Chapter Text
Wednesday, September 17th. 6:41 PM
“Doctor Mohan,” His voice cut through the music blasting through her earbuds. Her volume was so high she half expected him to chastise her about noise-induced hearing loss.
She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and paused her weekly recommended listening from Javadi. “Doctor Abbot.”
His strides quickened, closing the twenty or so feet that separated them. His uneven gait rang through the parking garage. She’d only seen his prosthetic leg once, but she felt almost hyper-aware of it now. Behind him, the sun was almost entirely hidden beneath the skyline; only a few beams of orange light made their way around the horizon. “What the hell are you doing here?” Abbot asked. He nodded for her to continue walking.
“A physician walking into a hospital just before shift change,” she watched as a grin spread across his face. “It’s a riddle no one has been able to crack.”
“You’re finally working nights?”
“I switched with Ellis,” she said. “So, you’re stuck with me for the next three days.” Her steps faltered. “Finally?”
“Are you serious? I’ve been trying to poach you from day shift since PittFest.”
“Really?”
“Really.” His response was almost instant. “You were incredible. The IO borehole, the pigtail catheter—I’m going to be talking about that for the rest of my life. Of course I want you for night shift.”
She let that knowledge wash over her as they rounded the corner and approached the ambulance bay. The sun was nearly gone, but every cell in her body felt warm and buzzy with appreciation. Recognition, perhaps? The knowledge that the work she accomplished during her worst day at The Pitt had actually been seen, for just a moment, made her feel lighter on her feet. “Well,” they walked through the automatic doors side by side. “Now I’m here.”
“No thanks to Michael Robinavitch.” Abbot said loud enough to catch the attention of Cassie, Dana, and everyone else gathered around the nurses station.
“Full name is never a good sign.” Robby didn’t look up from his charting.
Abbot leaned over the counter directly across from Robby. “You never even asked Mohan about nights?”
Robby hit enter on his keyboard with a dramatic flourish and finally looked up at Abbot, grinning. “Mohan, are you interested in working nights and increasing your chances of developing cancer, gastrointestinal diseases, and suffering cardiac arrest? I’ll even throw in strained interpersonal relationships, a deteriorating circadian rhythm, and hormonal imbalance for free.”
Abbot and Robby stared solely at her, awaiting two entirely opposed responses. She felt like a cell being studied under a microscope. She hated her pathology rotation in medical school. “I’m putting my things in my locker.”
“Can I pass off to you?” Cassie asked, following a step behind as Samira made her way to the back of the Emergency Department.
“Yeah, go for it. How was it this morning?”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it was chill. Only a handful of major traumas, and they’re all upstairs in Cardio, ICU, or Pedes.” Cassie McKay looked over her shoulder as they neared the lockers. Her voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Honestly, I was on chairs all day; I don’t have much to tell you. I’m just trying to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of whatever is going on over there.” She motioned back to the nurses station, Robby and Abbot still having a very animated discussion.
Faintly, she could hear Dana scolding the two of them. “Boys, that is more than enough.”
Samira couldn’t make out what the two of them were saying, but she could glean the gist of things even from the other side of the ED. “I think they’re just bored.” She moved her bag to her locker and grabbed her stethoscope from its designated hook inside. “It’s like when you don’t take your dog on enough walks, so they start biting over nothing.”
“You’re saying this is their enrichment time?” Cassie laughed.
“I think that is what I’m saying, somehow.” The latch of her locker clicked beneath her fingers. “Wanna go for a lap? You can catch me up on your hand-offs, and we can stay far away from whatever is going on over there.”
Doctor Abbot met her gaze from across the room, flashing her a thumbs up and a smile, before falling back into his routine argument with Robby. Intellectually, she knew they had almost certainly moved away from Samira as the topic of conversation, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the feeling of their stares on her. An admission that she was worth fighting over. They always fought at shift change. It wasn’t really fighting, more like an exercise in how far they could push the other. Everyone preferred it when they fought, because the absence of fighting certainly meant someone was being coaxed down from the roof.
Handoff was far less dramatic than Samira’s entrance. She was able to immediately discharge two patients who Santos had lovingly nicknamed ‘Nosebleed Guy’ and ‘Sandra Dee’ within her first half hour. Of course, Robby was not there, as she saw five–-yes, five, patients by the time her watch read 8:15 PM.
Samira had only ever worked a handful of night shifts since she began her residency. Jesse was doing someone a favor and acting as charge nurse for the night. Donnie told her he had picked up a shift last minute because he was “trying to get his money up.” She knew Doctor Shen strictly from their interactions the night of PittFest which had been impressive but admittedly out of the ordinary. Doctor Abbot was the only other truly familiar face in their ensemble.
Her first five cases: nosebleed, chlamydia, abdominal pain (constipation), concussion (almost certainly sex-induced), and back pain (kidney infection) had been almost ridiculously easy. Most of them would have been better suited for a visit to Urgent Care rather than the Emergency Department, but Samira knew for most people, the ED was the only place they were guaranteed care.
It was nice to settle into a groove. To knock out one problem after another and know that people were heading home tangibly better than when they entered. She had enjoyed that aspect of other rotations in medical school. Internal medicine, general surgery, dermatology, and even pathology. They were regular, regulated, and predictable. Emergency medicine was perpetually the odd man out. The least predictable. The most rewarding. The only specialty that she could justify pursuing. What was the point of practicing medicine in a suite upstairs when there were people on the ground floor in dire need?
Just before 9:00 PM, she felt the weight of her job for the first time that night. But it was not her job to let on.
Avery Campbell. 29-year-old female. 6 months pregnant. 4 previous pregnancies. 0 live births. Presents with vaginal bleeding and abdominal cramping.
Samira took a full, detailed history and physical workup, probably a tad slower than she should. Avery Campbell had a pile of curly auburn hair and exhausted brown eyes. She experienced four miscarriages over the span of three years. She had several healed full-thickness burns on her right leg and right arm. “Alright, Ms. Campbell-” Samira began.
“Avery, please.” The woman interrupted.
Samira nodded. “Avery, if you’ll move your shirt up a bit for an ultrasound. Just a warning, this gel might be cold.”
“Oh, this is not my first go-round,”
She’d heard time and time again that it was detrimental to her and her patients for Samira to get overly invested. Emotions cloud judgment, slow reaction time, and make caring for the next patient more difficult. Still, she couldn’t help but hold her breath as she prepared the ultrasound machine. She took a beat as she applied gel to the transducer.
Breathe in for four seconds. Hold for four. Breathe out for four seconds. Hold for four.
She turned back to Avery, composed and entirely neutral. There was a tattoo along her waistline that read ‘Semper Fi’ in a messy black script. Samira turned the ultrasound screen towards her, ensuring Avery couldn't see the screen. Just in case.
“Tell me about your tattoo. Is that Latin?”
Avery shifted on the table, involuntarily moving away from the sensation of cold plastic and colder gel being rubbed across her skin. “Motto of the Marine Corps.” She said, “It means always faithful. At least, that’s what I’ve been told.”
“Were you in the Marines?” There it was. Samira wasn’t an OBGYN, but by her assessment, she was looking at a perfectly healthy fetus measuring around 25 weeks. Fetal heart rate in the 130s. She felt her shoulders untense in relief.
“Once they get you in their claws, they don’t really let you leave. But I’m retired now.”
Samira turned the ultrasound screen towards her. “Well, Avery, I’m going to get someone from obstetrics down here so they can also take a look, but everything looks okay to me. Baby’s heartbeat is strong, placenta looks normal, as did your pelvic exam. Spotting in the second trimester can be normal.”
“Oh my God,” She sighed, her entire body melting into the exam bed. For the first time in her visit, Avery put her hands on her bump. “Eleanor, you scared the shit out of me.”
Samira felt giddy. Like she could float out of the exam room powered by nothing but the happiness of this woman. “That’s a beautiful name.” She pulled off her gloves. “Can I get you anything while we wait for OB? A blanket? Any water?”
“Both would be amazing, if it’s not too much trouble.”
She shook her head. “Of course not. I’ll have someone bring those over right away. I know it can get pretty uncomfortable down here. I’ll be back shortly, but if you need anything else, just let us know.”
“Do you know if Doctor Abbot is working tonight?”
Samira stopped halfway out the door. “He is.” She said, “Do you two know each other?”
Avery pulled her shirt back over her exposed stomach. “He’s an old friend. Can you just tell him I’m here, if he’s not too busy?”
Samira gave her patient a nod. “I’ll let him know.”
The exam room door closed softly behind her as Samira left into the hall. Typically, she would let a nurse know that her patient needed water, a blanket, and probably a sandwich if there were any left in the bin, but she felt rude asking a stranger to do all of that for her when she was perfectly capable of doing it herself. When she had an endorphin high to happily ride all the way to the water cooler, the supply closet, and the secret stash of protein bars she kept in the staff lounge.
It didn’t take her more than four, maybe five minutes to gather everything, steal a look at the board, and make her way back to examination room 9.
“--ing me Connor didn’t want to come with you? What the hell is wrong with him?”
“He’s on a work trip. I didn’t want to bother him until I knew what was going on."
Samira recognized his voice before she peeked through the observation window. He sat in the visitor's chair closest to the bed. Avery sat with a cream blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Samira pressed open the door with her hip. “Doctor Abbot,” she greeted. “I see you beat me to it.” She placed a Styrofoam cup of water on the rolling tray table along with a generic Clif Bar. She placed the extra blanket on the foot of Avery’s bed.
“You’re so nice.” Avery immediately went to open the almost-Clif Bar. “You need to keep her around."
Abbot leaned back in his chair, his arms comfortably crossed in front of his chest. “Oh, trust me, we’re trying.”
Samira involuntarily let out a laugh. “Uh, how do you two know each other?”
“Avery used to be the most valuable asset on base, until she decided to jump ship and waste her precious time with the Marines.”
“You’re just mad they didn’t want you.” She turned her attention to Samira. “Jack and my father were good friends on base. I was, of course, the go-to unpaid babysitter.”
Abbot scoffed in protest. “We paid you.”
“Barely.” Avery stilled for a moment, her hand now rested comfortably on her abdomen. “I’m glad you’re holding up, Jack. You look a lot better now, but I’d have no way to know since you never answer our calls.”
His tone was far quieter. “Thank you, kid. It’s been too long.”
Samira was entirely out of place. So much of practicing medicine was stepping into the personal lives of complete strangers. Asking for someone to be completely and totally honest with you about things they would rather never mention. For the past three years, she had been paid to ask people about their bowel movements, their sexual histories, their drug use. She’d yet to go a week without cutting the clothes off of someone's unconscious body.
Somehow, this conversation felt more intimate than any of that. She was intruding somewhere she didn’t belong.
She cleared her throat. “I’ll let you two catch up.” Samira did her best to sound like a professional. “Again, let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” She felt relief, and for some reason, guilt washed over her when neither of them said anything to stop her.
Samira saw two more patients from chairs: a dislocated shoulder and another nosebleed before she saw Doctor Abbot again. She almost screamed when she rounded the corner into the staff lounge and flipped on the lights to find him sitting in the dark with his back pressed against the far wall.
“Oh my God!” She raised her arms in front of her, fingers uselessly splayed open. Abbot did his best not to laugh at her, but his chest rose involuntarily. His lips were pressed into a thin, barely there smile. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I wasn’t trying to scare you.”
Samira held her hand to her chest, feeling her heart hammering behind her sternum. “A little late for that.”
He stopped attempting to suppress his smile and chuckled. A hearty, full laugh that took up so much space in the room it was almost claustrophobic. It reverberated through her pounding chest, down her arms, and into her fingertips. “Sorry, Doctor Mohan.”
“Should I be concerned that you’re sitting alone in the dark?”
“Maybe.”
Samira waited for him to elaborate but quickly discovered he was not planning to. She waded cautiously towards the barely working Mr. Coffee on the counter. She could feel Abbot's eyes on her as she pulled a mug from the cabinet, rinsed it out in the sink, and poured herself a cup of visibly weak black coffee. “I didn’t know you had kids.” She turned around to face him, resting her hip against the counter.
He did not seem surprised by her question. “Just the one. Lizzie .” Abbot said. “I actually saw her a few weeks ago for her birthday. She just turned twenty-one.” Samira didn’t respond, mostly because she didn’t know how she should respond. She wasn’t sure why she brought it up in the first place other than the beginnings of night shift exhaustion began to set in a dozen hours too early. “She moved to California for college. She’s going to be a teacher. Middle schoolers—for some reason.”
“You must be really proud.”
He sat up a degree straighter. “You have no idea.”
Again, she didn’t know what to say. Samira Mohan had rarely ever found herself searching for words. Typically, she was desperately trying to keep herself from talking too much. From taking up too much space in the conversation with her peers.
“How’s your coffee?”
“Terrible.”
He chuckled again, and she couldn’t help but wonder why wasn’t Doctor Jack Abbot laughing every moment of the day? If she had a laugh like his, she would never stop.