Page 64 of Sinful in Scrubs

I shook my head and turned to walk away, but he swung.

His arm pulled back, telegraphing the punch so far in advance that it moved like a slow-motion film. I didn’t even have to think. I simply stepped aside, letting his fist fly past. As he overbalanced, I caught his other shoulder, drove my knee into his back, and slammed him down onto the concrete floor.

As I pressed his face into the cold ground, I snarled, “If I ever?—”

I stopped myself. He wasn’t worth it.

I stood, turned, and walked away, pushing through the exit to the stairwell. As the door swung shut behind me, I heard Kevin groan and the elevator ding.

29

EMMA

L.A. was not kind to me. California dreaming was simply a big, horrible joke at my expense. I had such great hopes of finding a new future here. But instead, it was nothing more than one struggle after another.

I had been lied to about the job, and I had been left questioning what I was really doing at St. Cedar’s and what was really going on. I had been hired under less-than-honest circumstances, and that was starting to really get on my nerves. Even after speaking with Sylvia, who I had come to find always had that same smile on her face—she must have thought it made her look friendly, but I was starting to think it just made her look manic—I spent more time doing jobs outside my field of expertise, or what I had even been hired to do.

I was a trauma surgeon with a focus on streamlining procedures, not a generalist to be shuffled from department to department filling in gaps when other doctors weren’t available. In the grand scheme of things, this was strike one against my move to L.A.

And that was a pretty big strike, considering that within a week of purchasing my first car—the only car I had ever owned—it had been stolen.

I was second-guessing every choice I made. Even if the cops were able to find my car intact—which everybody doubted—I wasn’t sure I even wanted it back. How was I supposed to know I had bought the most stolen car? Shouldn’t the insurance company or the car salesman have said something about that? And until the police recovered the car or the insurance made up their mind, I was stuck making payments on something I didn’t even have possession of.

It was a mess, and everything was just getting messier.

The stress threw my body off schedule. Not only was I not working the job I had been promised, but I was also still relegated to taking an Uber to work, and now my skin took this as a good time to reenact being a teenager. I had zits breaking out on my chin and my period had gone rogue.

Not that I actually missed it—I wasn’t a fan of that particular biological feature of being a woman. When I was first hitting puberty as a teen, it had taken almost two years for my body to settle into a routine. Once established, that cycle had never wavered, even when I changed up my birth control. I had to be under a lot of stress to throw it off schedule. I didn’t know anyone who would take that as a good sign.

I really didn’t put much thought into my missing period—my focus was all on trying to limit the other stressors in my life—until I had to do a shift in the maternity ward. I was the hospitalist for any patient who came into labor and delivery without their own physician on call. I knew how to deliver a baby, but it felt so far out of my specialty that I spent most of the day in a bit of a mood.

Since I only had one patient at the moment, I was reviewing other patients’ records and listening to the nurses talking. It wasn’t that I wasn’t busy. I felt more like I was stuck in one of those nightmares where I had less than five minutes to cram for an exam everyone else knew was happening but I had just learned about. The only thing worse than the unexpected test dreams were the dreams of showing up to classes completely naked. Both dream meanings were indicators of extreme stress. Not only was I having those dreams, but it also felt like I was living them. Case in point, I was expected to deliver someone’s baby in the next few hours.

A woman was sent to us from the emergency department. She had presented with severe abdominal pain and cramping. She didn’t have other symptoms like vomiting and had already lost her gallbladder. To her great dismay, she was sent to us because she was pregnant and about to deliver a baby.

“I don’t understand how somebody can be pregnant and not notice,” a young nurse said to her colleagues at the nurses’ station.

“Well, not everybody has a regular period,” another nurse said.

“But what about gaining weight and the baby bump?” the younger nurse asked.

“Not everybody gains a lot of weight, and not everybody gains it in the middle,” the older nurse explained. “Not everyone develops a baby bump. It all depends on their body shape.”

“What do you mean, not everybody develops a baby bump?” I asked.

“A taller woman isn’t going to develop as much of a pregnant belly as a shorter woman might. Some women tend to put all their weight in their hips and ass. Their middle only fills out a bit. They look like they’ve gained weight and are not pregnant. And if she already has an irregular period, or depending on the kind of birth control she used, she might not realize she’s pregnant at all.”

By this time, I had picked up the woman’s chart. If she didn’t have her own obstetrician, she was technically my patient now.

“Has Dr. Moore already been called?” I asked as I read her doctor’s name.

“Yeah, she’s been called. Apparently, she’s just as surprised as the patient, who thought she was in menopause.”

The patient was in her early forties and had only gained a little weight around the same time she stopped having a period. That all made perfect sense—she thought she was menopausal, not pregnant.

“That would do it,” the older nurse said with a knowing nod.

“You mean you can get pregnant when you’re in menopause?” the younger one asked.

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