by his relatively enthusiastic and light tone, was the first non emergent or patient related conversation that he’d had since he’d arrived on duty some fifteen hours earlier. He was also busily tucking into what looked like homemade cottage pie.
Emily had heard in her third shift, that Nurse Willis – the scariest Nurse in the whole of the A&E department, favoured Dr Grayson. Yet she’d soon learnt that this was useful information to have found out. As she’d discovered that if Dr Grayson had been on shift for more than ten hours, and he couldn’t be found in the A&E, then nine times out of ten he’d be at the nurses’ station talking to Nurse Willis. He’d also usually be eating something that always smelt very nice and looked homemade, and was – she’d been told, brought in especially for him by Nurse Willis.
Nurse Willis terrified Emily. She was from a past generation of medicine where fear and reverence to the matron of the ward applied, and all of the doctors knew that she could either be a great help or a great hindrance. It was known throughout Selly Oak A&E, that the worst mistake you could make as a Junior Doctor was to get on the wrong side of Nurse Willis.
Nurse Willis kept all of the nurses under her control in order, and she ruled with an iron fist and stern demeanour that terrified everyone including most of the doctors. Dr Grayson though seemed to be the exception, and Emily had heard that Nurse Willis had taken pity on him and had become –according to the gossipy nurses on staff, a surrogate mother to him and his wife.
Emily watched him take another large forkful of food before he reached for his pager that had started to buzz next to his plate. He put down his fork and reached for the phone, which Emily passed to him. He looked at her curiously, and she handed him the x-ray that she’d been carrying around with her whilst she’d been looking for him and that she wanted him to look at.
“Thanks,” he said as he took the phone from her. He then wedged it into its usual position between his shoulder and ear whilst at the same time taking the x-ray and looking at it.
He held it up into the light, and as he looked at it Emily looked at him and tried to gage what he was thinking. She’d come to be able to read his face better than anyone else in the hospital, and she could sometimes tell from his expression alone what orders he would give for a patient before he even spoke.
Dr Grayson was not only her teacher, and an extraordinarily good doctor, but outside of the hospital he and his wife were her friends. Yet as she continued to watch him she stifled a yawn. She was tired, but then they were all tired. It’d been a long day, and she hadn’t even been in for as long as Dr Grayson had. She also knew from a conversation that she’d had with Charlie earlier in the week that Dr Grayson had virtually been living at the hospital for the past few weeks, and it was showing. He looked dead on his feet, and she wondered how he was still standing.
“It’s fine,” he said handing the x-ray back to her; “but we’ve got a couple of ambulances on the way in. There’s been an accident on the Bristol road, two men from one car with minor injuries, and one female in a bad condition from another. It sounds like she’s gonna be DOA though.”
Emily looked at him and saw her own tiredness reflected back in his. At that moment her pager also began to buzz and she followed Dr Grayson towards the ambulance bay, and as she walked she tried to shake off the tiredness that was descending upon her with increasing urgency.
***
Her whole life had been dedicated to becoming a doctor. So when she’d found herself ready to quit within the first two weeks, she’d been confounded as to why. She’d had no idea why she’d been struggling so much with the demands of a life as a doctor, and she’d been devastated.
Emily had known that a career in medicine would be hard. She’d known that unlike many other professions, it wasn’t a job where you worked a standard forty hour week. It wasn’t a job where you clocked in and out at the same time every