by Sonia Henry
The morning doctors start to arrive, and I meet Estelle out the front of the emergency department. She looks haggard. I put an arm around her shoulders.
‘Let’s get the fuck away from this place,’ I say with feeling.
Estelle manages a small grin. ‘You know, even Poo Palace doesn’t seem that bad at the moment.’
We walk home in silence, lost in our own worlds. We’re just about to turn into our street when I feel a sense of recklessness come over me.
‘Let’s go for an adventure,’ I tell Estelle.
She doesn’t look too enthused, but I force her along anyway.
‘Come on, run!’ I say, and start to sprint towards the road that heads out into farmland.
Estelle shrugs, but she runs with me.
It feels good to stretch my legs. I take huge strides, flying through the air in the quiet of the morning. We run and run and run, until we’re surrounded by grass and trees, with the hospital and the memory of the night fading in the light of the morning.
When we finally stop, we both bend over, our chests heaving. My face is covered in sweat. Estelle’s cheeks are flushed a bright pink, and she is gasping for breath.
‘I need to lie down,’ she says, panting.
I crawl under the fence running beside the road, and she follows me. We’re surrounded by rows of orange trees laden with fruit. Some of the oranges are small and hard, but others are big and ripe, ready to be picked.
We throw ourselves down among the trees.
‘I don’t know why life feels so hard all the time,’ Estelle says, shielding her face from the sun with her hand as she stares up into the oranges, ‘when really it’s pretty simple.’
I know what she means. I close my eyes, and let the gentle breeze soothe my frazzled mind.
I hear Estelle’s breathing become regular sighs. Totally exhausted from the night, she has fallen asleep.
I don’t wake her up.
I relax into the soft grass, for some reason remembering the odd conversation I’d had with the Smiling Assassin just before I left for Wingabby. She’d recited a passage from one of my favourite books.
Lines from Through the Looking-Glass float across the blue sky above me now, threading around the fluffy white clouds.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die.
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?
It feels like we have stepped into Wonderland. This comforts me. Even in pain, I think, I can still find beauty.
In the orchard of orange trees, my nightmares are no more.
twenty-four
After that night, all we can think about is getting back to Sydney. Max crosses off the days on a calendar. ‘Thirty-four to go,’ he says grimly one afternoon, ‘which means five more remedial drivers’ lessons.’ It’s also crawling towards winter, which is a relief. The ward, despite still being hellish, is at least a more tolerable temperature.
The Godfather has slept with nearly every single nurse in the hospital and is feeling the pressure. ‘I don’t think people really like me out here,’ he says nervously over a beer in our living room. ‘The nurses are all banding together against me.’
‘Well, you didn’t have to sleep with all of them,’ Estelle points out. ‘You didn’t have to take such a mass destruction approach.’
‘Or mass seduction,’ I pipe up, smiling.
I spend every waking minute that I’m not at the hospital reading about glioblastoma and trying frantically to finish the literature review for Wolfgang Dietrich. It’s becoming incredibly tedious. Wolfgang tears to shreds every draft I send him but offers only vague suggestions for improvement. I’m starting to wonder whether I should bother persevering; his feedback has been largely negative, and I doubt I have a chance of the paper being accepted into the conference line-up. I’m halfway through a draft email suggesting that I withdraw from the project, when Wolfgang beats me to the punch.
Great news, Katarina! The abstract has been accepted! We have prevailed!
The word ‘we’ is a little galling, considering I’ve done all the work—but, as Max points out, that’s the beauty of being a senior consultant surgeon.
‘Everyone does the work for you and you take most of the credit,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t worry, Kitty, only another twenty-five years before we get there ourselves.’
I send admin an email confirming I’m going to use my study leave to fly to Sweden to present the paper, and they respond more positively than usual, knowing it will reflect well on the hospital to be seen as a centre of research excellence that offers its juniors such wonderful opportunities.
I ring Mum to tell her the good news. She is over the moon. ‘My daughter, the future surgeon, off to present at an international conference!’ she says. ‘I’ve told you that story about when you were born, haven’t I? About your fingers being long? Surgeon’s fingers!’
‘Yes,’ I say, refraining from adding, Like a billion fucking times. Why do you think I’m doing this?
I’m so focused on surviving Wingabby and finishing the research on time I can barely think about the fact that I’ll return to Sydney only to get on another plane to fly straight to Europe. I want to be excited but only feel anxious.
The good thing about being so busy is it makes the time go much more quickly. The days are long, but the weeks are becoming shorter, and shorter again. Before I know it, Max’s calendar has only six days and one remedial drivers’ lesson remaining.
And there’s another bright spot on the horizon. Despite my fear that it will only lead to heartbreak, when I see on Facebook that Fabien is leaving South America and heading to Europe, I send him a message to tell him about my own trip.
Maybe we can meet at a coffee shop, he messages back as I’m wading through the Johanssen paper on glioblastoma operative outcomes.
Or we could just get really drunk at a bar, I write back.
I didn’t think doctors got drunk.
I allow myself a small smirk.
We decide we will meet. The conference only goes for a day and I assume I won’t want to be spending a huge amount of time in Sweden with surgeons I’ve never met, so I allow myself to do something that makes me truly happy. I book myself a flight to Amsterdam, and Fabien books his. We send each other screenshots of our respective e-tickets and I nearly cry with joy.
Maybe I’m just a simple creature after all. Away from the operating theatre and glioblastomas and dying children, what fills my heart is booking a flight across Europe to see the ski bum I met three years ago.
‘Being a doctor doesn’t make a person happy,’ Estelle says bluntly when I tell her this. ‘It just makes you confused.’
‘Agreed,’ Max chimes in. ‘You leave the operating theatre at midnight and feel great because you’ve just done a heart transplant or something equally hectic. But then you get home and there’s no one there, or worse a partner you’ve been cheating on every other second because you’re such a fucking mess, and all your mates are at work or asleep, then you realise you’re actually really lonely and depressed, and all you have to look forward to is waking up and going back to the hospital.’
‘That’s why you’ve got Stilnox,’ the Godfather points out.
‘To avoid all that unnecessary reflection.’
We spend our final night in Wingabby getting drunk at Poo Palace. Estelle says she has a surprise for us and produces a huge bag of oranges and a juicer.
‘I went back to the orchard Kitty and I found,’ she says, looking pleased with herself, ‘and I picked as many oranges as I could.’
I recall the rows of trees. Estelle, stricken from her terrible night shift, had found comfort among the trees and returned to pick the oranges to make vodka oranges for her friends. Life continues, glass by glass. Who says that alcohol doesn’t bring people together?
Max loves the
juicer, and orange after orange goes through. Vodka after vodka is thrown back. We toast the best orange juice in the world, Max’s remedial drivers’ certificate, the Godfather’s nurse success rate, Estelle’s survival of her night shifts (just), and me finishing my research paper. We toast each other well into the night.
‘We survived,’ Max says before we retire to our beds. ‘It was touch and go for a while there, but we survived.’
I raise my last vodka and orange. Cheers to survival.
Doctors worry constantly about patients surviving. We fear death and suffering and blame. Our own survival seems unimportant by comparison. The doctor saves the child, or doesn’t. Who saves the doctor?
These questions are hard to answer, and my brain is tired. On my last night in Wingabby, I dream of a horse eating an orange. The horse is alive and the orange is ripe. I wake up to the sun rising and hear Estelle in the shower, getting ready to take one of the only two taxis in Wingabby to the airport.
We have orange juice for breakfast. Survival tastes sweet.
twenty-five
Winnie is shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Max, you are so bad!’
Max looks sheepish. ‘Did I tell you I came top of the remedial drivers’ course, though?’ he says.
We’re back at number 19, having coffee with Winnie in the kitchen before work. We’d kept in touch with her from Wingabby, and while Max had kept quiet about his misadventures I’d happily spilled the beans.
When Max produces his remedial drivers’ certificate, Winnie loses the plot and laughs so hard I worry she’ll aspirate.
‘It’s good to have you both home,’ she says when she has regained the power of speech.
‘Yeah, but Kitty’s flying to Sweden the day after tomorrow,’ Max reminds her.
‘I know,’ Winnie says, looking jealous. ‘I wish I was going to Sweden, instead of being stuck here arguing with the neighbours about who owns which bin.’
Max and I leave the house together and walk to the front entrance of the hospital, where we stop for a second, prolonging the inevitable.
‘I almost envy that guy, you know,’ Max says wistfully, looking at the homeless man who’s asleep at the bus stop, wrapped in a quilt. ‘He looks so peaceful.’
After Wingabby, which was largely populated by white farmers, I am much more aware of the diversity of the city. The area around the hospital is a good example. While it’s in a very well-to-do beachside paradise, it also has its seedy sections, populated by homeless people and backpackers hanging out in old pubs with saltwater-stained windows. I admit to myself that I have missed the place a tiny bit.
The feeling passes almost immediately. The junior doctors who were away last term are hauled into reorientation by medical admin to remind us that while things may have been different in the country, we’re back in the centre of teaching hospital excellence and must behave as such.
Nicole, wearing yellow and looking like a voluptuous buttercup, starts with a friendly welcome which quickly turns into a disciplinary ear-bashing.
I get a text from the Godfather.
You know what this is about right?
I reply in the negative.
Some nurse accessed the file of the football player who had a drug overdose and the media got on to it. So now we’re copping it.
Fifteen seconds into the friendly welcome, Nicole has already used the word ‘terminated’ three times. As if we are pests that need exterminating, we’re informed that if we do anything to compromise the confidentiality of any of our more famous clients (apparently when you’re famous you’re a client, not a patient), we will be terminated immediately.
‘We’ve introduced a new system that you should all be aware of,’ the buttercup chirps.
While we were away, the hospital has entered the twenty-first century and put us all under surveillance, she explains. The hospital computers now have an electronic tracking system that alerts the administration directly if an unauthorised doctor accesses a patient file. So, if a famous patient is in the hospital and you decide to sneak a look at their CT scan, an alert will be sent to the executive, who can then terminate you.
‘It’s for your own protection,’ Nicole tells us cheerfully, neglecting to point out the obvious: that protection and termination can be used interchangeably.
As the lecture continues, I find out that there are plenty of grounds on which the executive can terminate me. If I don’t wash my hands enough, if I don’t use the right code on my discharge summaries … the list goes on and on.
After the talk ends, Nicole corners me. ‘So you’re off to Sweden tomorrow!’ she exclaims. ‘Are you seeing Wolfgang?’
I remember mentioning the research to her briefly, but I’m surprised she knows about my trip. She must realise this from my expression, because she rushes to explain. ‘Jack told me,’ she says, smiling. ‘He said you’re presenting the poster.’
I’m momentarily pleased that Dr Prince remembers who I am, as I’ve not heard from him in months. Then I feel irritated that he has discussed my research with Nicole but has never communicated with me. Then I tell myself to stop being so pathetic.
‘Ah, yeah,’ I say noncommittally, ‘but I’m only spending a few days there. I’m meeting a friend in Amsterdam afterwards.’ I think of Fabien, and the light, fairy-floss feeling of happiness floats around me.
‘A special friend?’ Nicole probes. ‘Is he a doctor?’
I refrain from pointing out that doctors can find happiness with people who aren’t doctors themselves, probably more so, and shake my head. ‘No, he’s just a friend,’ I lie. ‘We used to ski together.’
‘I can’t believe he treated me like that, you know,’ she complains, and I’m confused for a moment, before I realise she must be referring to the mysterious Dr Wolfgang Dietrich.
‘Men,’ I say vaguely, reluctant to get caught up in the saga.
I’m almost relieved when the Joker calls me on my mobile. No doubt he knows that I’m leaving the country tomorrow and wants to make the most of the one day we have together.
‘I don’t care that you’ve been away,’ is his opening line. ‘It doesn’t make up for the fact that half the bloods haven’t been ordered.’
‘That’s the job of the doctor who was on last night,’ I point out, ‘when I wasn’t actually here.’
‘Don’t make excuses,’ he snaps.
I hold my phone in front of me and mouth, ‘FUCK OFF!’ as forcefully as I can.
His voice, unfortunately, continues to spew out of the microphone. ‘Come to theatres now,’ he instructs. ‘I wanted you there five minutes ago.’
I walk as slowly as possible to the operating theatre, wondering why it is that I can be terminated for failing to wash my hands thoroughly, while the Joker and the Smiling Assassin can be as heinous as they like and suffer no consequences.
I arrive at theatre six to see a man covered in blood fleeing the area. I step back as he charges towards me.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask. Normally people covered in blood are lying unconscious on the theatre trolley, not running out of the place.
The man is spluttering with indignation. ‘He threw a tub of betadine at me!’
‘What?’
‘I’m one of the porters,’ he explains, ‘and that surgeon just threw a tub of betadine at me because he said I wasn’t holding my hands up high enough.’
‘So that’s not blood?’ I gesture at his shirt.
‘No! It’s fucking betadine!’
He storms out of theatres, raging about physical abuse in the workplace and threatening to lodge an official complaint. I raise my eyebrows as I start to scrub in. It appears the Joker has now progressed to physical harassment. Things have obviously escalated in my absence.
I hear stories like this a fair bit. Max has told me that he once saw an orthopaedic surgeon throw an IV pole at one of the residents because he didn’t have his scrubs tucked in.
‘How did he get away with that?’ I asked Max.
He shrugged. ‘Who knows? The more senior you are, the harder it is for them to touch you, I reckon.’
Personally, I don’t think being a senior surgeon should excuse someone for being a total maniac, but that’s how medicine works. I also don’t understand how being an arsehole will increase your surgical dexterity, but maybe I just haven’t had enough experience yet.
I finish scrubbing in and reluctantly enter the operating theatre, where I put on the sterile gloves and gown.
The Joker tells me to get a move on.
‘I don’t understand why Prince asked you to do this research.’ He sounds more disdainful than usual as he starts to shave the head of the unconscious person on the table. ‘You’ve been doing surgery for months and you’re still hopeless.’
‘Maybe he thinks I’ve got potential,’ I can’t resist saying.
‘Potential to do what? Kill someone?’ He laughs loudly.
The Smiling Assassin, who has joined us and is silently standing behind me watching what I do, joins in, laughing much too enthusiastically.
Maybe one day I’ll tell them what I think of them, I muse. Maybe the day I quit. Maybe that will be today.
Yeah, right, a little voice in my head scoffs. Who’s going to pay your rent and credit card debt then, Doctor?
The Joker starts quizzing me on brain anatomy, which I answer more proficiently than usual after my weeks spent reading about recurrent glioblastoma multiforme.
After an hour of me making him angry by not making as many mistakes as usual, he accuses me of ruining the sterile field and tells me to scrub out and stand in the corner to watch instead. The Smiling Assassin eagerly takes my place.
I relocate to the corner of theatre six and stare at the clock, willing it to move faster. Mercifully, my phone starts to ring. Even better, it’s the hospital switchboard.
