10
L
ITTLE
S
ECRETS
I
n the obstetrics and gynecology wing of the hospital, Delbert had spent the better part of the morning seeing to one pregnant patient after another. So far, Delbert's secret was secure, despite the unnerving feeling that the third-year nurse assigned to him would catch wise when his training was upstaged by his lack of carnal experience. With only one remaining scheduled patient on the roll before his lunch hour, Delbert breathed a sigh of relief as he read over her chart. “Mrs. Samuella Collier, she's been complaining of pain on her lower right side, mostly,” he read aloud, outside of Examination Room Number Two. He glanced up from the chart and turned toward the nurse, who he hadn't noticed was as pretty as she was intelligent because of his bouts of anxiety. “Her lower right quadrant,
mostly
?” he asked peculiarly.
“Yes, doctor,” answered the petite and perturbed duty nurse. Her name was Sue Jacobs, a pleasant twenty-four-year-old with a penchant for blowing off doctors who exhibited a healthy appetite for casual affairs with nurses. Since Delbert hadn't looked at her twice, she felt quite comfortable in his company until now. His strange behavior was puzzling so she flashed her soft brown eyes innocently, riddled by his question.
“That sounds like a typical appendicitis. It's odd that she isn't being seen in the appropriate unit,” he reasoned.
“One of the staff has had a look at her, decided the pain wasn't caused by her appendix and they sent her over for you to give your opinion,” the nurse said, as if to ask why any of that mattered.
Delbert was oblivious to the nurse looking upside his head like it had a hole in it. “So, she's not expecting?” he asked, in the same confused manner as before.
“I'm sure by now she's
expecting
for a qualified physician to walk into that room and examine her, doctor,” smarted the nurse, after momentarily forgetting herself.
Delbert read over the chart a second time, praying he'd missed something. He stalled long enough to raise the nurse's suspicions. “Is she prepped for examination?” he asked, while moving toward the door to open it.
“Yes, doctor, at least she was before we started this conversation,” Sue answered, her voice trailing off at the end of it.
“Mrs. Collier, I'm Dr. Gales,” Delbert announced as he entered the small room with white walls, a standard examination table and a short desk which doubled for a place to situate instruments and write evaluations.
“ 'Bout time, Doctor!” the frumpy older woman grumbled with both eyes cut sharply at him. “I been shuffled around this place like a damn dairy cow and I want you to know I don't care for it.”
Delbert took one look at the large brooding woman and smiled. “Yes, Mrs. Collier, I don't blame you for being upset. It's been a long day and I aim to move things along for you if I can. How'd that be?”
“That'll be just peachy,” the woman chuckled. “I'm beginning to feel better already.”
How'd that be
? Nurse Jacobs thought.
Oh, brother
. She didn't know what to make of this young doctor she'd heard such a great deal about. Just outside the room, he was as worried as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Now, his bedside manner was downright charming. What caused the quick turnabout wasn't clear, but she simply chalked it up to what the senior nurses referred to as baby doctors on “training wheels” syndrome. Some interns weren't afforded the opportunity to see a lot of different ailments before arriving and immediately found themselves subjected to big city illnesses in an often overcrowded facility. “Sometimes it's too soon, too much and too fast,” Head Nurse Robinson surmised when one of the fellows buckled under pressure and washed out of the program in the early stages. “They usually sneak off and turn tail for home if the training wheels start to wobble before they know it.”
Delbert looked the patient over thoroughly with his assistant watching his every move. He discovered that her discomfort was caused by ascites, ascitic fluid causing the pain and bulging flanks in the abdomen as opposed to a growth in the abdominal cavity. He explained to Mrs. Collier her need for medication, and because it was less complicated than he'd originally suspected, she was expected to heal within a week. The young nurse followed him outside of the room after grasping his impressive examination technique and heady prognosis.
“You were very good in there, doctor,” she politely complimented him. “You probably saved her from the knife. Good for you. Good for her. Nevertheless, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. While we were in with Exam Room Two, another patient has been prepped for you in Number Four. After what I just saw in there with Mrs. Collier, this is a cakewalk for you. A simple external examination ought to do it and then we're off for lunch. Here's her chart. She's experiencing vaginal discharge and discomfort during urination.”
Delbert froze. He swallowed hard but didn't want to appear thrown off. “Sure, I've done enough of those to know my way around,” he said, envisioning someone as large and equally unattractive as Mrs. Samuella Collier, who was unquestionably older than his mother and several pounds heavier. Delbert wished for the most hideous woman alive to be dreadful and draped on the other side of that door. Unfortunately, the moment his eyes landed on her lying at ease on the examination table with her feet placed apply in the stirrups, a dilemma begun to grow inside of his boxers.
Wearing a surprisingly perky smile and not much else, she happened to be the same woman in the tight pink dress Delbert had fantasized about at the train station. He'd dreamed of her in that exact compromising position, flat on her back with both feet reaching toward the ceiling but this was altogether different. His dream had turned into a nightmare, one that forced him to stand by as it unfolded.
After staring between the patient's thighs for what seemed like forever, Delbert heard a woman's voice. It was Nurse Jacobs beckoning him. “Dr. Gales, is there a problem, something you need me to do?” she asked, for the second time.
“Oh, uh ... no,” he answered, snapping out of an awkward gaze. “No, I'm fine. Sorry. Ms. Alberta Hawkins,” he said, reading her name aloud from the chart. “I wasn't sure I had the right notes. I must've confused you with someone else.”
“Naw, you got the right one, doctor,” she purred shamelessly, while glancing down at the stiff erection in his white uniform slacks. “I ain't ever been so sure about nothing in my whole life.”
Cleverly, the patient opened her legs slightly wider. Her ploy didn't go unnoticed by the attentive nurse. She'd seen women with some of the most unthinkable conditions flirt with doctors in mixed company. Likewise, more than a few physicians have sent her away on pointless errands in order to take advantage of the right situation. Delbert appeared to get caught off guard, uncertain how to handle his obvious attraction to the woman regardless of her current symptoms. He hesitated to begin the interview.
Having been through this sort of thing before, Nurse Jacobs removed the chart from Delbert's grasp. “Ms. Hawkins, the doctor has had a very trying day. He'll need a moment to compose himself,” she said, opening the manila folder.
“He don't have to go composing his self on my account,” Ms. Hawkins flirted. “He's a real thrill packaged just like he is now.”
“Okay, let's get something straight,” the nurse replied, once she'd seen enough. “This is a hospital, not a dance hall. If you can't respect yourself, at least you could save all that cooing until I'm out of the room.” That last comment was aimed at Delbert, who until then had become merely a bystander.
“Yeah, she's right,” he said, nodding his head in a deliberate and methodical manner.
This is my profession. This is not the time for letting what I really want getting in the way. She's the patient, I'm the doctor, and the nurse ain't missing a beat.
“Let's concentrate on the matter at hand. Ms. Hawkins, how long has this problem existed?”
Although Delbert worked hard at training his focus above the draping, what he'd witnessed going on beneath it was getting the best of him.
Smacking her lips in direct opposition to the nurse's interference, the patient answered with her tone subdued and edgy. “The problem started existin' when my no good steady got it in his head to tip out on me a few weeks back. Can you fix it, doctor?”
“I'll do the best I can, ma'am,” Delbert answered, feeling sorry for her, but thankful that he wasn't lucky enough to make her acquaintance at the train station and ultimately sharing what her steady had stumbled home and greeted her with. Seeing her as just another patient for the first time, Delbert experienced no additional angst while treating her. He took a seat on the short stool at the end of the examination table. He inspected her thoroughly, collected a specimen and then studied it beneath a microscope on the adjacent desk. Before long, he'd begun humming a mellow tune. Eventually Alberta Hawkins hummed along with him and wiggled her toes to the beat.
“Ooh, that's nice,” she said, more relaxed than before. “I always liked that song. Never could remember the name of it though.”
“âThe Very Thought of You,'” answered Nurse Jacobs as she smiled amiably. “I've always been fond of it too.” Somehow decorum was restored in that small white room. Delbert had confronted his demons and with a little help from a crafty assistant, he chartered a route back to respectability, a great place to be for a new doctor trying out his training wheels. And since the specimen he swabbed proved to be a garden variety case of gonorrhea, he was able to treat the attractive woman immediately with a dose of penicillin, although she was all too enthusiastic to straddle the table for an injection. Delbert fought back a laugh when Nurse Jacobs turned her nose up at the sight of the woman's behind readily tooted skyward.
“That's how you ended up with the clap in the first place,” she wanted to say, but didn't. “Better luck next time,” she told the woman on her way out, after Delbert refused to accept her home number and the standing invitation for late night house calls. Moments later, the nurse checked her watch. She tidied up the room as Delbert made notes in his training journal for his report to Dr. Hiram Knight after each shift.
There was a naiveté about this young man of promise from Texas, she thought. If she didn't know better, she'd have assumed he was afraid of women by the way he initially balked at going near Alberta Hawkins. Good thing for him, she didn't know better.
Delbert was a virgin, despite how hard he worked at concealing it. Coming face to face with one substantiated case of gonorrhea wasn't going to stand in his way either, not by a long shot. Delbert stepped onto the elevator when the same nurse glided between the doors. He'd had the chance to recount the morning's activities in his mind and it wasn't at all as stellar as he imagined it would have been. A quick glance at the nurse conveyed a lot of what she was thinking. Her eyes darted back and forth then drifted toward the floor. “I wasn't that bad, was I?” Delbert asked as they exited the elevator together.
“Excuse me?” she said, knowing exactly what he meant.
“I mean, I did buckle there at the end, but I couldn't have been as lame as that look you saddled me with implied.”
“What look? I didn't say a word.”
“You didn't have to,” he said. “Your expression said it all.” Delbert read her name tag and winced. “Nurse Jacobs, Sue, could you do me a favor and keep this between us?”
“I wish I could,” she apologized, “only I have to make a report at the end of my shift and hand it in for review. Besides, why should I go out of my way for you when you've just decided to take the time to learn my name?”
Delbert threw his head back and whistled. “This'll be the end of me.”
“I wouldn't be so sure about that. When I report how you calmed a patient who was very upset after being sent here and there, made a good diagnosis, and acted professionally when seduced by a naked woman, you'll come out on top. That is, unless you do something to mess all that up this afternoon. See you later, doctor,” she said, walking off in the opposite direction from the staff dining hall.
“Sue Jacobs, you're all right with me,” he said to himself, standing in the middle of wide hallway. “Yeah, all right with me.”
“What's all right with you?” M.K. asked, from the other end of a half-eaten pressed ham sandwich.
“Oh, nothing, just trying to keep up with my first day on the floor is all,” Delbert answered. “Hey, was there anymore of that ham?”
“Uhh-huh and plenty of it where this came from. Come on, I'll show you where they keep the good stuff.”
Serving trays were set aside in the surgeon's lounge in the event that a difficult case prevented the golden boys of medicine from making it to the cafeteria. Delbert's stomach growled when he saw the buffet. “Man, I know I'm not supposed to be in here. This is fit for a king.”
“You're almost right,” M.K. corrected him, while grabbing yet another sandwich and a soda to go. “They lay all of this out for the surgical staff. Most of 'em too stuck up to appreciate it though. I know you must be hungry, go ahead and dig in.”