I roll my eyes and leave the room. Jenny is exactly where I expect her to be, perched behind the reception bay just outside the surgical wing, her nails clicking aggressively against the keyboard. Technically, she doesn’t need to be here. Dr. Moreno’s private clinic is separate from the hospital. But when he’s booked into an OR, she’ll find a reason to be nearby.
She’s in her signature floral blouse and a slick of her new favorite lip gloss, reapplied before every senior consult.
When I pass her desk, she doesn’t look up.
“Another successful save for Dr. Moreno?” Her purring tone always makes me want to perform a tracheotomy on myself.
“Team effort,” I say, without even glancing over.
The hospital’s break room is mercifully empty. Slightly different to our own space at the sports clinic, but when we have surgeries out of the hospital, we can’t be picky.
I pull out the sandwich I packed at six a.m. and stare at it. There’s just something about this job and eating that don’t go together for me. It’s probably the insistent feeling of nausea that exists in the pit of my stomach. Comes with the territory of being a resident surgeon, I guess.
After a few seconds, I snap a photo and text it to Heidi.
Me:Does looking at this for 6 minutes count as eating it?
She replies almost instantly, because Heidi always replies instantly.
Heidi:No. You have to actually place it into your mouth and swallow. Which is exactly what I did with my date last night. Also, are you emotionally imploding or just regular imploding?
I roll my eyes and huff a laugh.
Heidi Grant is one of the only people in my life who knows which one I’m more likely to answer. She’s a sports PT I met on rotation two years ago, when neither of us had slept in four days and were both elbow-deep in post-op athletes and caffeine-induced existentialism. We’ve been each other’s emergency contact ever since, and she recently started her physical therapyrole out of Dr. Moreno’s clinic, so now we see each other almost every day.
She’s less cynical than me, annoyingly perceptive, has a knack for reminding me to eat, and is weirdly good at asking questions I don’t want to answer.
So I don’t answer.
Because I can still see the eight-year-old boy’s face when we told him he couldn’t go home tonight, and I can still hear his mother’s voice cracking as she quietly asked out of his earshot if he’d walk again.
And I know the surgical plan. I know it’ll be okay, or at least as okay as it can be. But that doesn’t change the way he looked up at me earnestly and asked if he could have a blue cast, because blue is his favorite. And that was his most important thought in that moment, not the cancer invading his bone.
It’s always the kids that get me, and it’s always when I’m alone that it hits.
Heidi knows this, too, which is why I don’t reply.
Because if I do, she’ll show up here with a protein bar and that annoying, too-gentle look that saysyou’re allowed to feel things, you know.
But I don’t have time to feel things.
And I need to check on Reid Hutchison.
***
It’s almost seven when I find myself outside Room 143, and technically, I’m off shift. No lab coat, no badge. Just my bag slung over one shoulder with the weight of a dozen cases. I should keep walking, but my feet don’t move.
Reid Hutchison was transferred here an hour ago from recovery. He’s in a private room, post-op vitals holding steady, no complications.
There’s no medical reason for me to be here.
But I remember his face as the anesthesia started to pull him under—how that cool demeanor of his slipped, just for a second. I’ve seen that look before. On patients who know exactly how much they’re gambling, and what it’s like to place their entire future in someone else’s hands and hope they don’t fuck it up.
Especially ones with Olympic jerseys hanging in their closets.
I push the door open and see he’s awake. Sort of.
Flat on his back, one arm tossed over his eyes, the other resting on the TV remote he clearly doesn’t know how to use. The room’s dim, and the TV’s stuck on a sports channel highlight. He doesn’t seem to notice me.
