On Rotation(23)

“Hey,” my resident said, “don’t be torn up about Dr. Berber. He asks a lot of those ‘guess what I’m thinking’ questions.”

I looked up at my resident. Her name was Shruti, and even though I’d been scuttling around in her shadow for the last week and a half, this was the first time she’d spoken to me like I was a human. I wasn’t even sure she knew my name. Still wasn’t. Regardless, I appreciated the gesture.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Yeah, like, come on. It was a febrile seizure.” Her lips quirked like she was going to smile but then decided against it. “Kid’s gonna be okay. You’ve been helpful, so just keep doing what you’re doing.”

But what am I doing right? I wanted to ask. I spent much of my day mindlessly refreshing labs and stealing snacks from the nutrition rooms. On call days, I sat around in a mixture of anticipation and trepidation of new admissions, using the downtime to read through the dense text of my pediatrics shelf exam review book. I didn’t feel helpful. Until this very moment, I’d been positive that the only thing I’d been contributing to on the team was Shruti’s insanity.

“Thanks,” I said.

The next day on rounds, I was prepared. I showed up bright and early at five thirty in the morning, long before the day intern came in, and found Shruti in the workroom.

“You really shouldn’t be here yet,” she said, rolling her eyes. She had passed the point during her twenty-eight-hour call where she cared at all about tact or the state of her hair, and barely looked away from her computer screen to address me.

I smiled. I was exhausted—I’d stayed up late studying and woken up early to get to the hospital—but not as exhausted as she was.

“Do you have anyone I should pick up?”

Shruti gave me a grim look and rattled off a one-liner about a child she’d admitted overnight, a twelve-year-old with cerebral palsy coming in after an aspiration event. Then she turned bodily away from me and left me to stalk the chart.

I started off hopeful. I’d come early for this precise reason: to read about my new patient and have enough time to research the management of their medical problems so that when Dr. Berber inevitably pimped me I could sound like I at least kind of knew what I was talking about. But any hopes I had of that were dashed the moment I opened little Miss Marisol’s chart. The extra hour I’d budgeted would not be enough to cover even half of the complications she’d had from her cerebral palsy. Twelve years old with a medical history so long and depressing it made my eyes cross. Poor baby.

After thirty minutes, I gave up on chart stalking and headed to see Miss Marisol herself.

I saw Marisol’s mother first. She was wide awake, sitting straight backed in a recliner, woven pink yarn pooled in her lap. Even as she regarded me, her knitting needles moved mechanically in her hands.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Angie. I’m the medical student on the team.”

She gave me a sympathetic smile. She had probably met dozens of medical students over the years and pitied each one.

“It’s nice to meet you, Angie,” she said. “I’m Marisol’s mom. You can call me Mercedes.” She tilted her head in the direction of the hospital bed. “Marisol’s the hospital’s favorite little drama queen. She likes to come in with a bang and settle out right after.”

I peered around to the drama queen in question. If I hadn’t read her chart, I would never have believed Marisol was twelve. Lying in bed, blanket tucked in under her contracted arms, she reminded me of a fawn. Her eyes stared, listless, into the distance. If it weren’t for the lurching of her chest, I would have thought she was dead.

“Hi, Marisol,” I said, hesitantly sidling up to her bedside. “My name’s Angie. I’ll be helping to take care of you.”

Marisol didn’t track me. This close, I could hear the rattle of her breath. I pulled out my stethoscope.

“Need me to help you lift her up?” Mercedes said. “So you can listen to her lungs.”

I nodded, and Mercedes quickly hoisted her child into her arms. Marisol made a keening animal noise in complaint, her first real sign of life. Mercedes’s eyes flickered to mine then—kind still, but defiant, the battle-ready look of a mother who has had to prove her daughter’s humanity over and over again. I knew then that I’d been caught. I didn’t know what to do with Marisol, how to interact with her, and it showed in my awkward, stilted movements, my furtive glances back at Mercedes, my hesitance to touch her.

My next movements were more decisive. I lifted the back of Marisol’s shirt in a clean, clinical sweep. Her skin was tawny brown and perfect, marred only by the raised line of the surgical scar down the middle of her back. I placed my stethoscope to her back and listened, trying to isolate the staccato of her upper airway from the sound of air moving through her lungs.

“She does have crackles on the right,” I surmised after a moment of careful listening.

Mercedes looked satisfied.

“Yeah, your resident thought so too.”

She placed her daughter back into bed so I could finish the exam, and I checked her gastrostomy tube site, looked at the rest of her skin for cuts or bruises, tried my best to look into her mouth (she didn’t like that), and called that a day on my exam.