Forbidden Doctor - R. S. Elliot Page 0,34
his way to an OR and “couldn’t talk” or was being pulled into some kind of emergency. It was infuriating and I was worried that my work was beginning to suffer because of my distraction. I began to wonder if my mother had been right when she called him that. While things had been forbidden and unsaid between us, the tension had been bearable. I had been able to work, but with the elephant in the room having grown to encompass the entire hospital, I started thinking that our whole engagement had been a terrible thing from the start.
It was a Monday, six days after the incident in the on-call room, and everything on the orthopedic surgical ward was suspiciously quiet.
Jack and I were stuck with Smith on a night-shift, and a call to the ER had revealed that even they didn’t need our help. So, the three of us were playing catch-up with paperwork. Quiet nights were always suspicious in the hospital, because it put everyone on edge. Horror stories of multiple patients crashing at once, huge accidents, and mysterious illnesses had been whispered throughout medical school and made us all wary. For people that believed so strongly in science, we were also surprisingly superstitious. So, we pushed through our paperwork, but stayed near the phones and repeatedly checked our pagers.
Somewhere around two a.m., I decided to take a walk. I headed up to the third floor. It had become a habit to check on Jasmine whenever I could, just to see her progress for myself. As I would hope for any eight-year-old, and especially one recovering from major heart surgery, she was asleep at two a.m. Her mother was still on the couch next to her, but even from the doorway, I could see how many of the worry lines had melted from around her face.
Where she had looked tense even in sleep previously, Kayla now looked calm. I hoped she was finally getting some rest. I needed some rest as well. My whole body ached from three night shifts in a row, but it was more than that. I wasn’t sleeping when the daylight hours rolled around, my mind too preoccupied with the pain I’d glimpsed in Adrian’s eyes for it to shut off and let me sleep. Being on shift wasn’t the time for that though, so I left the sleeping girl and her mother.
As I headed back out of the ward, I passed Adrian’s office. It was locked up for the night, but the events that had transpired there played on a loop in my mind. The way he’d extinguished my anger at my father just by being near me had been admirable. In the memory, he had an almost saint-like glow around him, and I had to do my best to remember that he had used me and then thrown me away. At least, that’s what I had been confident had happened before I’d seen the look in his eyes.
I walked back into the stairwell, and with my pager silent, I decided to head to the surgical board. I hadn’t been scheduled in the recent past, but we’d had an uptick in planned surgeries, so I was hoping my drought was reaching its end.
Of course, what I hadn’t been hoping for was to be trapped for four hours with Adrian while he performed a CABG procedure. Like an actor in a bad movie, I actually groaned and hit myself in the face.
“Careful, you can’t afford to lose any more brain cells,” Jack’s familiar voice said.
I glanced over at him, unsurprised that he had also decided to take a trip down to the board. He was going to be happy—he was scheduled for a syndesmosis reconstruction and hardware removal. It read on his face just how pleased he was. If he hadn’t looked quite so ecstatic, I would have considered asking him to switch with me.
Then it occurred to me. I would be stuck for four hours in a room with Adrian. He would have almost no option but to speak to me. Sure, it would be in a room with an entire surgical team, but I could try my damned best. Plus, it looked like the only opportunity I was going to get. I tucked the small sliver of hope away, refusing to feed it in case it all went wrong.
To all our surprise, the night passed uneventfully. No one under our care crashed or needed anything more drastic than a bandage change. I