Page 6 of Doctored Vows

Dr. Sidorov seems put off by my request, but he still obliges. “I guess that won’t be a problem.” He removes the document from his desk and places it into an envelope. “If you have any questions, you know where to reach me.”

I nod until the possible inconvenience of his offer smacks into me. “Is there someone else I should call if I have any questions? I won’t have time to review the offer until after my shifts tonight.” I overexert the “s” at the end of shifts to ensure he knows I won’t be heading home anytime within the next seventeen hours.

I’m tempted to pinch myself when he replies, “Why don’t you take the day off so you can look over it… twice.”

The humor at the end of his statement doesn’t match his pinched expression.

He looks as uneasy as I feel.

“And draft your resignation to the sterilization contractor you’ve been working for the past four months while you’re there.”

His lips raise at the bewilderment on my face.

I wasn’t aware he knew about my secondary employment.

“I’ve known for some time but figured you’d give it up when awarded a full-pay contract.” He sees something I didn’t mean to express. “Was I wrong?”

“No. I… ah…” I roll my shoulders before saying with more certainty, “No. You are correct. I just don’t want to leave them short.”

“They’ll be fine.” He sits in his big, bulky chair before raising his eyes to mine. “I’m sure you won’t be hard to replace.”

Ouch. There’s a sting my ego never anticipated after being praised so highly.

“Still, I would like to finish my assigned shifts.” When anger hardens his features, I add, “If that’s okay with you?”

He breathes out his nose before finally giving in with the faintest head bob.

“Thank you.” I gesture to the envelope in my hand. “For both. It is nice to have the belief of someone who doesn’t share your blood.”

He smiles at my praise before shifting his focus to a pile of documents in front of him. They’re not patient records, more the calculated-to-the-penny reports of the mammoth debt most patients leave with once they’re discharged.

With his focus elsewhere, I show myself out before immediately starting what I hope will be one of my last sixteen-hour-plus workdays.

With the ER overrun with another foodborne illness outbreak, this is the first five minutes I’ve had to myself in ages, and I use it by scrolling through patient records. I prefer a one-on-one approach, but there are too many overflowing vomit buckets to sneak a visit to the surgical ward, so I log into HIS (Myasnikov’s health information system) and type my patients’ names into the search bar.

Every name on my rounds roster shows a result except for Mrs. Ivanov.

“Is there an issue with HIS?” I ask a colleague, conscious it could be a software issue and not solely user error. I’m great with bedside manner, but I hate the computer side of my profession. Technology and I aren’t friends.

A nurse whose name is skipping my mind joins me at the nurses’ station. “I don’t think so. Who are you looking for?”

“Irina Ivanov.”

“Ivanov?” she asks, her tone as peaked as her manicured brow.

I nod. “She’s a patient on the surgical ward. I wanted to check her current blood workup.”

“Oh… umm…” She sounds more worried than daft. “Perhaps the report hasn’t been added to her file yet.” She clicks me out of the patient screen and logs me into the pathology mainframe we use when we’re too impatient to wait for the pathology department to upload the results to the patient’s record. “There you go.”

“Thanks.” My gratitude is short because she helped me find Mrs. Ivanov’s latest blood workup, and the results are miraculous, but she completely overlooked the fact we have a patient in a ward who hasn’t been admitted.

Mrs. Ivanov was brought in by an ambulance five days ago. That means the ER department should have handled her admission. If her time here was missed, and the department is not assigned the funds for her consultation and subsequent admission, they could lose even more medical officers than they lost the prior year.

“Who should I call to ensure Mrs. Ivanov’s admission was done correctly?”

“You could ask the admissions clerk,” answers the nurse, “but last I heard, she was off sick.” When I huff in frustration, she promises to look into it if I assist her in administrating Ondansetron to a child in bay three. “She hasn’t kept anything down in over twenty-four hours and has severe abdominal distension.”

The worry on her face has me leaping up from my seat and following her into a curtained-off cubicle without further consultation.

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