Turning Point(7)

Three of the nurses lingered after the others went back to work, and there was a momentary lull in the ER. Tom didn’t mind working on Christmas Day, he usually did. He had nowhere else to spend it, and no family, so he signed up for all the major holidays and freed up the married doctors to stay home with their kids. It had been quiet in the ER for the last two hours.

    “Everybody must be home opening presents,” Tom said with a flirtatious glance at one of the younger nurses. “If you weren’t so young and beautiful, I’d invite you to my place to play, but your father or boyfriend would probably shoot me,” he teased her and she laughed. She was twenty-two and had just graduated from nursing school in June. Tom Wylie was attracted to women of every age. He thought they were all fair game, and his success rate was amazing.

The banter stopped immediately when an unconscious six-year-old boy was airlifted in from a car accident. His mother and sister had been killed and his father was in serious condition and was taken to surgery, while Tom headed up a trauma team to examine the boy. He called in a pediatric neurosurgeon immediately, and assisted at three hours of surgery. The child’s condition remained critical but was stable after the surgery, and Tom advised the nurses’ station that he would be spending the night at the hospital to keep an eye on the boy. He went upstairs to reassure the child’s father, but discovered that he was still in surgery himself. Tom checked the little boy every fifteen minutes for the first hour, and then went to add some notes to the chart, and smiled at one of the older nurses at the desk when he did. She was used to his contradictory style of buffoon among the women, and serious, extremely attentive physician when needed by his patients.

“I think you should come home with me when we get off duty,” he whispered to the nurse and she grinned at him.

    “Just say the word, anytime,” she whispered back, and he laughed and kissed her on the cheek.

“Thank God somebody still wants me around here,” he said and turned his attention to the chart, relieved that he now felt fairly sure the boy would survive. The pediatric neurosurgeon had done his job well, to relieve pressure on the child’s brain without doing additional damage, which was a delicate procedure.

Tom Wylie was a strange dichotomy of diligent medical practitioner alternating with Lothario. He was the handsome man that no woman would ever catch. His glib style got him all the women he wanted, but never a relationship that would last. Other than the funny stories, he never shared any personal information about his past. The women who had dated him knew as little about him as everyone else. He often said that marriage sounded like a nightmare to him, and that he much preferred life as a buffet, rather than a set menu every night. Some of the married doctors he worked with suspected that he might be right.

Most of his colleagues liked working with him, he lightened the mood of what was at times a very hard job, and his medical skills were impressive. And it was obvious from his dedication how much he loved the work he did.



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Wendy Jones spent Christmas Eve and Day just as she had for the last six years, alone. It was part of the deal of loving a married man. She had known it would be like this when she fell in love with Jeffrey Hunter, renowned cardiac surgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, where she worked in the trauma/surgical critical care program for adult and pediatric trauma patients. She’d met Jeff at the hospital, when one of his patients had come to the trauma center when she was on duty. She had fallen madly in love with Jeff from the first moment she saw him, and he had called her the next day. He was so brilliant that she found everything about him seductive, and was flattered when he called her.

    She’d gone to lunch with him, hesitantly, even though she knew he was married. He said his marriage had been dead for years, and they were planning to separate. According to him, his wife, Jane, was fed up with being the wife of a surgeon, married to a man she never saw, who cared more about his work and patients than he did about her or their children. They had four kids, and Jeff admitted himself that he was an inattentive husband and father. His work was very demanding, and his specialty was heart transplants. He couldn’t just drop everything and run to a school soccer game or a dinner party. His work was his priority. He said that he and his wife led separate lives, and he was planning to leave the marriage by the end of the year. Wendy had believed him, and in retrospect she thought he had believed himself. But six months into their relationship, his wife had convinced him that their children were still too young for them to divorce and they had come to a better understanding, so he stayed. And so had Wendy. From that moment on, she had known it wouldn’t be easy.

Six years later, he was still married and his youngest child was eleven. The oldest had just left for college. He assured Wendy now that by the time his youngest son was in high school, he would feel comfortable leaving the family home. It was only three years away, but Wendy wondered if he would actually leave before his youngest was in college, or at all. She had promised herself she would end the affair a hundred times, but she never did. He always talked her into staying. His arguments were so convincing. And they loved each other.

    They were well suited. They were both physicians and graduates of Harvard. Her work in trauma was almost as stressful and high pressured as his. The men she went out with before had complained about her dedication to her work. Jeff always understood. She had done her residency at Mass General, after getting her undergraduate degree and MD at Harvard, and been offered an outstanding job at Stanford, which was the same career path Jeff had chosen. Jeff’s wife was the daughter of a highly respected surgeon, but she had said she didn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps with an absentee husband who was never around and hardly knew his own kids. And yet, it was exactly what she was doing, and had done since they married.