Mr. Dark 1 (Tamed #1)(11)

"Huh. Well, I guess I’ll take the small favors created by the death of a criminal," I replied, wiping my eyes. I caught one piece of crusty eye that I'd missed earlier, the scratchy little bit scraping my cheekbone just a bit as I worked it out. "I'm only on until two today, and I've got a shift at the Shamrock this evening. Any chance to get work done without Green around is good for me."

One of the attending physicians, Dr. Morrison, dropped off a chart with a laugh. "Face it Sophie, if it wasn't for Green, work here would be very boring for you."

I half yawned, half laughed and pulled on my short jacket that showed I was a volunteer assistant on top of my scrubs. "True, Doctor. But I think I'd rather have boring shifts than entertaining ones."

Morrison nodded and grabbed the next chart in the line off the wall. "That's fine. Okay, let's see, I've got you down for health clinic duty starting at ten, but until then stick close. You've been working on your sutures a lot lately I noticed, I might just let you try them out on a real human today."

I liked Morrison. He was in his mid forties and ugly as sin, but a nice guy. He had even had me over to his house along with a bunch of the other volunteers and med students the summer before for a barbecue, and I was able to spend three hours hanging out with his teenage daughter, who thankfully looked nothing at all like her father. "Thanks Doc. I promise, I won't sew my fingers to anyone's scalp today."

Morrison nodded. "Better not, or else I'm just going to leave them there. Come on, Mrs. Wong in exam two isn't going to like waiting much longer."

The first three hours of my shift went well, and at ten I headed over to the community health clinic. A partnership with a local charity, it was a huge tax write-off for both the hospital and the corporation behind the charity. The clinic provided low cost community health care for the local area, and often gave away services to those who couldn't pay for them.

While noble in nature, the reality was I spent a lot of my time wiping stuffy noses and trying to explain to woefully unprepared, uneducated and uninterested parents that feeding your child real food from the supermarket instead of fast food and convenience store stuff would go a long way towards some of the problems they kept bringing their kids in for.

Their kids didn't need pills for their cold, they needed fresh oranges. Their anemic child would be a lot better off with some spinach or kale with their dinner instead of coming in for shots. Sadly, most of my lectures got nasty looks from parents, and not a week went by without someone loudly stating that I had a lot of nerve trying to tell her how to raise her children.

But today was vaccination day, so I got to give my right thumb a good workout. As I was sticking dose after dose of measles vaccine into little kids' backsides, I reflected that at least the clinic didn't have to deal with the affluent parents some of the private doctors did. I don't think I could have dealt with any soccer moms whipping out blog posts from anti-vax websites and trying to trip me up with 'facts' from Jenny McCarthy. We didn't get that sort of parent in the clinic. I suppose it was just trading one type of headache parent for another.

After two hours, the clinic closed down for lunch, and I headed back over to the ER after a ten minute break where I exchanged a few text messages with Mark. I planned on taking my lunch after my shift was over, so I wanted to see if I could tag along with Dr. Morrison on any more cases. Instead, almost as soon as I waved to Cassandra, I heard the voice I was not looking forward to in the least. "Well well, back from baby butt duty, Pure-D?"

I hated Dr. Green's nickname for me. He's a good doctor, a clinical genius in a lot of ways, and one of the best in the entire state at what the ER docs jokingly called "meatball surgery," stabilizing patients and keeping them alive long enough for the other surgeons to take over.

I'd seen him take a teenage gunshot victim and in the middle of the ER, crack her sternum open, pinching the woman's pulmonary vein closed by hand while applying what amounted to super glue to hold it closed before she bled out. The girl ended up with a seven inch scar that I'm sure would make her want to wear high necked shirts for the rest of her life, but she was at least alive.

Still, Dr. Green was an * with a juvenile sense of humor. My second shift in the ER, after mistakenly leaving my bra behind in one of the staff changing rooms, he had settled on my nickname. Dredging the back alleys of his mind, he tied in my bra size with my last name, and then some old movie or another he watched where a character uses the phrase "Pure-D white." And so my nickname was born. Since then, I've never taken off any of my underwear in the staff changing rooms.

At least I wasn't Dr. Green's only target of harassment. Almost every intern, volunteer, or doctor who couldn't threaten his position as an ER institution had something about them he could comment on. His list of complaints in HR was a mile long, and the one time I had gone up to talk to them, the woman who took my complaint just nodded. "Let me give you some advice," she told me after reading over my carefully handwritten form. "Glen Green is never going to get himself fired from this hospital unless you can find pictures of him with his dick out around the underage candy stripers. He's too damn good, and he's happy down there in the ER. The administration deals with him because he's pulled more miracles out of his ass in the past two years than most doctors do in an entire career. So they put up with him, and he knows he's never going to be promoted past head attending physician of the ER."