Page 56 of The Doctor's Simple Life

This is everything I wanted, to come home to everything I love. But I just hadn’t been expecting to miss anything about Silverbell at all.

“Stop being so dumb,” I chide myself as I pull my suitcases through to my bedroom. Unpacking is going to be a later problem. I’m too tired to bother with that now. Besides, I have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

Mikey texted me earlier with my shifts for tomorrow, and like the prankster he is, he set me on the earliest shift.

So I abandon my suitcases, order food, and head straight for bed, where I sit and watch TV over my takeout noodles until I start dozing off. It’s so good to watch TV again, real TV. It helps with the not wanting to think about anything else.

When I get to work the next day, I’m greeted by my friends, the colleagues I’ve known for years. They’re all delighted to have me back. Immediately, I get thrown in to the deep end with client consultations, signing charts, and babysitting interns, and by the time my first break rolls around, I’m totally exhausted.

I’m taking a time out in the break room when Mikey slides up to me. “Howdy, Reece.”

“Hello, Michael,” I say because I know it winds him up.

The words hit their target perfectly, and his face twists into a frown. “How’s being back in the real world?”

“Great.” I shrug. “It’s weird doing real work again.”

“The vacation’s over now, buddy.” He slaps me playfully on the shoulder, then says, “Me and the boys are heading out for lunch later. Come with us.”

It’s not really a question. I don’t really want to go, but it’ll look bad if I refuse. It’s still too soon after getting back to avoid the “Reece went soft in the small town” jokes, which I really don’t want to be on the other end of. So I force myself to smile and say, “Sounds great. Where?”

I show up at the restaurant exactly on time, and I’m met by all the guys from the work tennis club staring at me. We all know exactly what this is going to be. An interrogation.

“So,” says Joe as I sit. “How was it? Was it awful? Did you hate it?”

“How were the women?” chips in Nathan.

More questions follow in quick succession. How were the people? What did I eat? Where did I go? What was the hospital like? Was everyone stupid? Were they bad doctors? Were they horrible people?

I give them the most honest answers that I can, not wanting to slander the people of Silverbell but also not wanting to sound like I had too much of a good time. I know what these people are like. I don’t want to get mocked mercilessly for the next few years for being the doctor who actually enjoyed the small town.

I’m supposed to be hip and cool. I’m supposed to be a smooth guy from the city.

Defending the people of Silverbell doesn’t really fit into that vision.

They’re all expecting me to tell them it was the worst, that it sucked as much as they think it would. I think for any of them, it would have. I tell them about the hospital, at my shock over paper charts and old people, and I don’t tell them how it started to fill a hollow space in me that I hadn’t even been aware of.

I tell them about the hopeless internet and the pagers and the hip replacements, and they all laugh and tell me how brave I was to endure it all. How awful it must have been for me to face all of that alone.

And the more I speak, the more guilt gnaws into my stomach.

I don’t think this is who I am after all. It isn’t who I should be.

I had a glimpse of something different out there, and now… I don’t know if I can be who I was before.

Every day after that becomes a tedium. At first, it’s exciting to be dealing with high-quality patients and their high-quality problems again. I like it when they have money, and I like it when we build something amazing together. I help a young man get the jawline of his dreams and give a mastectomy patient a bust indistinguishable from the one she lost.

And I do a lot of Botox. A lot of nips and tucks. A lot of the same old, tedious shit.

The exciting patients are few and far between, and though I get good money for everything else and I don’t have to care for any really old people, I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. It’s only the occasional few that I feel like I’m actually doing anything real with.

The entire time I was in Silverbell, I was remembering why I loved being a doctor.

Now, as I sit here all day, every day, in my office, looking out at the bustling streets of Miami, the shining high-rises and the honking cars, I’m starting to doubt myself.

Sure, it feels good that people are so happy with my work. I’m good at what I do. The regret rate isn’t that high.

I just don’t know who I am anymore. It makes everything start to blur.

---