“I’m gonna pass on that.”
“You don’t even know what he looks like.”
“And I don’t need to.”
She laughed. “You sound traumatized.”
“Girl, I am.” We both laughed before she asked if I was hungry. I looked at the clock on the wall and said, “A little. I didn’t eat anything before I came in.”
“Come on. Cafeteria should still have something edible.”
“Edible doesn’t exactly make me excited.”
“It’s the hospital.” She shrugged. “Lower your expectations now and you’ll never be disappointed.”
We both laughed as we started toward the elevators.
The break room wasn’t crowded yet. A couple nurses sat around one of the tables talking about weekend plans while somebody else complained about mandatory overtime. It sounded like every other workplace conversation I’d ever heard, and for the first time since moving back to Atlanta, everything felt... normal.
At least, it did until two nurses walked past our table.
“That’s her.” I automatically looked up when I heard that.
The other nurse glanced in my direction before lowering her voice.
“I heard she was the one who tried to save him.”
They weren’t gossiping to be mean. If anything, they sounded sympathetic. Still, it made me uncomfortable, though.
Nia noticed it too. She waited until they were gone before looking at me and saying, “Ignore them.”
“I’m trying.”
“They’ll stop talking about it, eventually.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “They’re nurses. By tomorrow there will be something else going on.”
I hoped she was right… I really did, because the last thing I wanted was for people to look at me and see the woman from the parking garage instead of the nurse I’d worked so hard to become.
The rest of the shift went by a lot faster than I expected. A couple of my patients were discharged, another came in complaining about chest pain that turned out to be nothing serious, and before I realized it, I was finishing my last chart of the night.
“You survived,” Nia said as she walked beside me toward the elevators.
“Barely.”
She laughed. “That’s everybody’s answer after their first week.”
“It ain’t even been a week.”
“Exactly.”
I shook my head, laughing right along with her. “I don’t know how y’all do this every night.”
“You get used to it.”
“I hope so.”
