Chapter Five
“Has anyone seen my stethoscope?”
Lauren kept her eyes on her computer screen. “It’s wrapped around the arm of your chair.”
“How the—” Emma twisted around and the metal head of the device clinked against her seat as she unwound it. “Thanks. Hey, did that guy ever call you?”
“Nope.”
Emma huffed out a breath. “I can’t believe that.”
“I can. He was clearly more interested in you, but you kept forcing me on him. Poor guy didn’t know what to do.”
Emma blinked. “Maybe he’s been busy.”
“It’s been two weeks, Em. Let it go.”
“Not a chance. We’re gonna find you a guy.”
“We?”
“Yes, we,” came Kiara’s voice. “Just because you two ditched me that night doesn’t mean I’m not part of this.”
“We didn’t ditch you,” Emma said in an exasperated tone. “You had plans with your boyfriend.”
“Fiancé,” Kiara corrected with a smile. She’d had special plans that night, indeed.
“Don’t rub it in,” Emma grumbled.
“If you want your own fiancé that bad, you can’t keep avoiding guys who want to talk to you,” Lauren said, leaning back in her chair. “I guarantee if you’d offered your number instead of mine, that guy from the bar would’ve been blowing up your phone.”
“Whatever.”
Lauren feigned a stern expression. “Stop distracting me. Just because Dr. Stanford left and my morning clinic is over doesn’t mean you can heckle me about my love life. Go see your patients and let me finish my notes.”
Their conversation paused when Dr. Patel entered the room and set a paper chart next to Kiara’s keyboard. She rambled off instructions and Kiara rose to discharge the patient.
“I keep trying to convince Dr. Stanford he doesn’t need you for myeloma,” Dr. Patel said to Lauren as she sat in front of her computer. “But he’s not falling for it.”
Lauren just smiled. She’d loved being in the leukemia and lymphoma clinic, but she needed a well-rounded residency education.
Emma swiveled in her chair to face Dr. Patel. “Would you like me to see one of the next ones, Dr. Patel?”
“Please.” Dr. Patel unlocked her screen and pulled up the schedule. “Could you see Mr. Bishop? Zeke Young is here, and that will be a difficult conversation.”
Lauren perked up. Her first thought was Andrew’s here? followed by What happened with Zeke? Zeke was a forty-year-old man with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and was the first patient she’d seen when she’d started in Dr. Patel’s clinic. He’d completed his chemo regimen and gone into remission, and without the need for medication, Lauren hadn’t been involved in his follow-up visits. But she thought about him often. He was a farmer and had always been accompanied by his parents, and all of them had been such kind, soft-spoken people.
She technically shouldn’t ask what was going on, since she wasn’t part of Zeke’s care team anymore, but it was hard not to care. She’d followed him for months. Thankfully, Emma seemed as surprised as Lauren was and voiced the question in her mind.
“Why?” Emma asked.
“His surveillance bone marrow biopsy came back. His disease relapsed.”
Lauren felt the word relapse like a punch in the gut. “Oh no.”
Emma’s face was stricken. “He was doing so well, I really hoped…”
Dr. Patel nodded solemnly. “Me too.” She took a deep breath. “We’ve still got options for him, that’s the important thing. But I’m worried about how today will go. I called him with the results yesterday, and he was very upset. He refused to speak to me, but his mother called back. I asked if she thought he’d come talk about his options in person, and she said she’d try to get him here.”