Forbidden Doctor - R. S. Elliot Page 0,23
early graduation twice had a terrifyingly small voice at that moment, and all it could do was remind me of how off-limits Adrian was.
My conversation with my mother hadn’t helped either. While she had never been one to pressure me into success, and definitely hadn’t chosen my career path for me, she also didn’t stand for any crap regarding my work ethic. She thought Adrian was a danger to that carefully cultivated work ethic. Not only did he pose a possibly dangerous distraction, but I knew she thought I would end up exactly where she’d been twenty-five years ago: pregnant and out of a job with her reputation in the gutter. She didn’t want me to repeat her mistakes, and as much as I thought I knew better, she had warned me against spending time with him.
How could I tell her I thought I was falling for him?
Every time he spoke, my heart rate picked up, and every time he moved, I moved around him. I was the Earth and he was the Sun and I felt so, so pathetic that I was focusing on that instead of on the life of the girl we would be trying to save later that day. I rubbed my eyes and continued walking, trying to put it all out of my mind.
A flail chest was a common enough injury that I had seen enough photos and victims of it to be acclimatized, and yet this one was particularly disturbing. The patient was a thirty-two-year-old man that had fallen from an incredibly high ladder at work. I had been called in to do the grunt work like handing the doctors bandages and retrieving the portable x-ray but was eventually standing aside, watching the uneven rise and fall of his chest. His body looked like it could have been made of putty if it weren’t for the bandages that slowly soaked with blood. The man was awake, and I couldn’t even imagine the panic he was feeling, the way the world must look when you were in that much pain.
“Intern,” one of the ER doctors grunted, “talk to him; you need to talk to him.”
I could see that for myself, with the way his eyes were wide with panic. He reminded me briefly of a horse I’d seen fall over at a race track once. It had the same crazed look of fear, with heavy breaths pouring from its nose. Then people had surrounded the horse, I’d heard a muted shot, and my mother had driven us home. This man was not a horse. Not something you just “put out of its misery”. This man was alive and scared, and I wasn’t allowed to touch his injuries. However, I could damn well comfort him.
“Hey,” I said moving up towards his head. “What’s your name?”
The man just gasped breathlessly for a moment, before moaning in pain when someone probed at the fracture in his leg. The man groaned and passed out. Jonah had been paged, and I just wanted him to arrive, wanted someone I knew to be there. In a way, I wanted someone to tell me it would all be okay.
“Tucker,” one of the doctors told me, “name’s Tucker.”
“Alright Tucker, I’m Stevie,” I said steadily. What the hell was I even supposed to say? “I’m sorry we met like this, but we’re going to do our best to fix you up.”
The man stayed unconscious, but I had no other way to help than try to reach him wherever he was.
“Did you know I’m an intern here? That’s why I’m not working on you. I know this whole place must look pretty scary to you right now, and I get it. It is kind of scary, even when you work here. I figure that’s why they give you the year to get used to it.”
“Giving the man your life story, Christophers?” Jonah asked, sweeping in confidently.
He stared at the x-rays and immediately started doing things that would have caused immense pain to Tucker, were he awake. One of the doctors muttered something to Jonah, who nodded and released them back to the OR. I dug for an intubation tray, and Jonah took it from me. A new doctor came in and sat by Tucker’s head, prepared to help Jonah with the intubation.
“Tucker, we’re going to insert a tube in your throat to help you breathe,” I said.
Jonah nodded encouragingly at me and carefully tilted Tucker’s head back.
“See you on the other side, Tucker.”
The words had