“Thank you, Doctor,” she coos. “You saved my life.”
I purse my lips to keep from laughing in her face. I most certainly did not save her life since food poisoning is extremely common, but I nod anyways and give her a small smile. She practically swoons and sits back down on the stretcher like a happy princess, even if she smells like garbage at the moment.
“Bye now, doctor,” she coos, waggling her fingers at me. I nod and disappear behind the curtain before taking a deep breath.
Gotta love the ER.“Hey, Randall,” Henry greets as I walk into the break room. He’s one of the other ER doctors that’s about to take over for me. I assume that it’s now mid-day, somewhere around two or three o’clock in the afternoon based on Henry’s packed lunch laying idly on the table. He rubs his bald head and grabs a turkey sandwich, taking a big bite of it and swallowing before he speaks again. “Quitting time?”
I nod my head, sighing in relief and complete exhaustion. I plop into the chair next to him, my muscles screaming in bliss and pleasure as they unravel and relax. My feet throb and I wiggle my toes in my black shoes as I feel the beginning of pins and needles. I yank off my mask and breathe in fresh air, my sweaty face cooling off without the material plastered to my face. “Hell yes. I need some sleep.”
“Long day?” Henry finishes up his sandwich and pulls out a plastic baggy filled with potato chips, a chocolate bar, and a can of soda. For a health professional with a keen understanding of what that junk can do to you, he’s really not the healthiest person and he doesn’t care at all. I grimace.
“After almost being vomited on by a patient who kept trying to flirt with me,” I grunt. “Yeah, I guess you could say I’ve had a long day.”
Henry cracks up, nearly spitting out potato chip crumbs. “No way. She was vomiting and trying to get in your pants?”
I grimace at the oh-so familiar stench of stomach acid trickling back into my nostrils from memory. “It was a lovely experience.”
“Why don’t you just get a girlfriend already, my man?” Henry asks. “You have all these women that want to be with you and some of them are actually really cute when they’re not vomiting in your face. Why don’t you go on a date with one of them?”
I sigh. We’ve had this conversation so many times before and my answer is always the same: I don’t mix business with pleasure. It would feel inappropriate to date a former patient, someone I’ve helped recover from an illness or ailment. Now, if the right girl came along and she was perfect for me, then I might be willing to bend my personal set of rules just once. But until that day comes, there will be no fraternizing with patients for me.
“This is where I work, Henry,” I reply grimly. “This isn’t some bar where we pick up girls. I don’t shit where I eat.”
Henry pauses his snacking, a challenging gleam in his eyes. A smirk plays on his thin lips, revealing a set of pearly white teeth. “So, you’re telling me that if a female patient comes in and she’s absolutely gorgeous and is everything you’re looking for in a woman, you wouldn’t make a move because it’s ‘unethical’? You too high and mighty for that?”
I shrug my shoulders. “I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that I’m not going to bang every female patient that hits on me. If I’m going to be unethical, it might as well be with a person I actually have a connection with and like as a person. Does that make sense?”
He wipes his hands on his blue scrubs and stands from the gray plastic chair. He winks at me, grabs his trash, and pulls up his mask to cover the lower portion of his mask. “So, you would break your rules, is that what you’re saying?”
I grimace. Why doesn’t this guy understand what I’m saying? He has a MD, after all, just like me.
“No, I didn’t—”
But before I can state my defense and elaborate on what I meant, he saunters out of the break room and into the chaos of the emergency room, the door slamming shut behind him. I’m left in the break room alone, feeling as though I just revealed a huge loophole in my code of ethics.
Unfortunately, Henry was completely right because my next patient makes me think twice.3OliviaMeow.
My tabby cat, Quibbles, peers at me from her perch on her cream cat tree and meows again at me. She’s probably wondering why I’m still home with her at 8:30 in the morning when I should be on my way to work. From my seat on the gray sofa, I lean forward and place my coffee mug on a coaster to keep my glass coffee table from getting dirty, my eyes locked on Quibbles.