Page 18 of We Were Something
Even though I always shower at the hospital when my shift is over, I still shower again once I get back from work. Maybe it’s because there’s a utilitarian kind of efficiency with which I shower at the hospital. A good scrub equals clean. Time to change and head home.
Despite what television may try to convince audiences of, the on-call rooms and the showers attached to them donotget any kind of recreational usage if you want to keep your job. It’s an ‘in and out’ situation.
I’m not any more germophobic than any of the other medical professionals I work with, which means my desire to take another shower once I’m home is probably rooted in the fact that I love to spend long moments under pounding hot water. It’s where I do my best reflecting on the long days that come with being one of the best pediatric surgeons in the country. Where I consider and reconsider the day’s decisions.
Like today, when I had to tell Cayla Ebhart’s mother that the experimental treatment being used to address her daughter’s nearly constant seizures isn’t working the way we’d hoped. As I slip under the showerhead and let the water hit my face, I rethink the conversations we had, the defeated resignation on Judy’s face as I told her it was time for Cayla to go back to the medication that eliminates close to half of her seizures but leaves her almost permanently nauseous, along with some other unfortunate side effects.
Normal days.
It’s all any parent wants for their kid who is dealing with a long-term illness. They just want normal days so their child can be a child. So they don’t have to be constantly worrying about getting sick or feeling worse or catching something new that could be a death sentence.
Spinning around, I twist my neck side to side as my mind flips through the charts and medications and conversations with all of my patients. A few dozen kids—the youngest being barely one, the oldest sixteen—who look to me as the person who will hopefully make them feel better.
It’s a lot of pressure. A lot to live up to.
There are some days when it feels too big, but those come few and far between.
Most days, I know I was gifted with this mind by a greater being. A higher power that wants me to use my skills to save children in any way possible.
With research and exploration and tireless hours at work.
With drugs, with surgery, with experimental procedures and clinical trials.
Like Ivy Calloway.
She’s been in my wing of the hospital for four weeks. The first two were spent under the watchful eyes of myself and the other pediatric surgeons and specialists who work at Roth Memorial after she had an episode and collapsed at her home.
Once she began to level out, we started prepping her for a clinical trial she’ll be participating in to see if we can cure her paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria. PNH is the life-threatening blood disease she’s been battling since she was just a toddler, though it was only diagnosed recently. But the constant issues, the long-term problems, have kept her from living with manynormal days.
A buddy of mine at Seattle Children’s is the head physician and researcher conducting the study. Usually, bone marrow transplants have to come from full-blooded siblings to get a perfect match, but Rishaan’s experimental procedure is attempting to expand the potential pool of transplant donors by taking the bone marrow of half-siblings, cousins, and other relatives and manipulating it with stem cells from the recipient.
If the science behind his theory holds and all the other smaller experiments and models he’s done to get this trial approved are accurate, it could have massive implications for future bone marrow transplants—not just for this medical condition, but for dozens of other procedures and treatments, as well.
I’m excited to be one of the many doctors around the country participating in a small capacity, though I wouldn’t ever wish a debilitating disease like PNH on anyone. Especially not a sweet kid like Ivy.
Once I’m done thinking through all my cases for the day, I crank the knob to cold for a split second, sending a jolt through my body as the freezing water blasts my skin. Then I turn it off and slip out, drying off and pulling on a pair of boxers before heading out to the living room to zone out with someSportsCenter.
But it isn’t long that I’m sitting on the couch before my mind decides to flit over to the one interaction I haven’tallowed myself to fully review.
My brief encounter with Paige.
Though if I want to be completely honest, she’s been slipping into my thoughts here and there for longer than I’d like to admit to myself. Even before our first interaction at the gala on Saturday.
She was surprised to see me in Ivy’s room, and I saw the slight flush of red in her cheeks and neck as recognition set in.
She and her friends left before I could think of anything to say to her, leaving just the faint scent of her expensive floral perfume wafting behind her—the same one she wore on Saturday—before it was absorbed by the normal hospital smells of antiseptic and the metallic tang of stainless steel.
There were a hundred things I could have said. Conversation points I could have hit. Like asking her how she knows Ivy, which is still a mystery to me. Or telling her it was good to see her again. I could have let her know I wish things had ended differently on Saturday night, with me taking her up on what seemed to be a very clear offer.
Even thinking about that now, I know going to bed with Paige would have been an even larger mistake than striking up a conversation with her was in the first place.
I just couldn’t help myself, though. She was standing there at the bar in that beautiful floral dress with the fifties flare to it, her short hair tucked back in some swirly hairstyle I couldn’t name if you offered me a million dollars, and I just…couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
Nothing could ever happen between us. For so many reasons, not the least of which is our age difference or the fact that a guy like me and a girl like her would never mesh. She’s too wild, an untamed animal on the prowl, while I feel like I live my life in a cage of my own making.
But that didn’t keep me from poking the beast. Didn’t keep me from reveling in the way her eyes drank me in. Didn’t stop me from coming home that night and enjoying a long few moments in the shower imagining what it could have been like if I’d seen things through.
So when I saw her at the hospital? I didn’tfreeze, exactly. I just…didn’t have anything to say.
