Page 3 of Near Miss

She hands it back to my brother, his hand shaking when he takes it. She notices, and one eyebrow arches up again. “You’re right. I couldn’t have found a better match. Run it all again tomorrow so we can be sure. I’ll do the transplant as soon as we have OR time, and I’ll ask Dr. Godoy to do the harvest. You can scrub in and observe, if you’d like. I’d say you could even hold a retractor, but we both know it was wise you didn’t pursue surgery when your hand shakes like that.”

Nathaniel’s mouth opens and closes again uselessly. He looks a bit like a fish—gasping for air like she had him on her hook and dangled him above the water for too long. He doesn’t say anything until she’s gone, halfway down the hall. “Thank you!”

“Page me when you have the latest labs.” She doesn’t turn back, but she raises a hand in acknowledgment.

“Dude, that was so fucking rough. ‘We both know it’s wise you didn’t pursue surgery’?” I crack a smile. He still looks a bit dumbstruck standing in the middle of the hallway: a Pokémon clipped to his stethoscope and the folder gripped loosely in his hands.

Nathaniel finally comes to and gives me a flat look. “Shut up, she wouldn’t even shake your hand.”

I look down and realize my hand is still there, fluttering by my side, waiting for hers.

“Huh,” I mutter, stretching out my fingers and examining them like there might be something all over me. I glance back up at my brother and offer him a shrug. “At least she didn’t throw a drink at me.”

He winces, and it’s exaggerated for a moment before he remembers to feel sorry for me. “People don’t actually throw things at you. Do they?”

“You’d be surprised,” I tell him. But I’m grinning when I say it, and that puts him at ease. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

I toss my arm around my brother’s neck like I’m going to try to shove him the way I did when we were kids, even though we’re much closer in height now, but I glance back over my shoulder before pushing him down the hallway.

She’s gone.

Nathaniel might think she’s mean, but I think she was probably nicer to me than most people are on a day-to-day basis.

Greer

It really is a beautiful kidney.

Dr. Davis and Dr. Ladak wouldn’t have known just how wonderful it is from labs alone—sometimes labs lie. You get in there and the organ just doesn’t look as healthy as it should.

But this one—this organ that belonged to a seventeen-year-old who turned out to be kind, thoughtful, and maybe a bit too wise beyond their years so that now it belongs to their fifteen-year-old cousin they so desperately wanted to give a new lease on life to—this one is perfect.

A small smile tugs at my lips behind my mask. I stare at the kidney for a few seconds longer, eyes tracking where I just sutured off the reconnected blood vessels. The stitches stay taut.

My shoulders relax, and I roll them out as I step out from under the glare of the overhead OR lighting and off the platform. “Dr. Ihnat, you can close up.”

She beams at me in thanks, stepping up to take my place, one hand extending for the forceps.

I usually like closing on my own work, but my neck was getting sore. I don’t sleep well the night before I operate on someone young. I have a harder time detaching from those donors, whether they’re living or dead.

Dr. Ihnat starts murmuring and making conversation, leaning forward as her hands start to move.

My fingers twitch in my gloves, the ghosts of all the movements I’ve spent the last seven years perfecting.

Movements I’m not so sure about anymore.

I notice Dr. Davis when I turn around to push back into the scrub room. He did end up scrubbing in to observe, and he’s standing at the back of the operating theatre with most of the surgical oncology and general surgery residents.

He raises his eyebrows at me, and I don’t realize he’s followed me until the door doesn’t swing shut—it catches on the toe of his pristine white Hoka.

A terrible shoe for the operating room. You’re just asking for blood splatter.

He clears his throat, and my eyes cut to him as I stand by the biohazard disposal and start to doff my gloves and gown.

“Thank you.” His voice is hesitant, almost like he’s nervous.

I don’t like that I make the residents nervous. I don’t mean to. It’s just that I take my job seriously. All surgery is serious. All medicine is.

But there’s this tagline one of the donor networks uses about giving the gift of life.

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