Bad Case of Loving You

by Laney Cairo

  Messages from the outpatient clinic. Two drug company reps who could safely be ignored. Why did nobody ever leave a message asking me if I wanted to have sex? I’d settle for a date; it didn’t even have to be sex.

  * * *

  By the time the particularly uninspiring young man with the hair falling in his eyes had finished, I was working hard at looking supportive and encouraging when I really just wanted to gouge my eyes out with the PDA that the shy Asian girl was fiddling with. Fuck, if she was playing Snake on it, I’d give her extra marks if she handed it over to me. It had to be more interesting than this tutorial.

  When it was her turn, she put the PDA down, took out her index cards, and began to drone on. Why me? Why did the med school insist on sending their neophytes to me for house training? I must have done something dreadful in a previous life to deserve this.

  Thankfully, she was the last. I nodded, smiled at her, and said, “Mr. Blake, will you hand me over your cards?”

  Blake looked anxiously down at the stack of cards on the table in front of him, then passed them to me.

  They were just about unreadable, but I could make out the scrawled headings. I redid his presentation for him; cut the social history back to four words, spent a couple of hundred on her CT results, another hundred on her Us and Es, and brought the whole lot home in 90 seconds.

  There was a stunned silence around the table as I handed Blake back his cards and said, “For a ten minute presentation, I want some substantial content. Some real meat. I want to hear about treatment options, conservative and interventionist. I want to hear what the real world cost of the treatment is, and how much of the department resources it’s going to consume. I want some discussion of patient compliance, too. No point in using home monitoring if they haven’t got two neurons to rub together. The goal for the hospital has to be to shift management back to the family doctor where possible.”

  The students looked horrified, so I rescued my empty coffee mug, scooped up my files, and left them. No doubt they’d have bitter things to say as soon as I was out of hearing, but I was comfortable with that.

  * * *

  Blake was waiting outside my office at the end of the following day, and I regretted letting him find out where it was so easily. I preferred the students to find it by themselves; it was a good test of initiative to make them locate it through the central hospital directory. Not to mention courage when it came to getting past the guard dog, who was smiling fondly at Blake from behind her tacky magazine. He must have charmed her somehow. I was impressed.

  I opened the door, flopped into my chair, and looked expectantly up at him. He sat down and shuffled his index cards nervously.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I want to redo my presentation.”

  “I’m not going to change your mark.”

  “That’s not… I just want to get it right,” he explained.

  “Okay, I’m listening, but I reserve the right to stop you if it’s crap,” I said. “I’m not being paid enough to sit through presentation reruns.”

  I didn’t have to stop him. He did it cold, no notes, and it was solid and concise. Still unspeakably dull, but renal insufficiency was like that. I stood up and held out my hand to him.

  He looked confused as he stood and took my hand. I shook it. “Congratulations. You’re not a moron. Keep going like that and you’ll restore my faith in humanity.”

  He coloured a little and blinked, his eyelashes tiny fans against his skin, then smiled at me. This must have been what he had done to get past The Secretary From Hell. Fuck, but he was gorgeous, and I let go of his hand before it all became far too embarrassing.

  “Get out of here,” I said, but my voice wasn’t the least bit grouchy.

  Chapter Three

  Lin, the Asian girl, said, “There’s Dr. Maynard in the queue,” grabbing my arm and pulling me behind her up to the junk food counter. All right, so I wasn’t the only student to have noticed he was cute. I followed her, even though I was carrying my own food in my backpack. I could always scrape together the coins to buy a can of soft drink.

  He smiled at both of us in greeting, then leaned across the counter and said, “I’ll have the cardiology special,” to the bored-looking teenager behind it.

  “Righty ho,” she said and took his money.

  “What’s the cardiology special?” Lin asked. “Is it really healthy or something?”

  Dr. Maynard shook his head. “No way. It’s a burger with cheese and fried egg, with fries and a thick shake. The cook changed the name when he noticed that the cardiology team all ordered it. I think they made one of their residents measure the saturated fat in it once.”

  “How much was in it?” I asked. “Just out of morbid curiosity.”

  Lin ordered a salad and Dr. Maynard took the bright yellow shake the girl handed him.

  “Thirty-five grams I think.” He quirked an eyebrow at us.

  “Okay, what’s the recommended maximum daily intake of saturated fat?”

  I looked blankly at him, and Lin promptly said, “Twenty grams, no more than half of the total daily fat intake of forty grams.”

  I ordered a Diet Coke, and Dr. Maynard said, “You haven’t read the latest papers on Aspartame, have you?”

  Point to Dr. Maynard. Now it was my turn. “I’ll worry about my brain tumours if you worry about your arteries.”

  He chuckled and took the plate heaped with chips that the girl held out. “Join us, the pair of you,” he said.

  Lin glanced up at me, looking scared. The medical students usually hid in the back corner of the dining room and tried not to pester the real staff. We were supposed to know our place, but if one of the senior registrars invited us to eat with him, we were probably obliged to accept.

  Then there was the hunk factor. It wasn’t likely that either of us would refuse.

  He was sitting with Jane and another nurse I didn’t recognise, a bloke wearing the same solid red shoulder epaulettes as Jane. Lin and I sat down at the table and Jane nodded at us, then turned her attention back to the guy, who was talking about the Ducati he’d just bought.

  Somehow I’d imagined that the mighty medical types would talk about case studies at lunch, but Dr. Maynard was eating chips and waving his other hand in the air, describing the Indian his father had owned.

  A nurse walked past the table and smiled pointedly at Dr. Maynard. She didn’t look like Jane or the bloke—Daniel, according to his name badge—and it took me a moment to work out how she was different. Her hair was long and in some fancy plait, her uniform was clean, and she had real shoes on, not sneakers. There was a cane basket in her hand, with an expensive lunchbox and some knitting showing. Nothing like Jane and Daniel, with their crumpled, splotched uniforms and hamburgers.

  “Hi, Andrew,” she said, throwing in a wriggle as she went past.

  Jane leaned forward and said, “FDO,” to Lin and me under her breath.

  “What’s that?” Lin asked, keeping her voice down.

  “’Fucks Doctors Only’,” Daniel explained.

  Dr. Maynard nodded. “Registrar’s Mattresses. You’ll get to pick them; they invariably work in ICU.”

  Lin and I exchanged glances, then we both burst out laughing. Jane waved a chip at us and said, “Sure, you think it’s funny now. Just wait until you’re a resident, it won’t be quite so funny, then, especially if they find out you’re planning on specialising in something profitable.”

  “Not gen med,” Dr. Maynard said. “Orthos make a decent living, but I’ve always thought dermatology was the way to go for a career path. None of your patients ever die, none of them get better, and you never have to get out of bed in the middle of the night. Either of you thought about what area you want to work in?”

  I shook my head. “Just getting through finals is enough of a goal at the moment. Getting through and not stuffing up badly.”

  Lin said, “I really like lab work. I’d like to do micro.”

  Dr.
Maynard stared at Lin for a moment. I must admit I thought she was pretty weird, too. “I don’t think either of you have anything to worry about with your finals. And you’ll both make damn good doctors.”

  I was inordinately pleased with Dr. Maynard’s praise, and wished I shared his confidence in our abilities.

  “Hospitals are strange,” I said, and everyone besides Lin cracked up. She just nodded sympathetically beside me.

  Smart one, Blake. Now I looked even more like an idiot.

  That would serve me right for opening my mouth and just letting words fall out. I bit into my cheese sandwich, trying to salvage some dignity, and Dr. Maynard patted my shoulder reassuringly.

  “They are,” he agreed. “Weird shit happens here.”

  All right, we had a full-on lust situation here. Serious chemistry. Fuck, but his hand felt good, and my overactive imagination thought that it slid off my shoulder a little too slowly.

  Tomorrow I was wearing my pink triangle earring.

  Chapter Four

  I was exasperated. There was no other word for it. Nevins was staring at me like a deer trapped by car headlights, so I smiled at the poor patient who was retching and indicated with my head for the students to follow me out of the cubicle.

  “Okay, who here has actually inserted a naso-gastric tube?” I asked.

  There was a universal shaking of heads.

  “Can any of you at least tell me how to check that one is correctly positioned?” I was going to throttle someone soon.

  If it wasn’t Nevins, it’d be whoever was supposed to have taught them this stuff already.

  Lin said, “Um, there’s three ways, Dr. Maynard. Litmus paper to test acidity of aspirate, auscultation for gurgling of injected air, and X-ray confirmation of the location of the radio-opaque tip.” She looked like she was about to cry, so I smiled reassuringly at her.

  “Absolutely right. Now, Blake, tell me about the relative merits of each method.”

  Long eyelashes fluttered and I noticed Blake’s earring.

  That was brave of him, and I wondered for a moment if this was a response to the discussion of the predatory nurses here.

  During this moment, Blake got his shit together and retrieved a textbook answer from his memory.

  “Good,” I said when he’d finished. “Follow me.”

  I took them to the storeroom and searched the shelves and bins for a little while, then grabbed a handful of NGT kits and lube sachets. “Here,” I said. “Go home tonight and practice on yourself. I’m not letting you learn on an unsuspecting member of the general public.”

  There was a stunned silence from the little dears before they took their kits and filed out of the storeroom. Blake was last, and as he walked past, I said quietly, “Nice earring.”

  I was out of line, of course, since that was almost flirting, and I expected Blake to just pretend he hadn’t heard, but he paused and looked at me sideways.

  “Do you have one, too?” he asked, and he coloured a little.

  My eyes were fixed on his mouth now, and God help me, but I was getting hard. We were definitely into flirting territory now.

  “No, but I should have.” My eyes dropped for an instant to Blake’s hands. He was squeezing the sachet of lube between his fingers. I glanced at the door of the storeroom, even though I knew there was no way we could lock ourselves in here.

  Nevins appeared in the doorway and we both let out long breaths of relief. Jesuuuus, but things had been about to get out of hand. “Um, Dr. Maynard,” he said. “I need more lube. I just burst the sachet.”

  He held out one hand, which was dripping lube.

  I cracked. Between the combination of sexual tension and the dawning realization I was actually flirting with a sexual harassment suit, as well as a student, it was all too much. I clung onto the shelving beside me and shook with laughter.

  I waved a hand feebly at the bin containing the lube sachets, and Nevins took another one with his clean hand.

  When he’d gone, I looked at Blake, shaking my head in disbelief and still chuckling. He was grinning back at me, a hundred megawatt smile that warmed me all the way through.

  As Jane frequently said, JesusfuckingChrist.

  “Back to work,” I said to him. “Let’s go eke out the public health system’s resources a little further by exploiting the free labour you people represent.”

  * * *

  Thud.

  I leaned forward and thumped my head softly on the table again.

  Thud.

  “No,” I said, my voice a little muffled until I sat up again.

  “That is wrong on so many levels.” The spotty kid, who had been reading from his Palm Pilot, paused and peered at me through his spectacles.

  “What did I say wrong?” the student asked, and I glared at him.

  “You cannot say that being black is a risk factor for heart disease.”

  “But it is…” he spluttered. “Our pathophysiology textbook says so…”

  “Then your textbook is wrong.” Judging by the look on the kid’s face I had said something scandalous. “It’s the social disadvantages that go with being black that are the risk factors: being poor, being malnourished, having a lower standard of education, and impaired access to health care. There is nothing intrinsic about skin colour that affects heart disease risk.”

  “But…” the kid said, and I shook my head.

  “That’s just crap,” I said. “Just like being gay isn’t a risk factor for HIV infection. It’s the sexual activity itself that is the risk factor, not the orientation. Read your textbooks with a critical mind, people. Deep-seated prejudices run through them.”

  There was stony silence around the table, though Blake was looking smug and managing to mostly hide it.

  “Have any of you got a textbook with you?” I asked. “I’ll show you what I mean.”

  I’d politicise these brats before this was over. It was that, or I was going to wind up cancelling the tutorial and stomping out.

  Nevins handed over a textbook from his backpack.

  Excellent; it was a reproductive anatomy text; I couldn’t have asked for a better example.

  Five seconds in the index gave me the page I wanted. “Tell me what’s wrong with this passage,” I said, and I began to read: “Menstruation is the failure to achieve pregnancy. If the egg released at ovulation is not fertilised, the corpus luteum degenerates, the endometrium deteriorates and the necrotic tissue is lost through the vagina.”

  I waited, and no one said anything. “Well?” I prompted.

  I banged the text down on the table, making them all jump. “Menstruation is the failure to achieve pregnancy?

  What sort of sexist rubbish is that?”

  More silence, but at least it looked like some of them had got the point. “And what about the language? Failure?

  Degenerates? Deteriorates? This is entrenched prejudice, people. I want all of you to rewrite this passage…” I checked the page number, “on page sixty-seven in culturally neutral terms. For tomorrow.”

  I pushed Nevins’s book back across the table to him, picked up my files, and left them sitting around the table with looks of horror on their faces. They were going to have to grow some left-wing sensibilities if they were going to train in the public health system.

  Chapter Five

  It hurt, there was no way around it. I pulled the NGT out of my nose and smeared more lube on the end. Of all of the things I’d ever done with lube, I’d never put it up my nose before, and it seemed intrinsically wrong.

  Following the adage that ‘too much lube is almost enough’ helped, and this time I managed to get the tube into the back of my nose. The back of the throat bit was worse, even with sipping water to help it down, but I did it, despite a couple of hangover-type retches.

  In the mirror I’d reached the mark I’d made on the tube, so I put the 20ml syringe on the end of the tube and aspirated.

  Yuck.

  Ramen noodles.
r />   That was definitely in the right place. This was reaching a new stage of hideousness.

  When I’d hauled the tube back out again, I had a new appreciation for the whole process. Guess that was what Dr.

  Maynard had intended.

  I dropped the tube into the green garbage bag hanging off my wardrobe door and stretched out on my bed, ignoring the textbooks digging into my side.

  Fuck, but the term Registrar’s Mattress had real appeal right now. That man was hot, and if the circumstances had been different, I would have jumped him today. Oh, yeah, jumped him hard. I still couldn’t quite believe he’d hit on me, that we’d been standing there like that, both staring at the lube I’d been holding.

  Then that fuckwit Nevins had blundered in. Dr. M. had been right, it had been screamingly funny in a frustrated, unbearably horny way and I wasn’t sure what might have happened if we hadn’t been interrupted. We couldn’t have shagged, not on the ward…

  I groaned quietly.

  …but we could have done something… even snogging would have been heaven.

  There was lube left from my NGT learning curve experience, so I unzipped myself and curled slick fingers around my cock.

  * * *

  Dr. M looked even more gorgeous the next morning at rounds and I decided I was well on my way to being obsessed with the man. I was a pushover, totally.

  He, however, seemed miles removed from the bloke who had tried to pick me up the day before. In the staff room, he was grim and distant.

  “Who actually attempted to insert a NGT last night?” he asked.

  About half of us put our hands up.

  “Who succeeded?”

  Lin and I were the only ones who kept our hands up.

  “Fine,” he said. “Everyone else is in this room at the end of rounds, practicing on each other.” Relief swept through me. If there was anything worse than having to insert a NGT in myself, it was holding still while one of these clowns did it.