Page 12 of Look on the Bright Side

She smiled at the kid, who abruptly noticed her. His cheeks flushed. “I won’t kick you this time,” she said. “We all do dumb things when we’re kids. But you don’t want to end up with a traumatic brain injury. Or worse.”

Her eyes stung abruptly. Because of course, he could’ve died from one stupid moment. An image of another mother, staring into the middle distance, flashed through her brain, and the sting became a burn.

“Go on, Dr.Smith. Safety lectures are part of our job here.”

She cleared her throat. “Imagine living the rest of your life in a nursing facility, unable to talk, walk, feed yourself, understand simple sentences. Or worse, imagine your mom having to hear you didn’t make it, just because you didn’t wear a helmet. Her life would be ruined.” Her voice cracked.

“She’s crying,” Danny whispered. “The rumors were true.”

A tear slid down Lark’s cheek, and she wiped it away.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Jackson said, his voice considerably more somber. “I really am.”

The mother wiped her eyes. “You should be. She’s right. I adore you, dummy.”

Mara got the staple kit; irrigated the wound, which was a good four-inch laceration; shot the area up with lidocaine and put in thirteen staples. It touched Lark to see that Jackson reached for his mom’s hand while Mara worked on him.

They moved from patient to patient, stopping to log in to the computer, order meds, ask Rena to get a consult, schedule follow-up visits, admissions. Most of their clients today were upwards of seventy-five. A sweet old man having chest pain who reminded Lark of Grandpop. A woman with dementia who had fallen out of bed at a nursing home. A diabetic man with a festering wound on his foot, noncompliant with medication and lifestyle changes. A woman who’d stumbled in the parking lot resulting in a very swollen, tender ankle.

After two hours of racing around from bay to bay, they circled back to Mrs.Hendricks. Dr.Unger asked Lark to palpate the patient’s abdomen, which she did. “What does Radiology think, Dr.Smith, and do you concur?”

She looked at the films. “The rectosigmoid looks full of a malleable substance,” Lark said, “which would confirm fecal impaction. No signs of obstruction or dilated small bowel. Physical exam negative for perforation.”

“Well done,” Dr.Unger said. “Treatment?”

“Manual disimpaction, since laxatives haven’t worked.”

“Correct. Please inform the patient.”

Lark looked at Mrs.Hendricks. “Mrs.Hendricks, what we’ll try first is—”

“Yeah, yeah. This isn’t my first rodeo. Just get going, okay?”

Lark gloved up, put on protective glasses and a mask, lubed her finger, got the bedpan and did the job, narrating as she did so. The rule was that the patient was told what was happening before and during the procedure. And once, er, things got moving with Mrs.Hendricks, they definitely moved. The poor woman. No wonder she was so sour.

Lalita gagged, then excused herself.

“Remember the Vicks next time,” Dr.Unger called after her. “Not that your poop doesn’t smell like roses,” he added to the patient. “Lark, if you don’t have one already, get a little container of Vicks VapoRub for under your nose. Cases like this, or gangrene, maggots, necrosis, you’ll really need it.”

“Fun,” she said, and Dr.Unger smiled at her.

The thing was, it was actually fun. By the end of the shift, there hadn’t been a single scary moment. No one’s life had been in imminent danger, except the little old man with chest pain. (He’d been admitted to rule out a heart attack.) Hyannis was a small city, and sure, there’d be the inevitable horrible car accidents, especially as traffic beefed up over the summer. Drownings, gunshot wounds and stabbings, acute and serious illnesses, but today…well, today had been good. No one had been told their loved one had died. No one had been giving a terminal diagnosis.

•••

“You might like it here,” Dr.Unger said as they both sat at the computer station at the end of the day. “I try not to overwork my residents, because the whole work-life balance thing turns out to be true. And you do have to work nights. You’ll learn something in every field of medicine here…we all have kind of a professional attention deficit disorder, by necessity.”

“Yeah, I was picking up on that.”

“It can be really fun. We have the best team anywhere, the best nurses and CNAs, orderlies, everything. But when it’s bad, it’s horrible. We lost a twelve-year-old last week from anaphylaxis. Same age as my nephew. In April, a woman came in with her skull, jaw and arm broken because her husband beat the shit out of her. In the winter, a tree fell on a car full of college students during that ice storm. One of them died, two almost did.”

Lark had read about that and cried (obviously), thinking about the families.

“But mostly,” Dr.Unger said, “we don’t lose patients. We send them up—” He pointed to the ceiling, indicating the five other floors of Hyannis Hospital. “Or we send them out.” He pointed to the exit. “We don’t get as close to them or their families as you would in Oncology, which has its upsides.” He paused. “I should tell you, Heather and Theo Dean are friends of mine.”

Lark’s heart jerked, and her eyes abruptly blurred with tears. “They’re wonderful people,” she said, looking away from him.

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Have a good night, Lark. You did well today.”

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