BWWM Interracial Romance 2: Open Heart

Open

Heart

Elena Brown

Copyright © 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Copyright © 2014

Table of Contents

Patient Backlog

Pediatrics

The Date

Vince

The Past Resurfaces

Amusement Park Fun

On His Mind

Decisions

Peace

Two Rings

As she always tried to do, Ashley arrived at the hospital with twenty minutes to spare, pulling into her designated parking spot and quickly getting out of her car. She grabbed her purse and a duffel bag and locked the car behind her. Ashley started through the garage, smiling as she caught sight of the white lights decking the building across the street from Jackson Memorial Hospital. If it weren’t for the sight of holiday decorations everywhere—lights, menorahs, Christmas trees, and all the other associated paraphernalia—Ashley wasn’t sure she would have even noticed that the year was coming to a close. She joked to friends from other states that south Florida had two seasons: warm and dry, and hot and rainy. There was the occasional cold front that blew through in December or January, but for the most part, Ashley could wear shorts and a tee shirt for Christmas in perfect comfort.

She waved to the guard at the front desk as she strode through the hospital’s entrance, giving the nurses at reception a little smile as well. Ashley glanced around the waiting area and hurried her steps; she could already see that the ER was backed up, and she would be needed as soon as she got dressed. She was surprised they hadn’t called to ask her in early—but then, the hospital was all about cost-cutting whenever possible, and staffing had been slim for a few weeks. Ashley knew the nurses had been grumbling about it; they always caught the brunt of it, both in terms of their paychecks and in terms of their workloads.  Ashley had made it clear to her department head that she was more than happy to float and cover, and she suspected when she looked at the duty board in the break area, she’d find that she’d been pushed to the ER instead of pediatrics. It didn’t bother her—it was a change, and it would, at least, keep her mind occupied, which Ashley needed a great deal.

She was wearing street clothes—she made a point of not coming to work in her scrubs on general principle—and part of her reason for arriving early for all of her shifts was that she had to have time to change. Ashley knew there were a lot of medical assistants, nurses, and even doctors who got into their scrubs before they left from home, and even some that wore them out of the hospital, but Ashley had always been slightly irritated by that. She could understand the convenience, but the whole point of scrubs was that they were easy to keep clean—and cleaner than regular clothes. By wearing them outside of the hospital, Ashley felt like the sanitary aspect of the clothes was diminished.

Ashley had ceased to comment on that irritation to her colleagues, not wanting to develop a reputation as a stickler for rules; what was already going around about her was bad enough. She sighed as she held her ID to the security check on the door that led into the employee lockers. The hospital was standard fare in most respects, from the perspective of an employee; there were ample showers, a bunk room where on-call physicians could nap, a dining area, and the lockers where anyone could get changed. The facilities were separated into men’s and women’s, through most doctors that Ashley had met wouldn’t have even noticed their colleagues’ nudity. After a certain point, with a few exceptions, a body was a body, and not particularly of note.

Ashley stripped out of her street clothes quickly, folding her jeans into a neat rectangle, her blouse in a square on top of it, and the fashionable flats on top of the whole. She took out her scrubs and slipped into the pants first, trying not to think about the voicemail that she had awakened to. She pulled the blouse over her head and tucked it into the pants, tightening the drawstring on the pants as tightly as she could while still remaining comfortable. She reached into her bag and pulled out her shoes and socks from a separate compartment. Ashley had long ago learned that as a doctor, it was the best option for her to invest in a comfortable pair of shoes that was easy to keep clean. She spent a bit more money than some of the other doctors, but she was never complaining at the end of the day about how much her feet ached.

Finally, Ashley pulled out her white lab coat and threw it on over her ensemble, attaching her identification badge on the lapel and bundling her street clothes up, stuffing them into the duffel and putting the duffel into her assigned locker. Her heart was starting to beat faster; she wondered just how backed up things were, what the story was. Ashley took a deep breath and prepared to meet the challenge. Glancing at the duty board as she passed through the break area, Ashley noted that the first several hours of her shift, which would have been in pediatrics, was marked out—with ‘ER’ scribbled in with an arrow indicating that until her scheduled lunch break (and there was no guarantee it would occur at the scheduled time): she was in the understaffed department. Ashley strode through the hallway and closed her eyes for a moment before she reached the door to the hospital proper. She took a deep breath, gathering her composure. There would be a lot of stressed out people, she reminded herself. People in pain, people confused, people who haven’t slept well. It was four o’clock in the morning; for there to be a backlog in the ER, something big must have happened within the past hour. Ashley opened her eyes and settled her face into serene lines. She was going to be on the run from the very moment she clocked in at reception. A moment’s calm before the storm had gotten her through much more frenetic days in the past; it would help again.

Ashley’s hope that the backlog of patients in the ER would keep her mind occupied was a fair one; for hours she was moving so constantly, reading charts, talking to patients and nurses, that there was nothing at all on her mind except for the person in front of her. She had become a successful and well-paid doctor because she had always had the ability to focus strictly on the task at hand—particularly in stressful situations.

Her first patient of the day was an old man who insisted that he was having a heart attack, but was apparently fine enough to ignore her for three whole minutes while he played a game on his phone. Ashley waited for him and evaluated the records of his vitals, not even looking at the man himself until he started clearing his throat. “So when can I get out of here?” he asked her. His heart rate was fine—a little sluggish, but nothing that was outside of the normal for a man of his age. Ashley explained that they had to wait and see what his blood tests revealed; as part of his evaluation, they had taken a sample to check for the markers of a heart attack. Ashley looked over his EKG and decided that it was yet another person who had had a bad case of indigestion, or maybe an anxiety attack at the outside, and rushed to the hospital. She couldn’t dismiss his concerns completely—a heart attack was, after all, a very serious thing—but she was comfortable assuring him that as long as his blood work came back without showing he was free of markers of heart muscle death or other problems, he could be discharged in a few hours. He would be monitored in the meantime.

She rushed to another patient, and another; although Ashley’s entire focus was on her patients when she was in front of them, if she had been asked to pick one of them out from a lineup she was almost certain that she would have no success. There was the woman who insisted that she must have some kind of dread stomach virus—and who refuted the diagnosis of pregnancy on the grounds that she and her boyfriend always used two condoms. It was a reasoning that Ashley had heard more times than she would care to admit; no matter how many times she stressed to the woman that two condoms were a bad idea, that the arrangement had probably caused tearing and that was how she had become pregnant, the woman wouldn’t believe her. Finally, Ashley got a second pregnancy test out of the supplies and sat in the woman’s room with her while she took it. The results were the same. She left the woman with a nurse to discuss her options.

T
here was also the man who refused to be seen by her—claiming that she “had to have been an affirmative action hire,” and therefore no good at her job, being both a woman and black.

Between patients, Ashley learned from one of the other doctors what had caused the backlog. She liked to believe that after years of ER duty, she was inured to trauma, but when she heard that a massive four-car pileup on I-95 had brought in an elderly couple, a middle aged man, a family of four trying to make good time driving in the middle of the night to Disney, and a woman on her way home from the night shift, she had shuddered. The patients had been seen to by the time Ashley had arrived, and all settled in their various rooms, but it had—of course—caused the less urgent cases to be pushed back. And like always, once there was a backup, it tended to last for most of the shift; people came in even as doctors tried to get through patients as quickly as possible.

She hadn’t had to change as yet, which was a minor miracle; the hospital kept several spare changes of scrubs, and several spare lab coats, because between blood, vomit, and other bodily fluids that were the stock-in-trade of sick and injured people, it was impossible to keep clean and presentable through an entire shift. Particularly when the ER was backed up, Ashley had found that she had double the risk of having to change multiple times, stabilizing the patient and waiting to make sure that there would be no more of whatever fluids were flying through the air before she rushed into the employee lockers and grabbed a spare set of clothes at the first opportunity. The ones she owned herself she would bag up and send once or twice a week to the hospital’s medical laundry, tagged with her name. Any she borrowed went into a giant hamper to be part of the daily laundry runs, folded up and distributed to another doctor who needed a quick change.

Ashley finally had the opportunity for a break after the clamor in the ER began to ratchet down several decibels. She went to the cafeteria to grab something to eat quickly, as well as a cup of coffee. She knew she’d only have fifteen minutes total, but Ashley had long before learned how to gobble something down quickly and digest it on the move. When she had been in college, before she had even gone to medical school, Ashley had kept so busy that she had only rarely had time to actually sit down to eat. If she wasn’t going to unpaid internships, or in class, she was rushing off to her job; she had intended to minimize the amount of debt she had leaving college as much as possible, and to some extent she had succeeded. She got in line, checking her watch once or twice, trying not to look too impatient. The sudden lull in activity was like a cue to her mind, and Ashley, who had submerged herself into work with the hope of occupying her thoughts so fully that she couldn’t possibly fixate on what had happened before she had left for work, was suddenly—almost forcibly—thinking about it.

She had awakened at two-thirty, her alarm pulling her out of a deep and restful sleep. When she went to press the button on her phone’s screen to cut off the alarm, she saw that she had a missed call. It was from her ex. Ashley had stared at her phone for a long moment as the alarm tone continued to play, unable to tear her gaze away from the notification. Kent hadn’t called her in months. Since the divorce had been finalized, he had basically dropped off the planet; to the extent that Ashley nearly removed his phone number from her directory more than once, reasoning that he would never call her. She kept it in because if he did call her, she wanted to be able to screen it. She turned off the alarm finally and went to the missed call log. He had left a message.

“Hey, Ashley baby,” his message started. Ashley felt a flash of annoyance at the slight slurring that suggested that he was drunk. “Baby, I just wanted to talk to you. I know you’re probably asleep, but I hope you’ll call me back. I’m a different man, Ashley. I made a huge mistake.”

The early-morning hour meant that the food being served was mostly breakfast, and Ashley grabbed a few donuts—one for herself, a couple for the ladies manning the admitting desk; she got a coffee and a snack-pack of cheese. She knew the donut would burn through her system in less than an hour. The cheese at least would give her some staying power.

After paying, Ashley devoured her donut while moving through the cafeteria, and then munched on the cheese as she moved through the halls. It was a mixture of odds and ends—though sometimes it was nothing more than mozzarella—that the cafeteria had lying around from other applications. There wasn’t much cheese used in the hospital cafeterias; the food was designed to be as healthy as possible, but they did make sandwiches and other food items. Ashley swallowed gulps of coffee to wash down the sharp cheddar, Swiss, and provolone cheeses that were in her snack pack. She had a cooler bag with her lunch in it, but it was in the locker—too far away for her to get into it.

She deposited the donuts at the desk and started looking through the patients waiting in examination rooms once more. It was starting to slow down, but Ashley could tell from the glance she had taken of the admitting area that there were more people starting to come in. She wouldn’t be surprised at all if she ended up spending her entire shift on ER duty. She wouldn’t necessarily have to run her feet off anymore, but Ashley moved back into the steady rhythm of going from patient to patient, spending a few minutes evaluating the patient and making sure to check up on the vitals that had already been taken. She got them as settled as possible, figuring out which of those patients who had come in needed to be fully admitted—given rooms within the emergency department—and which were just in need of a quick shot or a prescription before heading out. In spite of changes in insurance law, there were still many people who came directly to the ER for something that would make more sense to take to an urgent care clinic; Ashley thought ruefully that it wouldn’t be that bad, except that they were always appalled at the bill—and then worse, they didn’t pay it. It was a universally acknowledged fact in the field of medicine that the very last bills any person would ever pay were medical bills.