Broken Oaths in White Coats novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Dead Badge

Her badge fails in front of the whole lobby until a visiting trauma surgeon swipes her in, and then she learns her transplant patient's donor heart is already in the OR with Janelle listed as lead surgeon.

Norma Brenneman opened her front door at midnight in a flannel robe and did not ask me a single question.

She looked at my gown, my coat and my bare left hand.

"Kettle's on," she said. "You're in the back room. Don't argue."

I did not argue. I lay on her spare bed in the dress and did not sleep.

At five-thirty she knocked and held out a pair of her husband's scrub pants and a clean grey sweater.

"You're going in," she said.

"I'm on leave."

"You're on leave from six. It's five-thirty." She tapped her watch. "I've worked with you for eleven years. I know where you'll be at six."

She drove me to Lakeview herself, in a station wagon that smelled of peppermint.

The lobby was already full of the morning shift, nurses with coffee, a transport team, two residents arguing over a pager.

I walked up to the badge reader at the staff entrance and held my card to it.

The light stayed red.

I held it again, and it beeped twice and stayed red.

The security guard on the desk looked down at his screen and then, with great care, at his own hands.

"Dr. Falkland," he said. "I'm sorry. The system says you're on medical leave."

"It's six-oh-four," I said. "My leave started four minutes ago, and I haven't been told by anyone."

"I'm sorry, doctor."

Behind me the lobby had gone quiet. Forty people wanted to look and were pretending not to.

Someone's phone was playing a video at low volume. I knew the voice on it.

It was mine, saying, Room 1207.

Norma stepped up beside me. "I've got twenty years in this building," she told him. "You'll buzz her through."

"I can't, Norma. The order came from the chief's office."

The chief of surgery. My husband had put my name into his own system before the applause had even died.

"Dr. Falkland is on leave," the guard said again, quieter.

"She's with me," said a man's voice behind us.

I turned.

I had met him exactly once, in an elevator, three weeks earlier.

He was a trauma surgeon on a one-year contract from Minneapolis.

He was tall, with sandy hair going grey and a nose that had been broken once and set a little crooked.

Dr. Almqvist. "Ben," he had said in the elevator, and then nothing else for six floors.

He was wearing wrinkled scrubs and looked as though he had been up all night.

He held his own badge to the reader and the light went green.

"Dr. Almqvist," the guard said. "She's on medical leave, sir."

"Then she's a visitor," said Ben. "And visitors get escorted, and I'm escorting one. Hospital policy. Page nine of the handbook."

The guard blinked at him. "Is that on page nine?"

"I have no idea," said Ben. "Neither do you. Let us through."

The guard pressed the button.

I went through the door without looking back at the lobby. I could feel every phone on my back.

In the corridor Ben stopped at the elevators and pushed the call button.

"I'm not doing this for the headlines," he said. "I watched the video last night. After that, I'd have walked you in if you were sleepwalking."

"You didn't have to."

"No," he agreed. "I wanted to."

The elevator opened. He held the door.

I was about to say thank you when Norma's pager went off at her belt.

She looked at it. Her face changed.

"Laurel," she said. "It's your sixty-three-year-old. The man in the corner bed."

He had been on my transplant list for fourteen months.

A donor heart had come in at four that morning.

"They called the match overnight," Norma said. "He was prepped at five."

"Who's his surgeon?" I asked. "It was supposed to be me."

Norma held the pager out so I could see the screen.

Under Primary Surgeon, where my name had been for fourteen months, it said: Penhall, P.

"Alastair moved the board listing at eleven last night," Norma said. "Right after the gala. She's been in there with the donor heart for forty minutes, Laurel. And she's never done a transplant by herself."

My hands were shaking.

Not from fear, exactly. From how badly I wanted to put them on that heart.

"Is there anyone else scrubbed in?" I asked.

"Just the new fellow. Alastair's told the whole floor that nobody should disturb her."

Ben was still holding the elevator door.

"Which OR?" he asked.

"Four," said Norma.

"I'm trauma. I don't have privileges in cardiac." He looked at me. "But I'd bet my badge that you do."

"I'm on leave."

"So you keep saying."

I stepped into the elevator.

The doors closed on the lobby, the guard and the phone still playing my own voice.

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