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“I have to admit, I keep a prayer on my heart whenever I have to take this lift,” Dr. Okafor murmured as she badged us in to Critical Care. We headed straight for the nurses’ station.
Before she could speak to the charge nurse, another doctor approached, a woman in her forties who’d spent too long in the sun when she was younger but had pleasant smile lines. “Adesina, what brings you here?”
“May I present Davis Hardcastle?” Dr. Okafor gestured at me. Between my suit and her light accent, shaded with both Britain and Nigeria, I almost felt like I should bow.
“Sybil Ambrose,” the critical care doctor introduced herself. “Good to meet you, Mr. Hardcastle.”
“You can call me Davis,” I told her, as I’d insisted in every introduction where I’d been given the opportunity.
“Call me Sybil. Are you the one who’ll be working on the task force?”
“The very same,” Dr. Okafor assured her. “On that note, is ID down here?”
“They’ll be in 461—and I need to go check on 434, but I’ll see you at the meeting.” Dr. Ambrose walked away practically before she’d finished speaking.
“She was the liaison for our last project with the Health Department,” Dr. Okafor informed me as we wound our way through the halls to find Room 461. The door to the room was closed, but through the window, we could see only the patient, a heavy-set, ruddy man in his fifties.
“Not here yet.” Dr. Okafor glanced at her watch. “I suppose we can wait a moment. Twenty minutes until our meeting.”
One eye on the nearest clock, we chatted for a few minutes in the hallway. I learned Dr. Okafor was expecting her first grandchild within the next couple weeks, making her a bit older than I’d guessed.
After another minute of small talk, Dr. Okafor checked her watch again. “Perhaps Sybil’s ‘they’ll be in 461’ meant ‘they ought to be,’ not ‘they will be.’”
“Should we head back upstairs?”
Both of us swiveled to look in the direction of the elevator more likely to hurt you than an Indiana Jones booby trap.
Dr. Okafor looked to me. “I think we had better get the conference room set up.”
“Good call.” Once again, I gestured for her to lead the way.
I hoped we wouldn’t have to brave that elevator again—and I hoped this Infectious Disease person would be worth the trouble they’d inadvertently caused us.
I was hardly able to get more than a page of notes finalized before Dr. Donaldson insisted we leave for the meeting. “Dr. Croft,” he addressed me in the stairwell, as if we weren’t the only two people on this floor.
I didn’t slow down. “Yes?”
“I have a proposal for you.”
That was how he’d initially broached the topic of our superbug paper, but I hardly thought we had the time to write another before I finished my fellowship. “What’s that?”
We reached the sixth floor and strode through the doors. “I should have brought this up sooner,” Dr. Donaldson said. “But I do think it’s an excellent opportunity.”
“Okay.” I snuck a glance in his direction. How long was he going to talk around whatever this was? I’d never seen him be indirect or nervous before. Or show much of any emotion at all.
We turned the last corner before the conference room. “You know we’re meeting with the Health Department,” Dr. Donaldson said.
“Any minute now, yes. About some guidelines?” I was fuzzy on the purpose of the meeting and even fuzzier why I was being included, but if my mentor wanted me in what might be an important meeting, I wouldn’t say no.
“Yes, the state’s guidance on healthcare-associated infections needs to be updated, and they’ve tapped Beaufort to help.”
Recruit Dr. Donaldson made sense, considering he was an international expert on multidrug-resistant organisms. “Sounds like an interesting project.”
He smiled broadly at me. “I hope it will be.”
We were still the first ones to the conference room. Rather than continue the conversation, Dr. Donaldson crossed to the coffee service to start a pot.
Dr. Ambrose from Critical Care joined us before I had a chance to sit. “Have you met the new guy in Urban Health?” Dr. Ambrose asked us.
