Page 106 of You Loved Me Once
He’s going to take me down himself. The very last shred of hope I had regarding us is gone. I guess he needs to be the one to bring it to light to prove that he had nothing to do with it. I watch him walk toward the front, where I stand, and begin to shake.
“Is this your signature?” he asks.
I take the paper from him, holding back any outward show of emotion. After spending years pretending not to feel, you’d think this would be easier, but it’s not. Having someone I love be the one to drive the knife through my heart hurts more than I could’ve imagined.
I look over the paperwork I forged, changing the number on the folder. “Yes,” I agree. “That’s mine.”
He takes the paper back and nods. “Right. I got curious as to the line that was crossed off. And then I noticed that the next thing signed by Dr. Adams was the daily sheet which verified each coordinating number with the vial given.” Westin holds the paper for everyone to see.
“Correct, and that’s—” I begin.
He keeps going, cutting me off again. “That’s when I noticed that the correction form was missing.”
“Yes,” I sigh.
There’s no point, he’s out for blood and I’m hemorrhaging right now. Might as well let him save himself. It’s all going to come out eventually.
“Now, I conferred with Dr. Ney and she said she didn’t sign off on anything. The same with Dr. Wells and the other advisors.”
Of course, no one signed off because I fucking did it myself. He knows this. He’s just digging the damn hole deeper and then covering me with the soil. Westin stops, looks at me with a disappointed look, and I want to stab him with a pencil.
“I’m aware of this,” my voice is so detached it doesn’t sound like me.
“I wasn’t sure why this would be missing from a trial run by a doctor who has impeccable organizational skills. So, I started digging further,” Westin continues. “I looked into the other trial patients as well, wondering how many more errors I might find. I was looking for files that were missing the other advisor’s signature or mine. It wasn’t until I opened Lindsay Dunphy’s file, the patient who was dismissed the day the trial began, that I found the unsigned document,” he gives me a pointed stare.
What is he doing? He’s lying because there is no paper that was in a file. I look at him, begging him to stop this before there’s no way out, not wanting to let him get even more tangled in this mess.
Westin continues. “You see, Dr. Adams made a clerical error. The document would’ve been signed had it not have been placed in the wrong patient file. Which is why it’s unsigned,” he says while looking around the room. “While I know following procedure is a priority here, I’m sure we wouldn’t want to crucify a doctor who has always given her patients the best medical care possible over a lost paper. More than that, punishing Dr. Adams would be a great disservice to the patients she’s saved and could save.”
“Dr. Grant,” I interrupt.
His eyes meet mine and I can’t breathe. “There are things that we do that are forgivable when it’s in the best interest of the patient, Dr. Adams. Things that are foolish, but come from a place of caring. That day, you’d suffered the loss of a patient, along with a lot of other things that clearly led to you being out of sorts.”
Every muscle locks, and I don’t want to think he’s found some way to forgive me because if he’s just covering his ass, it’ll decimate me. But Westin is standing in front of the room, commanding it, and eliminating any chance of me telling the truth now. If I do, it’ll make him look like a fool and a liar.
I had a plan. I was going to do this the right way, and maybe a small part of me hoped that Westin would see that and find a way to at least not hate me. Now I don’t know what to do, but my judgment hasn’t been the best in the last few weeks, so I stay quiet.
I’ll follow his lead and hope he’s not leading me into the fire.
Dr. Pascoe clears his throat. “So the paper was filled out, but put in the wrong file, which resulted in it not being signed by the auditing and advising doctors?”
“It appears that it was,” I say, corroborating Westin’s story.
“Well,” he sighs.
“Since the medication wasn’t the cause of Allison Brown’s death, Dr. Adams clearly wasn’t at fault. We’ve read and reviewed the reports along with the surgical notes. Dr. Adams handled things exactly as she should’ve, so I don’t believe that the review board should take any drastic measures.”
Dr. Ney speaks now. “I agree, this was clearly an oversight of a very prestigious doctor.” She gives me a sad smile.
I feel worse than I did thinking I’d lose my job. Westin put his entire career on the line and lied on my behalf. He covered for me when he never should have.
Dr. Pascoe looks around. “But still, we can’t allow doctors not to have major forms signed. If the FDA or NIH were to look at this, the hospital would face serious repercussions. We could lose our research hospital status, making it difficult to run further trials.”
Westin still doesn’t look at me, but he nods slowly, seeming to process what he says. “I would suggest a probationary period of three months, a two-week suspension, and a formal reprimand,” Westin suggests. “It’s a message that these things can’t happen, but we also understand it wasn’t malicious.”
Basically, a slap on the wrist, but it will go on my record. I came in here ready to lose my job and no longer practice medicine, and instead, he’s talking about a much more lenient punishment.
The question remains, why would he defend me? After we spoke, it was clear he couldn’t forgive me, so why now?
