Page 17 of Sinful in Scrubs

I went and visited the patient, and after pressing lightly on her abdomen, I was convinced it was a gallbladder issue.

“I’ll have those tests ordered for you,” I mentioned before I left.

I put in the order for the tests I wanted her to have before checking in with the other department doctors. Technically, these were my office hours when I was supposed to be completing all the paperwork I hadn’t bothered to do during my previous shift. But if I could help out down here, I wanted to stay where I was needed.

I also needed to give Jason some time to get his act together. After he finished pouting, I was convinced the boy would buckle down and take care of his homework. And if I were being honest with myself, I was kind of hoping to run into Emma. We still hadn’t managed to schedule a time where we could really sit down and hash out the details of an intake procedure protocol.

I felt that we should be working on something just to streamline the process. But it wasn’t a desperate need. The hospital obviously functioned well without it. It was my excuse to get Emma to sit down, spend some time with me.

I stuck around long enough to confirm the gallbladder patient was, in fact, going to need surgery. I passed her case on to the hospitalist, who would get her admitted to the hospital and appropriately scheduled for surgery.

“You’ll be feeling better in no time,” I said to the patient as I gave her the status update.

I put her chart back into the appropriate slot at the nurse’s station so her records could be picked up when she was transferred, then headed back to see how much homework my son had managed to avoid doing.

“Dr. Walker,” I heard Emma call my name as I approached my office door. “I’m glad I caught you. I thought we should schedule that meeting.”

I smiled. She looked flushed around the edges, maybe a little nervous. Was she nervous talking to me? Maybe it hadn’t been my imagination that she had been avoiding me the past few days.

“That would be great. Let me grab my schedule, and I’ll be right back.”

I stepped into my office to see Jason at my desk, smiling at the computer screen. The noises coming from my computer were not indicative of studying. There were ‘boings’ and whizzes and loud crashes.

I stopped in my tracks. “Jason!” I barked.

“Dad?” He gasped in surprise. He frantically smashed at the keys on my keyboard.

“That had better be homework.”

“Yeah, I was looking something up.”

“Do not lie to me.”

“But, Dad?—”

“Jason, I left you here to do homework, not play video games. Unless you can produce a completed essay or any piece of homework from that backpack in the next thirty seconds, we are going to have a serious conversation. And if you think coming to my office after school to do homework for a week is punishment…”

I pointed at him and grabbed my date book before turning back to face Emma.

“My apologies. Shall we?” I extended my hand, indicating that we should go back out into the hallway.

I held up my leather-bound date book. “I know this is old-fashioned, but I still can’t seem to keep track of my schedule unless I write it down.”

She whipped out her phone from her pocket and held it up. “I have mine with me all the time.”

“I know, I know. I just can’t seem to keep up with it when it’s digital. It doesn’t seem to work for me.”

As I had all of my attention on Emma, I almost missed the growl of frustration coming from behind me.

Emma’s eyes went wide, and she reached out to snatch a coffee cup out of the air right before it crashed into the side of my head.

“Wow, that’s a good throwing arm he’s got there,” she said with a nervous laugh.

I looked from her to Jason. He was panting hard, and the expression fighting for control of his face was somewhere between shock, awe, and a smile. The pretty doctor had complimented him, and he had almost hit me in the head with a ceramic coffee mug. Both of these realizations were having a power struggle over his expression.

Emma stepped into the office and set the mug down on the edge of my desk.

“I think next time, don’t throw something at the back of your dad’s head. Okay? Especially not in a hospital. You’ve got a good aim. But what would have happened if you had been off? You could have hit me. You could have hit a patient. A nurse. Anybody you didn’t want to hit. So next time, let’s not throw things in the hospital. Okay?”

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