The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  Chapter Fourteen

  NO SEX FOR SIX WEEKS

  Late Summer, 1999: Louisville, Kentucky

  Zadie

  Some fourteen hours after my call room encounter with Dr. X, I let myself into the old house I shared with Emma, who was out. Both of us had a flair for design, and although we were impoverished medical students, we’d managed to cobble together a stylish abode, with metallic green and purple and yellow throw pillows, brightly hued quilts, framed posters of the obscure hippie sixties bands we loved, photographs of our friends scattered about, and many recently deceased plants.

  It was the first time I’d been alone in almost forty hours. I wanted a moment to savor the astonishing events of the preceding long day. I’d done some actual surgery, I had survived a volley of questioning by Dr. Markham at TICU rounds—not just survived, even, but distinguished myself with coherent answers miraculously pulled out of the ether—and finally, I’d had the dizzying encounter with Dr. X.

  Men in general were difficult to interpret, as every woman since the dawn of time will attest, but it was hard to know what to make of this. There was quite an unequal footing. Dr. X was a fifth-year resident, a chief; at the end of this year he would be in private practice or, more likely, in a fellowship somewhere, tacking on an extra year or more of subspecialty training. I actually knew very little about him. He was from somewhere in the Northeast, he drove a sports car of some sort, he lived in Louisville’s Highlands neighborhood, and he liked Rage Against the Machine. I had gleaned these things from casual conversation with the team, but now, with a mixture of dawning shame and curiosity, I realized he might as well have been Dr. Markham for all I knew about him.

  My pager vibrated. It was an unfamiliar number; not the hospital’s prefix, so it was probably one of my girlfriends trying to lure me out.

  “What’s up, Zadie?” It was Dr. X, apparently summoned by the power of my musings. His voice was low and smooth; suddenly, I couldn’t remember what he looked like.

  “Hi,” I said, for lack of anything witty to say.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “I’m . . . whirling around in confusion,” I admitted. “And I’m wiped.”

  “Why are you confused?” He sounded concerned.

  “I don’t make a habit of hurtling into bed with strange surgeons. Or anybody at work. Or anybody, actually.”

  “Yeah.” There was a short silence, then: “Just so you know, I generally don’t hurtle into bed with medical students either.”

  “Good.” I smiled to myself.

  “Usually they’re nurses.”

  “What?”

  “Kidding! This is an unusual feeling, though.” I recalled his face after he’d turned on the light in my call room: What had that look been? Interest? Calculation? Attraction?

  “What feeling is that?”

  “Well . . . you’re an intriguing girl—you know that? You are hard to intimidate, and you’re funny.” He lowered his voice even more. “And you’re very sexy.”

  “You’re not hideous yourself.”

  In a smooth growl: “Why don’t you come over?”

  “What, now?” I would have sworn I’d have been unconscious within two seconds of getting home, but now I felt a perverse spike of energy.

  “Yes, now.”

  “I . . . Aren’t you tired?”

  “I don’t get tired. And I kind of miss having a med student around; there’s nobody here to cater to my whims.”

  “Wow, this conversation has really taken a turn for the worse,” I said, smiling in spite of—or maybe because of—the absolute wrongness of this. I paused. “That was revolting. I’m contacting an attorney.”

  “Are you?” he asked, after the tiniest hesitation.

  I smiled again. “No,” I said. “I’m coming over.”

  —

  I awoke late the next morning, feeling excited, although it took me a moment to remember why. The light was streaming in through my bedroom window, matching the ridiculous, sunny grin that I could feel plastered to my face.

  Last night had been dreamy, otherworldly; my memory of it came back in wispy, wordless fragments. I’d knocked on his door and he’d opened it and pulled me inside without a sound. The feel of his slightly rough cheek pressed to mine, his hands in my hair. A pulsing, engulfing, crazy longing. Darkness and sweetness.

  I’d seen nothing of his apartment beyond the foyer, where we’d fallen to the floor. Afterward, he had insisted on driving me home, apparently worried that I’d plow into a building as soon as I was out of sight. Despite the minimal sleep I’d gotten, I felt exuberant. I’d been telling the truth when I told him it wasn’t a habit for me to do this; I’d been celibate, and somewhat lonely, since the end of my relationship with my longtime college boyfriend more than a year ago. In Dr. X’s presence I felt that weird, supercharged zing that you get only a few times in life, when you are perfectly compatible with someone else. With him, I was a more vivid version of myself.

  —

  Morning trauma rounds commenced. Dr. Markham was grilling the unlucky intern on Emma’s team with some incomprehensible questions about the ventilation-perfusion curve. I was consumed with impatience: Dr. X had leaned into me at the start of prerounds, his breath warm on my ear, and whispered, “What are you doing later?”

  “Depends on what my chief has planned,” I whispered back.

  With an insouciant grin: “Postrounds evaluation in my call room, Z.”

  My month on trauma was almost finished; tonight would be the last night of in-house call. As much as I liked the service, I was happy that it was nearly over. The thrill of sneaking around with Dr. X had waned. I wanted a real date.

  We ran the list after trauma rounds concluded, Dr. X assigning us our workload for the morning. We were instructed to be finished before the day’s new carnage began rolling in.

  “Last but not least: Garage Trauma. Sixty-two-year-old Abdominal Catastrophe, first day of graduation from the unit. Still some fallout from the last FUBAR, when good Dr. Clancy here nicked the bowel. Obviously, that one is for you, Ellington, since you now specialize in bowel disasters; schedule a washout for today. Speedy here can assist you.” Dr. X motioned toward Ethan.

  Val, the charge nurse, cut a quick glance at Clancy, who was unabashedly ogling a nursing assistant’s butt. Val turned back to Dr. X.

  “You’re going to supervise the washout, right?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Dr. X said hastily, saluting. “Zadie, did you write discharge instructions for the floor patients for me to sign?”

  “I did. Mostly. I have a question,” I said, scribbling away on the last set of papers for the patients going home that day.

  “Proceed.”

  “Why do we tell them no sex for six weeks?”

  A flash of deep dimples. The rest of the team began to giggle. I blinked; I’d been industriously writing this on every patient’s discharge for the last several weeks. I looked up as they broke into full-on laughter.

  “We are controlling future trauma populations,” Dr. X said firmly. “But, ah, no need to mention this to Dr. Hollister. Okay, everybody disperse.”

  I waited a beat for the dispersal to take place and then stuck out my tongue. He cocked an eyebrow at me and smirked. “Yes, Z?”

  I decided not to give him the satisfaction of admitting he’d gotten me. Again. He delighted in coming up with the most preposterous things solely for the fun of messing with me. “Nothing,” I cooed. “I have a ton of work to do.”

  “Zadie.”

  I turned back, unable to suppress a smile tinged with triumph.

  He craned his head toward me, growling directly in my ear. “I’ll help you.”

  “Oooh! How nice. In exchange for what?”

  “Meet me in my call room in five minutes, you little witch.” He
walked off, his long white coat flapping with each lengthy stride. Even looking at the back of his head made me weak with desire. This was likely not the way the medical school had envisioned the student experience, to be sure, but it was a good . . . education.

  I gave him the requested five minutes and headed for the stairs. When I opened the door to the stairwell, the hall looked empty. I bolted out and ducked into Dr. X’s room.

  Inside, a desk lamp offered a pale circle of light in the windowless space. X was seated at the veneered desk, and rose at my entrance. I took a single step inside and we fell into each other, brutally kissing, tearing at our scrubs, knocking over the lamp and the books piled on his desk. He plunged his hands into my hair, roughly twisting it. My lips parted and I let my head fall back, exposing my throat. I was unaware that I was crying out until he shoved something into my mouth—a sock? an OR mask?—and murmured “Shhh” into my ear. I struggled to breathe through my nose. He turned me away from him, still holding the cloth in my mouth. His other hand was savagely gripping the curve of my hip bone. Our pagers both sounded, and I registered the sound dimly. I struggled and spat the cloth out, but Dr. X, still standing behind me, stifled me by wrapping his arm around my neck so that I could not move my head. With his other hand, he reached up to my face and, with startling gentleness, caressed my cheekbones and eyelids and lips. A drumming noise filled my ears and my head and my chest, the dominating pulse of my blood churning through my carotid arteries. I closed my eyes, my arousal nearly unbearable.

  He was motionless behind me except for the fine, soft exploration of his fingers on my immobilized face. The rushing in my ears faded but—oh, no—the drumming noise continued. Grudgingly, I accepted that this must have been the blades of the hospital helicopter, pulsing some ten floors above us, but just audible enough through the ventilation system so that there was never really an escape from the sound of some incoming disaster. Our pagers beeped again.

  We stood still for a moment longer, trying to regain our breath, fighting the longing to ignore the summons and give in to what was now a maddening desire. Dr. X swore. The code was doubtless starting by now. He released me and said, “You first. Run.”

  I ran. My lips were chapped and swollen, my skin was flushed to an alarming pink, my hair was bunched up in a comb-proof combination of tangles and dreadlocks, and I was hyperventilating in uncontrolled gasps. There was no doubt I’d be of little use to anyone during the trauma code; I’d be lucky not to actively impede it by bursting in and passing out.

  When I reached the ER, I slowed to a trot and tried to slip behind the curtain to Trauma Bay 2 as unobtrusively as possible.

  This actually proved to be easy. The patient on the table had some sort of ghastly neck injury; he was spraying bright red arterial blood in staccato spurts, which had doused the ceiling, walls, and floors with the force of a fire hose. Everyone in the abattoir appeared to have sustained a direct hit, as they were all bloody to the point of being nearly unrecognizable.

  “Continue CPR,” said Allison Kalena to the ER nurse, who was most directly in the line of fire.

  “What are you doing?” screamed Clancy at another nurse who was holding a syringe. “Don’t give him any more fucking epinephrine!”

  “His heart’s stopping,” the nurse said to Dr. Kalena, ignoring Clancy. “What do you want me to do?”

  “He’s going to bleed out faster with the pressors, so hold the epi until we get some more fluid in him,” said Allison. “Where’s our O neg?”

  “On the way.”

  “Okay, get another quad lumen kit; I’ll add a femoral line, and you guys keep pumping it in. Ah, Zadie,” she said, catching sight of me. “Get up here.”

  I obeyed. Dr. Kalena handed me a wad of sterile dressings and instructed, “Hold pressure right here. We might keep him alive long enough to get to the OR.”

  “Allison, he’s toast,” Clancy argued. “He must have ripped off every branch of the external carotid. He’s stroked out by now.”

  “We can ligate what we have to—he should have good posterior circulation,” she replied, deftly threading a wire through a large needle jutting out of the patient’s groin.

  I couldn’t resist. “What happened?”

  “Meet Lima Trauma,” Clancy answered. “Piñata mishap at his kid’s birthday party—he got gouged through the neck with the splintered end of a stick.”

  “Hold CPR,” a voice from the back of the room called. Dr. X appeared. He surveyed the havoc briefly, and noting that the patient did have a heartbeat again—someone had hung the blood and I was still holding on, literally, for dear life—he called out, “Call the OR. We’re going in.”

  We scrubbed quickly, watching through the OR window as the nurses flew around the room opening various instrument kits. Just as we were about to start, the trauma pagers blared again. Dr. Kalena, Clancy, and Ethan departed.

  I braced for a long and uncomfortable slog. For the first hour, I held a delicate retractor while the two men grafted and ligated, my arms locked in an increasingly uncomfortable position until I could no longer control their shaking. The vascular surgeon, a genial British fellow named Markey, peered out over his loupes as my tired forearm muscles started vibrating enough to shake the entire surgical field, and said, “Have a little stretch, dear. I remember those days of endless retractor holding. Dr. X will have to make this up to you later.” Even in the midst of this hushed life-or-death drama, I could tell X was grinning under his mask.

  “Yes, sir, he will,” I replied. “I’m so sorry to distract you.”

  “Not at all. Dr. X can take your place for a moment.”

  I had not yet released my hand when the anesthesiologist let out a muffled curse from behind the patient’s head. “Sorry, boys. We’ve got some rhythm issues,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” Dr. Markey asked.

  “Runs of V-tach. We’re waiting on repeat electrolytes— Oh shit.” A nonstop beeping sound began. “He’s in V-fib,” the anesthesiologist called. “Shock him.”

  The nurses sprang into action, ordering everyone to stand clear. Dr. Markey said sharply to the anesthesiologist, “What’s the last hemoglobin?”

  “Waiting on it now. How much have we lost in the last ten minutes?”

  “Third shock delivered,” said the circulator, as the patient’s body jerked on the table.

  “Five hundred CCs,” Markey replied, backing away from the table with his hands up as if surrendering.

  “Resuming CPR,” announced the scrub nurse. The surgeons jumped back up to the table, everyone craning their heads to see the monitor, which demonstrated an ominous series of jagged green peaks and valleys. The anesthesiologist called out, “Giving epi now, one milligram,” at the exact moment that the monitor changed back into a recognizable sinus rhythm. With no one holding pressure on the myriad little open arteries in the neck, the vasoconstriction of the epinephrine caused a Vesuvius of blood to erupt, a high-force hail of magma pulsing out in all directions. Dr. X and Dr. Markey were instantly drenched, even behind their eye shields. The circulator bounded over to sponge off their faces.

  “Motherfuckingshitsonofabitch,” swore Dr. X. Then, to Dr. Markey: “Can you ligate anything?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t see shit,” replied Dr. Markey in his posh British voice. “Suction! Here!”

  “Aaaah!” cried the scrub nurse, who was blasted in the face while leaning over with a Yankauer tip. Dr. Markey snatched the tube from her and attempted to suction as much blood as possible from the field. Inspired, I rolled up a small surgical cloth and carefully placed it at the inferior aspect of the open wound, compressing as firmly as possible everything beneath it. This slowed the battalion of geysers in Lima’s neck, dulling them down to burbling red fountains. “Oh, well-done,” breathed Dr. Markey. We peered into the bloodbath. There were oozing little vessels everywhere, and one or two larger on
es, on which Dr. Markey and X immediately set to work.

  “Dr. Markey?” I asked timidly, looking at the white face of the young father. “Will he make it?”

  X’s pager chirped, a reminder beep for a message we’d all missed during the explosion.

  “It’s from Dr. Kalena,” the circulator read. “She says they’ve got the new one—Edict Trauma. Twenty-six-year-old pregnant female, gunshot wound to the head.”

  —

  “Last but not least, this is hospital day two for Edict Trauma, a twenty-six-year-old female at eighteen weeks gestation, status post-GSW to the left temporal lobe,” Ethan droned the next morning, by now immune to sentiment even though he was talking about a pregnant person who’d been shot in the head. We’d just finished rounding on Lima Trauma, who had somehow survived surgery and hung on through the night. “She’s day-one status post craniotomy with clot evacuation.”

  “You can skip the rest of the history, Speedy, since we just spent all night with her,” X allowed. He hadn’t shaved, and he sported blond stubble that lent him a rakish look. “Vitals?”

  Ethan vomited a cascade of numbers. “Pulse of 84, BP 105/65, temperature 98.2. She remains on the vent, with 96 percent O2 saturation on AC 10, PEEP of 5, Fi02 50 percent.”

  “We need to replace her line,” said X, reading something on his sign-off sheet and frowning. “A femoral line from the ER is not the most sterile access.”

  “Yes, sir, you did mention that yesterday,” Ethan mumbled.

  “Val?” X was still looking at his notes. “Page me when the family gets back so I can discuss her prognosis. We’ll do it first thing after rounds. Respiratory was concerned that her endotracheal tube might be developing a cuff leak, so we’ll change that out. Ethan, you have a case with Hollister, so, Zadie, you stay with me and we’ll get it done. Let’s try to get out at a decent time today, team; I have important plans tonight.”

  “Yes, Dr. X,” Val said.