Great. She’s going all out, isn’t she? “You’re going to be really dramatic about this whole thing, aren’t you?”
Her eyes gleam in unholy delight.
Ignoring the repeat—and, at this point, borderline offensive—email regarding Dragon training, I pull up the page from the ER. Possible ectopic pregnancy.
As a general rule, patients with ectopic pregnancies are either uncontrollably terrified they’ll die, or pretty blasé about the whole thing.
This one is the former.
Her name is Amelia, and her partner—Boyfriend? Friend? Husband?—is at her side, dutifully talking her down from theledge. The man looks vaguely familiar. Maybe just a generic white guy, though. As a member of the generic white guy club, I feel free to judge that this guy is particularly generic.
“It’s going to be okay, baby,” he says. “It’ll all be fine.”
Tears streak down her face, but she meets my eyes when I knock on the open door. “Are you the doctor?”
“Yeah, hi, I’m Doctor Foley.”
She nods and, with the help of her boyfriend, explains that she thinks she’s six weeks pregnant, but started spotting this morning and had some mild pain on her right side that’s now resolved. The ultrasound I reviewed before walking into the room isn’t convincing. There’s no pregnancy anywhere, meaning it’s either too early to see it in the uterus, she’s in the middle of a miscarriage or it’s an ectopic I can’t see.
I explain all this, tell her we need more time for things to declare themselves, and her tears slowly dry.
The boyfriend kisses her hand. “See, baby? It’s gonna be fine.” He checks his phone while I explain the next steps, his brows drawn together.
“So I might have to have surgery?” she asks with a sniffle.
I lift a shoulder. “Maybe. It’s hard to say at this point.”
She eyes me for a moment, and I sense her hesitation.
“What is it?” I ask as gently as I can.
“It’s just... Have you done this surgery before?”
I take a slow breath and try hard to let that roll off me, throwing on a smile and my trusty self-deprecating armor instead. “Nope. But I YouTubed it before I came in here, so I think we’ll be all right.”
She lets out a wet chuckle.
I force myself to laugh with her. That joke works every time. “Yes, I’ve done this many times, but again, you might not need any surgery at all.”
“But if I do, it might be a different surgeon?”
The muscles in my neck cramp. “That’s correct.”
She glances at her boyfriend, then proceeds to profusely thank me even though I did nothing, and she clearly didn’t trust me enough to do anything anyway.
Is it something about my face that makes people question my competence? Do I haveimpostertattooed on my forehead?
Or maybe I’m reading into it. She doesn’t know anything about me. Why do I care if she doesn’t believe I could remove an ectopic pregnancy half asleep in an overheated OR with hi-def speakers blaring Nickelback?
Stranger’s opinion doesn’t matter.
Except it sort of does.
Reframe the negative.
As I leave, my phone dings with another page—my patient upstairs is ready to deliver. It only takes me three minutes to reach the room, but I enter a world of chaos. Gabriela stands between the screaming patient’s legs, begging her not to push yet. The family is bouncing excitedly around the room while the respiratory therapist keeps reminding them to back up... give her space... “No, don’t step on that!”
Cynthia, angel that she is, merely sighs as I enter the room. “Thank god.”
