“Hey, that was hard,” Dr.Singh said during their debrief, “but we need to regroup.Lily is not our only patient today.”
She nodded, stripping off her gloves, as the aides cleaned the room, readying for the next patient.
Lily.Poor Lily.Her eyes burned with tears.Gen might think she had problems, but they were nothing compared to a poor little family-less girl, who’d been treated like a discarded sock all her life.
She returned to her locker, exchanged her sweat-stained T-shirt for a fresh one, and glanced at her phone.
A new message waited.Her heart froze.From Kyle.
No.She didn’t have the emotional capacity to look at it just yet.Already her heart felt like it had been scraped open with a grater.She was bloodied and bruised and had no room left for whatever awful—and completely justified—things he might say.
Yet all through the rest of her shift she kept wondering what he’d said.What he wanted.She struggled to stay focused, her heart slipping to fears for Lily, then sliding to fears for Bella and herself.
The future was so uncertain, and she knew she was losing her grip, evidenced when she rang internal medicine for a consult and was yelled at for asking a vague question.
“You’re right.Sorry,” she murmured.How humiliating.She needed to focus.Stop being distracted.
But she wasn’t doing a very good job at hiding it, and others were noticing.
“Dr.Rivas, get your head in the game,” Dr.Singh reprimanded her.
Her cheeks flushed with fresh shame.
“Stop thinking about lover boy,” Dr.Visek muttered when they were both at the desk.
“It’s not him.”Far from it.Well, it was partly him, but not because of love.
She needed a moment to pull herself together.This was what medical school was supposed to have done.Break her down, help her develop a thicker skin, to not let patients get into her heart.And she’d always done that, she’d managed that—until now.Now, she felt fragile, like the mask she’d worn for so long had slipped and instead of seeing stoic Dr.Rivas, people would see she was floundering, in over her head.
“Dr.Rivas?Gen?Are you okay?”Nancy frowned.
She nodded, even as her heart protested the lie.
Nancy’s face softened.“Oh, Lily, right?”
“Have you heard anything?”
“Not yet.But when we do, I’ll let you know.”
She nodded, forced herself to continue, supervising Francis with intubating a patient, but then made a silly miscalculation, which earned a smugly delivered reprimand from Dr.Visek, and another reproof from Dr.Singh.
“Dr.Rivas, I know it’s hard, but you still have a job to do and we need you to do yours properly.”
Ouch.She nodded.She deserved that.
But when the news filtered down an hour later that Lily had succumbed in the operating theater, her legs crumbled.
“Dr.Rivas?”Nancy’s expression held compassion.
But she couldn’t deal with compassion.Couldn’t deal with people in this moment.She shook her head, leaving her report half done as she hurried to the doctors’ lounge and grabbed her phone and sank against the wall.She studied the screensaver of Bella, the little girl who lived.Unlike the one who had tried to live but people had let her down time and time again.
She slid onto the floor, head in her hands as she sobbed, tears leaking past her fingers.
Poor Lily.She’d failed her.She couldn’t do this anymore.Oh, why was this world filled with so much pain?How could people carry on?How could she?
The door opened.“Dr.Rivas?Oh, I’ll give you a minute longer.”
She nodded, head down, unable to look at Francis.She wiped her eyes.What must the intern think of her?What must the rest of the staff think?She must seem so unprofessional.Dr.Visek obviously thought that already, but to have Dr.Singh see that too was all the more embarrassing.How could she wash off this failure?How could she ever let go of all the ugly things she’d seen and experienced and done?How could she ever find a way to move forward?Where was hope in this world?
