The Devil Wears Scrubs (6 page)

“No, just give me his pager number,” I say.
I suspect it may take several tries to reach this Dr. Reilly.

I place a page to Dr. Reilly, and meanwhile flag down a nurse.
She doesn’t look thrilled to be bothered by yet another clueless “doctor.”

“Hi,” I say, trying to sound as nice and respectful as possible.
You gotta be nice to the nurses. Or else. “Do you know what form I’m supposed to fill out to get an echocardiogram?”

T
he nurse narrows her eyes at me then wordlessly goes to a file cabinet. Since she didn’t actually say anything to me, I’m not entirely sure if she’s looking for the form or if she’s looking for something that
she
needs and has just decided to ignore me. I stand there like an idiot for a minute until she finally plucks out a white form and hands it over to me, then leaves without another word. Maybe she was mute?

I look down at the form.
It’s got tons of checkboxes but none of them say “echocardiogram.”

Also, Dr. Reilly hasn’t called me back yet.

I page Dr. Reilly one more time while I sit and examine the form. How could it be this hard to order a simple echo? I mean, this is a test that gets ordered all the freaking time. It should be on every form! It shouldn’t be some crazy puzzle.

I’m st
ill mulling over the form when by some miracle, the phone next to me rings. My page has been returned!

“Hi!”
I say excitedly, forgetting myself for a moment. I clear my throat. “Uh, this is ‘Doctor’ McGill.”

I hear an irritable female voice on the other line.
“I’m returning a page for Dr. Reilly.”

“Oh,” I say.
“Um, are you Dr. Reilly?”

“No,” she says.
Obviously Dr. Reilly is too important to return pages himself. Also, I think I am learning to
hear
people rolling their eyes. “Dr. Reilly is
in surgery
right now. He can’t be contacted.”

“Well, I have a consult I need him to see,” I explain.

“Well, he’s in surgery,” she says.

My head is starting to throb.
“Can I leave a message for him?”

“No,” she says.
“You have to wait until the surgery is finished.”

“Well, when will that be?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But…” I bite my lip.
“Isn’t there supposed to be some way to contact him? I mean, what if there were a life or death emergency with a patient?”

“You can page him again after the surgery,” the woman says.

It’s becoming fairly obvious that this is a hopeless situation. Maybe I’ll try again in an hour. It’s not like I’m going to bed any time soon.

I hang up the phone and look back at the form.
It hasn’t miraculously filled out itself while I was on the phone.

There’s a woman on the computer near me who doesn’t look horribly busy.
I approach her and clear my throat loudly a few times until she looks up. “Hi,” I say. “Can you tell me what box to check to order an echo?”

She looks down at the form then up at me.
“Transthoracic or transesophageal?”

“Um,” I say.
“Transthoracic?” Or the other one.

“That’s the wrong form,” she says.

Of course.

She goes back to the file cabinet and rifles around until she comes up with a new form, this one pink. She hands it over to me and I breathe a sigh of relief. At least I will have accomplished one thing for Mr. Swanson.

I look down at the form.
There’s still no box for echocardiogram.

I might cry.

Hours awake: 17

Chance of quitting: 78%

You won’t believe it, but eventually I do figure out how to fill out the form to order the echocardiogram. I end up having to recruit Alyssa’s help, which she gives me only after a colossal sigh. And then she asks me if I’ve gotten sticky notes yet. I have not.

I’m less successful in contacting the elusive Dr. Reilly.
I page him again at 2 a.m. from the resident lounge and get told by another irritable-sounding woman that he’s still in surgery.

“Can you please tell him that
we have a consult he needs to see?” I say. “The guy’s pretty sick.”

The woman puts down the phone and I sit there, my eyes shut, while I wait for a response.

“Dr. Reilly says to page the surgical consult pager tomorrow,” she finally says.

“But I’m calling the consult
tonight
!” I cry. “The guy has a huge abscess and he’s septic!”

I press my ear against the phone and I can just
barely make out a male voice saying, “Well, that’s
her
problem.”

I hate Dr. Reilly so much.

The worst part is that I’m not even sure I care anymore about Mr. Swanson. Mostly I just want to secure the consult to keep Alyssa from yelling at me. I’m not a terrible person—I swear. I’m just really tired.

After I hang up the phone, I just stare at it for a minute, trying to summon the strength to move.
I still have one more admission to do before I even contemplate trying to get some sleep. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so tired in my whole life. I would pay a thousand dollars if I could go to sleep right now. Well, actually I wouldn’t, since I don’t have a thousand dollars. How about this—I’d give up a kidney if I could go to sleep right now.

Not that anyone is offering to trade.

My eyelids are slowly drifting downward when I hear the door bang open. I lift my head and see Nina stumble inside. She looks as tired as I feel.

“Jane,” she
says, managing a small smile. “You’re not done, are you?”

“God no,” I say.

“If you were, I’d have to hate you,” she says. “I don’t think I’m going to get to sleep at all tonight.”

“Ditto.”

“Julia might though,” Nina says, crinkling her upturned nose. She collapses into a chair, cuddling against the armrest. “I would give anything if I could just not have to get out of this chair. I’d even give up, like, my spleen.”

Pssh
, just a
spleen
? Kidneys are way more important than spleens. She’s clearly not as tired as I am. But I say, “I know what you mean.”

She sighs and rubs her eyes.
“I miss Valsalva. I hope she’s okay all alone in my room.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” I say.
Not that I’m basing that on anything. “Hey, Nina?”

She yawns.
“Yeah?”

“Do you have any
sticky notes?” I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Nina stares at me.
“Any… what?”

“
Sticky notes.”

“Why on earth would I have
sticky notes?”

Great question.
“No reason. Never mind.”

Apparently both Dr. Reilly and
sticky notes are going to be out of my reach tonight.

_____

At around 4:30
a.m., I’m finally wrapping things up for the night. I feel like 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. is that weird time that stands at the junction between when it’s appropriate to go to sleep and when it’s appropriate to wake up. But I’ve stopped caring about anything like that. If I have a chance to get any sleep tonight, I’m taking it. The adrenaline has officially run out.

“All right,” Alyssa says to me, as she approves my orders on the final admission of the night.
“We’re going to meet up again with Dr. Westin to round at 7 a.m. You need to pre-round before that, but you can go to the call room and try to get a little sleep until then.”

I love you, Alyssa.
I want to give you a drunken hug.

I haven’t yet seen the call rooms, but it says in my intern orientation booklet that they’re located on the
eighth floor. I’m sure I can manage to find them if I stumble around the eighth floor for long enough. I step into the elevator and prepare to press the button for the eighth floor and that’s when I realize it:

There
is
no eighth floor.

I look at all the buttons.
Floors one through seven are there. And that’s it. Seven is the top floor. There’s no eighth floor.

Apparently, I am going to be sleeping on the roof.

I’m still staring at the buttons when the elevator doors slide closed. I am so frustrated right now. I have only maybe two hours to sleep right now and I’m probably going to have to spend an hour of that time searching for the call room. If I find it at all.

Maybe I should just sleep on the couch in the resident lounge.
Yes, it’s disgusting. But at this point, I could just about sleep standing up. Maybe I’ll just curl up right here in the elevator.

The
doors to the elevator slide open and in walks Sexy Surgeon. It gives me some small degree of satisfaction to see he looks kind of tired too. His blue eyes are a little less bright and he’s got dark circles under them. But he still manages a wide smile when he sees me.

“Medicine Intern!” he says.
He’s lucky I’m too tired to punch him. “How’d you survive your first call?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I mumble.

He laughs.
“You can’t be worse than
our
new interns.”

I recall how Sexy Surgeon yelled at that woman in the ER.
I guess there may be more painful things than having Alyssa as my senior resident.

“Hey,” I say.
“Do you know where the call rooms are?”

He nods.
“Eighth floor.”

I point to the elevator buttons.
“And how exactly do I get to the eighth floor?”

“Oh, the elevator doesn’t go there, of course,” he says.
Of course. “I mean, do you want patients’ families randomly wandering into our call rooms?”

“I guess not,” I grumble.
“Well, how do you get there, then?”

“Elevator to seven, then go up the stairs,” Sexy Surgeon says.
He smiles at me. “I’m headed there myself. I’ll show you the way.”

I don’t know if it’s a show for my benefit, but Sexy Surgeon still seems to have a whole lot of energy
for four in the morning. When we get to the stairs, he takes them two or three at a time up the two flights to the eighth floor. I’m taking them one at a time, clinging to the banister. I hear him yelling at the top, “Pick up the pace, Medicine Intern!”

Compared to the rest of the hospital, the eighth floor is eerily quiet
and dimly lit. There are no monitors beeping, no nurses rushing around, and no weird smells either. All I can hear is a low hum of the air conditioning. There are rows of doors, each labeled with a different designation. As I walk down the hall with Sexy Surgeon, he points out a room labeled “Senior Surgery Resident.”

“That’s me,” he says.

“Oh,” I say.

“Yours is probably down the hall somewhere,”
he says. He winks at me, “Of course, you’re welcome to join me in here.”

Oh my God, I can’t believe he just said that to me.
I have been awake for a billion hours and so has he and he’s actually
hitting
on me? What an arrogant jerk. This is too insulting for words.

“Yeah, right,” I say.
“You don’t even know my name.”

“Sure I do,” he says.

“Okay. What is it?”

I can see I’ve got him, but he still manages a cocky grin.
“It’s Medicine Intern.”

Is this guy for real?
“No, it’s not.”

“
Um… Michelle?”

“No.”

“Ingrid?”

“No!”

“Aphrodite?”

“Please stop guessing.”

“Fine,” he says.
“What’s your name?”

I hesitate.
I don’t want to get to know this guy, but then again, he’s definitely helped me out a bunch of times tonight. And I don’t want to be a bitch. Anyway, he’ll figure it out soon enough.

“It’s Jane,” I say.

“Hi, Jane,” he says. “I’m Ryan.” He raises his eyebrows and cocks his head in the direction of his call room. “So… now that we know each other…”

“Go to hell, Ryan,” I say.

He laughs
. “Oh, well. Worth a try, right?”

Ryan disappears into his call room.
As the door slams shut, I feel the tiniest twinge of… I don’t know. Definitely not regret. The foremost thing on my mind right now is sleep.

Actually, it’s too late now, but maybe Ryan could have helped me out with locating Dr. Reilly.
I’d love to see Sexy Surgeon chew out the guy who’s clearly been avoiding me all night. Maybe tomorrow.

I wander down the hall, passing the OB/GYN call rooms, until I get to a room labeled “Medicine Resident.”
My feet are barely holding me up at this point, so I open the door to the room.

The call room is very quiet and dark.
It’s warm—like a womb. There’s no window, a single bed that’s been recently made up, and a desk next to the bed with a phone on it. There’s also a small attached bathroom. The room has pretty much everything I could need for the next two hours. It’s perfect.

I set the alarm on my phone for 6:15
a.m., which is the latest I could possibly contemplate waking up the next morning. Then I kick off my shoes, and pull off my white coat and stethoscope and dump them on the desk. I slide under the covers of the bed. For a few moments, I worry that I’m going to get paged and woken up, but the lack of sleep quickly overcomes me, and I’m down for the count.

_____

Uninterrupted, I probably could have slept for the next two hours.
Hell, make that 24 hours. But that isn’t in the stars. Less than half an hour after I drift off, I’m awakened by the sound of the door to the call room creaking open and cold air flooding my cozy little womb.

For a second, I have no idea what’s going on or where I am.
Then it comes back to me: I’m an intern, I’m on call, and I’m in the call room. And the person at the door is Alyssa, for some reason.

“What are you
doing
in here?” she nearly screams at me.

I blink at her, and rub my eyes, squinting at the flood of light that’s rushed in from the hallway.
I don’t get it. She
told
me to go to the call room to get some sleep. Did she mean she just wanted me to
store
the sleep for later, like for example, in three years from now?

“Huh?” I manage.

“Jane,” she says. “What are you doing in
my
call room?”

“Oh,” I mumble.
“It said ‘Medicine Resident’ on the door, so…”

“Right,” she says.
“
I’m
the medicine resident. You’re the intern. You take one of the
intern
rooms.”

“Oh,” I say.
I add, “Sorry. I won’t do it again.”

“Get out of my call room,” she says.

I blink at her. What? “What?” I say.

“This is
my
call room,” she reiterates. “Go to
your
call room.”

“What’s the difference?”

“This one has a private bathroom.”

Considering we have only about an hour left to sleep, I don’t see how much it really matters, but I can tell Alyssa’s not going to let this go.
At this point, it’s easier to just move. I shrug on my white coat, grab my stethoscope, and slide my feet back into my clogs. I trudge past Alyssa toward the door.

“Excuse me,” Alyssa says.
“You’re just going to leave your dirty sheets on the bed?”

“I…” Baffled, I just shake my head.
“What do you want me to do?”

“There are clean sheets in the hallway linen room,” Alyssa says.

“Are you serious?” I ask.

Alyssa is
dead serious.

So at five in the freaking morning, I go out in the hallway and grab a new sheet and blanket from the linen room, and I make Alyssa’s bed.
I even change her pillowcase, because I know she’ll be horrified if I don’t. The whole thing feels incredibly surreal.

“Fine,” she says when I’m finished.
My shoulders sag in relief. I was half-expecting her to make me retrieve a mint for the pillow. “You can go find a dirty linen bin to throw the old sheets.”