Rowan Durona

Rowan Durona is a surgeon associated with the treatment of Miles Vorkosigan after cryo-revival and with a short-lived romance during his recovery from cryo-amnesia. Though she appears chiefly through Miles's recollections and plans, her double connection to his medical history and private life makes her a possible confidante at a moment when he is hiding a serious health problem from ImpSec.

Medical Work and Background

Rowan Durona was Miles Vorkosigan's cryo-revival surgeon. Miles recalls that the Durona sisters, refugees from Jackson's Whole, might have established a new clinic on Escobar, away from their former home. He does not know whether the clinic has opened; he thinks Mark may know, since Mark has continued sending the sisters money. The possibility of the clinic matters to Miles because it could bring him back to the surgeon who treated him after his revival.

Relationship with Miles Vorkosigan

Rowan and Miles Vorkosigan had a brief love affair while Miles was still experiencing cryo-amnesia. He regards the relationship as an accident of that period, but believes they parted on good terms. His thoughts about returning to Rowan therefore join professional trust to personal history: he wonders whether she might treat him again, even though his earlier connection with her was intimate as well as medical.

A Possible Return in Secret

After his revival, Miles experienced seizures, sometimes convulsions lasting two to five minutes and apparently triggered by extreme stress. They occurred several times soon after he was brought back from stasis, then seemed to stop; his surgeon had told him they might resolve on their own, as his memory loss and shortness of breath had. When the seizures again become an urgent concern, Miles considers taking leave to visit his parents on Sergyar and traveling from there to Escobar to see Rowan. The clinic and the consultation remain possibilities, not events he carries out in these passages.

The plan is explicitly clandestine. Miles considers asking Rowan to treat him without creating records for ImpSec to discover, hoping to have his condition addressed while allowing his professional life to continue without anyone knowing. He also considers disguising the trip as a visit to a lover, reasoning that even ImpSec agents are grudgingly permitted private lives. Rowan thus represents both a potential source of medical care and a private connection through which Miles imagines evading institutional scrutiny; the text does not establish whether she agrees to treat him or whether he ever makes the journey.