“Misty Narvaez.”
Ryder and Trainer looked at one another with raised eyebrows.
“What?” I said, puzzled.
“That name sounds mighty familiar…”
TEN
MISTY
“You have a maximum of ninety minutes to complete your test. No talking and no eating. If you are caught cheating, you will be escorted from the room and your grade disqualified. This is a multiple-choice questionnaire response for the first thirty minutes of the test. The second thirty minutes will be a case scenario and the third component will be a patient diagnosis where you will be asked to step into the clinical rooms to the left of the hallway. Good luck. Your time starts now.”
My palms were sweating bullets. I’d worked so hard that I thought my head would explode from study overload. Words jumped out of my anatomy book and swirled in my brain. I was seated in a large classroom with approximately sixty other students at the University of California. The examiners were standing at the front of the room like soldiers, a large clock ticking away in the background. All the desks were three feet apart. I sharpened my pencil and stared blankly at the circles in front of me. So it came down to this, the first quarter of medical exams in ninety minutes. The sound of the tick from the clock was equal to the pounding in my head. I talked the first question through to myself.
“What would I do if…” First question down, and then it got easier. The information I’d learned started to make sense. My heartbeat eased as I got into the groove of answering the questions. A flash of Shauna and me in the library broke through.
“No, c’mon. Go back to it, that's not right. The pulmonary valve doesn’t function if you do that. Read it again.” Shauna was a hard taskmaster. She wanted to be a surgeon. That was why she was the best person to study with, and those sessions rang steady and true in my ears. I breathed a sigh of relief as I got through the first thirty minutes of the test. I shook the cramps out of my fingers and looked up briefly. Mostly everyone had their heads down and pencils poised for the remaining questions. Only a few meerkats were peeking around the room. Shauna’s curls caught the light at the front of the desks; she too had her head down.
The second part of the test was my forte, and I felt the pencil write automatically under my fingertips. A memory of me as a little girl at my grandfather's house popped up. We’d taken a family vacay to Puerto Rico, and he had me on his knee.
“I wanna be a doctor, Grandpa. I want to help people!” I smiled at the memory. I had pigtails then so I guessed I was around eight years old. I loved it there. My grandfather's house was more like a shack facing the tumultuous Caribbean Sea. The winds would be so strong the palm trees would bend back and forth, howling in the night. The thatched roof would shift and I thought we would get swept away. In all of his forty years living there, he never once was touched by any natural disasters.
“Baby girl, you can save the world. You can be anything you want to be.”
I sailed through the questions and headed to the front to drop off my paper. The next part of the test was the doctor-patient test. I stepped into the examination room where a mock patient sat. I looked at the diagnosis on the clipboard. Pulmonary heart failure. I secretly smiled at the one area I’d studied extensively. I breezed through it and blew out a sigh of relief when it was all over. I finished and walked out into the open air. I rubbed my neck, which was sore from holding it in the same position.
Shauna came out looking drained.
“I failed, I know I did. I got the worst doctor-patient scenario. I stumbled over my words and everything!”
I hugged her. “Girl, I know there’s no way in hell that you failed. Because if you failed then I’m in trouble. You drilled me and Celine for hours in the library!”
She pouted. “Yeah, I know. I just felt like I didn’t do well.”
Other students slowly made their way out of the large hall and we walked out to the grassed area to sit down.
“You know what we need?” I said enthusiastically.
She was still in pout mode. “What do we need?”
“We need a beer and wings. Let’s go eat and complain about the test. The silver lining is we don’t have any more tests today.” I smiled. “It’s over and it’s out of our hands now. In another quarter we’ll have another one.”
Shauna dragged her feet as we meandered to the car. “Ugh. Don’t remind me.”
“Let’s go to Rondo’s. I’m pretty sure it’s hot chili wings and beer specials over there.”
Shauna perked up. “Oh yeah!”
We drove to Rondo’s and parked. Rondo’s was this popular bar that had a very cool beer garden out the back. I recognized a few students from the college who were having drinks at the front and chit-chatting. The light airy atmosphere in the space lifted my already happy spirits.
“Hey, my treat, girl. We should have invited Celine! I think she was still in the room after us,” I mentioned.
“I know we should have, huh? Oh well, we’ll see her in prac in the next couple of days,” Shauna dismissed.
“That’s true.” I nodded my head in agreement.
“Go pick a seat, girl, and I’ll bring the beers back,” she said bossily.
