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Four hours passed, and there was still no sign of him.
Ugh, I was getting nervous.
I let his office and headed to the hallway toward the OR, about to enter the galley to see what was going on, but Dex came out of the OR and stepped into the hallway, his gloves and mask gone because he’d scrubbed out. There were windows all around the OR room, so I could see that the nurses weren’t preparing to transfer the patient to the ICU.
He was covered with a white drape.
No…
Dex didn’t seem to notice me as he walked down the hallway, his hands on his hips, looking at the floor as he slowly made his way forward to where the family waited for news. Dex’s face was ghostly pale, his eyes were lifeless, and he looked dead himself.
I stepped in his way and pressed a hand to his chest to tell him I was there as gently as possible.
He lifted his chin and looked up at me, and slowly, his eyes started to moisten.
It broke my heart. “I’m so sorry.”
He dropped his chin again and cinched the bridge of his nose between his fingertips, taking a moment to steady himself and combat his impulse to have an emotional breakdown. “I need to talk to the family.”
“Can I do that for you?”
He released his nose and looked at me again, composing himself as a professional. “No. But I know you would if you could.” His arm hooked around my waist, and he gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the temple before he continued to head to the waiting room, this time walking at a normal pace.
I turned around and watched him go, not thinking twice about the way he’d held me and kissed me…because it felt right.
Fifteen minutes later, he stepped into his office and shut the door behind him. He moved to his chair at his desk and dropped into it with a thud, like he didn’t have the strength to hold himself up a second longer. He ignored the food. Didn’t care about it at all.
I sat in the armchair near his desk and stared, helpless.
His fingertips rested on his thigh, and he stared at his knee, all the muscles in his face tight with stress.
I didn’t know what to say.
He didn’t have anything to say.
I hoped this wouldn’t propel him backward, make him leave medicine all over again. I hoped he’d grown enough in these last few months to understand a perfect record wasn’t a reality, and a failure wasn’t the product of his skills or abilities. Like he said, it was God’s decision in the end.
“Cancel my appointments for today,” he said quietly. “And tomorrow.”
“Already taken care of.”
He rested his elbow on the armrest and propped his cheek against his closed knuckles, continuing to stare down at the floor.
My hand moved to his thigh, giving him some kind of affection to make him feel less alone, even though, in reality, he would always be alone. He was the only one who truly understood how this felt.
“Whenever this happens…I have no interest in anything. I cancel my upcoming surgeries, sulk in my bed for a couple days, evaluate every little thing to make sure incompetence or negligence didn’t cause it, that I fulfilled my oath as a physician to cause no harm. It’s a process.” He lifted his eyes and finally looked at me. “But I don’t have the time to cancel my surgeries next week. I can’t push those patients back because I need time to decompress, to grieve. I need to keep going.”
I was relieved that he hadn’t decided to walk away again. “Think of the thousands you save, not the few that you can’t.”
“That’s hard to do when I tell his wife she’s now a widow.”
I squeezed his thigh a little harder.
“My mom had cancer a couple years ago. I was in medical school at the time, so I would come up when I could, but it was really hard to make that schedule work at the time. But Derek was there, Daisy took a semester off from school…”
I had no idea.
“My dad wasn’t her oncologist because he specializes in other kinds of cancer, but he pulled a lot of strings and called in a lot of favors to make sure she could have the best care possible. But even then, I knew that might not be enough. I knew that my mom might die, that my dad would be a widower, that our entire world would fall apart because she’s the glue that keeps us together. So, when we got the news that she’d defeated it, that it was over, that she was cancer-free…” He shook his head. “I’ll never forget it.” His eyes started to well up. “I thanked the doctors for everything they did, thanked the universe for letting me have my mother for many more years to come, and I knew that was the news I always wanted to give my patients. That their mother, their spouse, their kid…they had many more years to come.” He closed his eyes as he caught his breath, tears sneaking underneath his closed lids and dripping down his face. “It kills me every time I can’t do that.”
