Pat’s nostrils flared with disdain. “Well, aren’t you special?”
“I do what I have to do in order to get what I want. Not such a difficult concept.”
“You are too intense, Marion. Lighten up. You know what else? You work hard so you barely know what’s going on in the rest of the world. Being a doctor is all you know now.”
Marion blinked. “That’s rude.”
“No, it’s true. Sorry, but you have blinders on. Look up from your textbooks and take a look around. Life is to be lived.”
Pat and her perfect family were in Montreal now, celebrating Canada’s centennial at Expo 67. The postcards she sent were fascinating, and a part of Marion was sorry she’d turned down Pat’s invitation to go. She’d put on those blinders again, choosing responsibility over adventure.
But what Marion did was important, too. People needed their doctors to be focused and effective. Other people were Marion’s priority. She picked up her bag and turned toward home.
“Maybe you can live that way,” she murmured to her absent sister, “but I can’t.”
She envied the hippies their freedom, and she envied her sister her comfortable life, but not enough to change her own. Marion had been a healer since childhood, supplying Band-Aids, pulling splinters from her friends’ fingers, and providing a shoulder to lean on whenever required. All Marion had ever wanted was to be a doctor. She’d never really thought about what that might entail until she was starting high school and she overheard one of the boys talking about his brother, who was one year away from enrolling at the University of Toronto in medicine.
“Four thousand dollars?” she gasped. There was no way her parents could afford that kind of tuition. Her father was a busy plumber, but there wasn’t nearly enough money coming in to pay for that.
“What’s it to you?” one of the boys asked. “It’s not like you gotta pay for it. You won’t be going to med school.”
“It just seems like a lot. What about scholarships? Government grants?”
He lifted a lip in a sneer. “Not that it’s any of your business, but my parents are looking into it.”
After school that day, Marion marched to the local grocer’s and asked for a job. They started her in the back room, but it wasn’t long before her intelligence and organizational skills became obvious to the owner and she was moved up to cashier, where she was paid $1.50 per hour. Every payday, she dropped her money into a coffee tin that she placed under her bed.
On the last day of school, she carried almost $300 into the kitchen and set it on the table for her parents to see. Their eyebrows had shot up at the sight, then she told them she wanted it all to go toward university so that she could be a real doctor one day. Her parents exchanged a look.
“You should be very proud of yourself, Marion,” her mother said.
“Oh, I am,” she replied. “And I will do this every year.”
“My dear girl,” her father said, beaming. “We’ll put this in your bank account, where it’ll make a little interest.”
“But Marion,” her mother continued, “keep your options open. You just completed grade nine, which means you have four years ahead of you. While you learn, consider other options for a career. Becoming a doctor is a great deal of work, and because of all its demands, it might be difficult to have a family of your own one day.”
“I don’t want a family of my own,” Marion told her. “I want to be a doctor.”
“Think about nursing.”
Marion crossed her arms, annoyed by her mother’s apparent lack of faith.
Her father observed the conversation with a gentle smile. “Your mother’s right. Becoming a doctor is very difficult. But if, at the end of high school, you still want to go to medical school, we will support your decision.”
When Marion presented her final coffee jar at the end of grade thirteen, her parents congratulated her on her hard work, as well as the scholarship she had won. Then they told her that they had been planning for her tuition for years.
“We’ve always known you would want to go to university. It has already been paid for,” her mother said, pleased.
At first, Marion had been upset. “All that work, and you never needed any of the money? Why didn’t you stop me?”
Her father grinned. “How many of the other girls at school already have more than fifteen hundred dollars in their bank accounts?”
She didn’t touch the bank account until the fall, when she was to start at the University of Toronto. She realized early on that the daily bus ride toand from school would be exhausting, so she decided to spend her money on renting an apartment. When they realized she was determined, her father told her he had a friend who owned an apartment building downtown. She never met the man in person, but he gave her an amazing deal on the rent, which meant she was able to spend all her time studying, not working at another grocery store.
Marion’s favourite place to be was in the hospital emergency room on a busy day, which she supposed was a little ironic. She wasn’t generally comfortable in hectic situations; however, she was very good at what she did, and being in almost total control in the middle of a storm—as she always was at the operating table—was the opposite of chaos. It was power.
It turned out that life had different plans for her. When it was time for Marion to choose her specialty—emergency surgery —she had fallen ill with double pneumonia that evolved into septicemia, which kept her in hospital for two months. As a result of missing so much practical training, she had not qualified for a position in emergency medicine.
