendant that he knew the cure to his freezing and that it was the doctor, his doctor, and that he simply must see her.
“I may need another appointment.” He paused. “Unless you could please have her call me back. Is that possible? Her calling me back? Is that even something doctors do?”
The attendant took his number and roughly an hour later, she called.
“This is very unusual,” she said the moment he answered.
“Oh, oh, I…Yes, I’m sure it is. Very sorry. But, listen, if I get another doctor, would you go to dinner with me? I really think we’d have a good time.”
“…”
“You there?”
“Yes, I am here. I will hazard a guess, just in this case. You believe I can warm you. Am I right?”
Colin was stunned. He admitted that, yes, he did believe that. Not only believed it, but had experienced it.
“The first time I actually felt warmer was when doing nothing more than imagining you kissing me during my last visit.”
“…”
“Doc?”
“I’m going to set you an appointment to see a therapist. She is good, very well-trained, experienced, and effective. Many of my patients have benefited from seeing her.”
“Doc…”
“My office will call you with an appointment date,” she said, and then hung up.
It was two days before they called and gave him an appointment date and time for a therapist named Janice Lyman. Colin immediately searched online to learn all he could about her. But his internet navigational skills were limited and soon he was only staring at the computer screen, teeth chattering, fingertips numb.
The appointment would be in a week, the office had said. In the meantime, Colin decided it would do well to see if his doctor was the only person who could warm him.
He knew no one else in town except his ex-wife, Suzie, the one woman he’d ever been brave enough to commit to on paper. The divorce had been difficult, hard feelings were scattered across the entire landscape of the marriage, but these many years later, wounds had turned to scars that were now not so easily spotted. There was room for a favor.
The meeting started strangely. When Suzie answered the door, Colin stood paralyzed in a slicing sheet of snow flurries, his eyes bugged out and staring off at an odd angle. He wore two parkas and three scarves, as well as a face toboggan with holes for the eyes and mouth. A multi-layered fat Spiderman creature wobbling on her doorstep.
“Good lord come in,” she said, more in mild disgust than with concern.
Colin gave her a summarized version of the past several months, including his last meeting with his doctor and the warming sensation left from her touch, about feeling she would kiss him and then becoming warm.
“Take all that shit off,” Suzie said.
“But I—”
“If you don’t, I’m not going to be able to take you serious, if I’ll even be able to anyway.”
He pulled the snow mask off, the scarves, and finally the parkas. He tossed all of it in the middle of the floor.
“If I go into cardiac arrest, please do drive fast, dear,” he said.
“You’re wearing three shirts!”
“And I will not be taking them off, just so you know.”
“Are you seriously that cold?”
“I truly am.”
She stood and walked to where he sat wobbling in his chair.
“Stand up, stupid.”
He stood and she embraced him right away, a kind and long hug, then patted him on the back.
“There.”
Colin sat back down and waited. He didn’t speak. In fact, he didn’t move a muscle. He focused on his chest, his back, and, particularly, his arms, as he had embraced Suzie with a firm grip to get all possible warmth that might have been available.
“Anything?”
He felt nothing. Only a deeper chill than before. He worried his blood might have, at last, frozen solid in his veins. He was so cold he couldn’t move. Prognosis, frostbite of the entire body.
“I…I’m…I’m sorry,” he managed to say between clenched teeth.
Suzie helped him put all his layers back on and walked him to the door.
“C-c-can you tell I’m not j-j-joking around? Ca-Can you tell I’m being h-h-honest?”
“Go back to the doctor. You’re too smart for this.”
By the morning of his appointment with Lyman, Colin had reached such a state that he couldn’t drive. He had been bedfast for the past three days with meals brought to him by his colleagues. The two of them agreed to drive him to his appointment, but stipulated he would need to find a way home on his own. They were scheduled to attend the very conference he had called in sick to.
Through a series of slapstick maneuvers, Colin at last sat in front of Janice Lyman at two in the afternoon. Her office was spartan, void of any decor, no bookcases, tables, lamps, rugs, no pictures on the wall, no certificates, no — and this was uniquely odd — no degrees.
Lyman herself was slender and layered in makeup. She wore what appeared to be a ball gown and had pulled her long, black hair into a tight bun atop her head. She reminded Colin of a Hollywood starlet from the forties. Just as he was about to ask where he should sit, she ducked behind an area just off from her desk and produced a metal folding chair. She clanged it open and sat it in front of her desk.
Colin looked at the metal chair for longer than he should have.
“I have my reasons,” was all she said.
He had worn the same attire as when he visited Suzie, but Lyman didn’t ask him to shed anything. Was it possible he looked so bad there was no need to plead his case any longer? He wasn’t sure anymore. The past three days had blurred him entirely. What he was now presenting to Lyman was hardly more than she’d find on various ledges along Mount Everest, frozen men, long dead, having tried and failed.
“Let me say to begin that if this,” she waved her hand in general directions, “if this is purely physical, then there’s little or nothing I can do to help. Not trying to discourage you, but, you see, your PCP says she believes this could be mental health-related. I’m to determine if that’s the case. Hopefully it will be, and I can help you find your way back to good health.”
It was everything he could do to stay upright in the chair. He could already tell his mere contact with the metal had already chilled it to the touch. Then it occurred to him.
“Come feel,” he managed to say, and pointed to the leg of the chair.
“Excuse me?”
He pointed at the leg of the chair. “C-come f-f-feel.”
She rose from behind the desk and came around to him. Her dress draped behind her runway-style. She leaned away from him and then bent and placed her hand around the leg of the chair.
“How? How in this world?”
All he could do was nod to say yes, yes, yes, I told you so, I told everyone so.
She let go of the chair leg and just as if she’d touched the frosted over windshield of a vehicle, the warm imprint of her hand was left behind. She squatted further and looked more closely at the chair leg.
“There’s actual frost on that.”
“H-h…”
“What?”
“Huuuu-Hug me.”
The therapist balked then quickly stood upright. She nervously tugged the waist of her dress, two quick jerks.
“No, sir. That’s not going to happen,” she said. “Simply put, the session is over. You’ll need to find another therapist.”
Colin looked up at her. In his mind he told himself to show her with his eyes that he was no threat, that he was genuinely in need of help and he knew no other way. But it was all too much to say with only a look.