Page 75 of We Were Something
“It’s not easy to shift the mindset, but I had a mentor in med school who helped teach me how to focus on some things over others. Because trust me, it’s all too easy to zoom in on the problems Ican’tsolve. The kids who come to me to consult on a tumor that is inoperable or a disease that’s too far along.”
I pause, feeling that familiar well of emotion inside of me beginning to stir. It’s the little pit of anger that comes when I allow myself to think about the very things I’m telling Paige I try to avoid.
Like the two-year-old girl who was taken off life support a few days ago, after her parents spent their life savings and went into significant debt hoping she’d survive after drowning in their neighbor’s pool.
Or the seven-year-old boy—Evan—who completed three years of treatments and chemo for leukemia, only to return a few months later with an inoperable brain tumor.
And then there are the limits of my own capabilities. I’m not a brain surgeon, so I have to trust my colleagues when they look at Evan’s scans and tell me nothing can be done.
That’s the kind of stuff that sends me on long runs in the middle of the night, hoping to exhaust myself to the point where I can mindlessly fall asleep.
Because if I have to think about their faces—the ones I know won’t ever get to grow up—I don’t know if I’d ever be able to do anything but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
“Do you get nervous for your patients?” Paige asks me, jerking me back to this table, with her.
I clear my throat and shift my shoulders. “Sometimes. It just depends on the case and the projected outcome.”
Paige nods, accepting my answer for what it is, but if I’m honest, this case with Ivy is different. And if I want to know Paige on a deeper level, want her to trust me with those secrets she keeps tucked away, I need to set the example. Demonstrate the vulnerability. Show her that revealing your deepest self and darkest fears makes for abetterrelationship, romantic or otherwise.
“I’ve never been friends with people I’ve taken care of before,” I tell her. “I haven’t ever had someone I know bring their child to me to help them with something. So when I say it depends on the case and the outcome…that’s true. But this situation with Ivy is a first. Having Ben come to me to help his baby sister, it adds a…I don’t know…a layer of fear I’m not entirely accustomed to. Or maybe notfear, but pressure.”
Paige reaches across the table and slips her hand into mine, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“I don’t want to let anyone down. I don’t want to, but there’s a very real possibility that Iwill. You know, it doesn’t matter how many times I tell everyone Ivy could die. It doesn’t matter if I share survival rates or other cases’ outcomes.”
I shake my head.
“There’s always a belief that a miracle will happen, that all the possible problems will be avoided, that I’ll somehow solve everything and beat the odds and Ivy will walk out of the hospital with her whole life ahead of her.”
I pause, taking a deep breath, my eyes staring lasers into the tabletop as sharing how I feel leads me to a sudden, shocking realization that hits me like a concrete block in the chest.
“I was wrong. It’snotpressure. Itisfear. I’m afraid they will never forgive me.”
Paige gets up from where she’s seated and rounds the table, tucking her tiny body in next to mine on my side of the booth, her arms slipping around my waist and her head snuggling in under my chin and against my chest.
“You’re giving them hope,” she tells me. “All of us. You’re giving all of us hope. And yes, hope can be dangerous, because it allows us to see a possibility other than the current situation. But hope also allows for a better life than staring at your daughter or sister or friend who has an incurable disease and having no options.”
I nod, knowing she’s right, having had almost that exact thought myself at different points in my career. And then I tug her in tighter.
There was a time, very early in my relationship with Jen, that I’d talk to her about the hardship of my work. I’d come home during my first year as an intern working in an actual hospital with actual patients, before I’d picked pediatric as a specialty, and I would share with her about the surgeries I was involved in.
But I remember the day she told me she didn’t want to hear about it anymore.
It was after Connor Franks died. He was my very first pediatric death, and after just that one, Jen told me it was my choice to work with dying kids, said she didn’t want to have their deaths on her mind all the time. She told me to keep it to myself.
So even though I know trust and honesty are important cornerstones of a relationship, in my entire career, I’ve never been lucky enough to have a moment like this.
A moment where I share the darkness I deal with on a daily basis and have someone wrapped in my arms, infusing me with light.
We sit out on the top of the boat for a while that evening, staring up at the stars and watching the handful of muted lights at the island’s campground. The time passes quickly as we swap stories about the camping experiences we’ve each had over the years. Paige’s are somewhat less rustic than mine, and I can’t help the laughter that echoes across the water of Landing Cove when she tells me about trying to pee in the woods for the first time.
I never could have pictured tonight turning out the way it has in the wake of our almost argument on the ride out here, but it really has turned into a fantastic opportunity to continue getting to know Paige better. Even if she isn’t ready to pull back all of her layers yet, I can still tell she’s sharing, slowly revealing more and more of herself in little bits and pieces. Little gems she passes over to me and hopes I will handle with care.
Eventually, as midnight nears, we call it and head below deck, Paige heading into the captain’s quarters while I hop in the shower for a quick rinse, finally washing off the salt from our earlier ocean dip.
When I emerge a few minutes later in my boxers and a shirt, I find Paige crawling into bed in a pair of sleep shorts and a tank top. Moving around the bed, I flick off the lights and slip under the comforter next to her.
We stare at each other for a long time, the emergency light from the center of the boat providing just enough dim light for us to see each other’s eyes.
