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“Will he be well enough for that?”
“There will be good days and bad ones, most likely, and you should take them as they come,” Emily said. “Some days it won’t feel like he’s sick at all. Don’t let those days lull you into a false belief that he’s getting better, but don’t be afraid to enjoy them either.”
“How are we supposed to enjoy anything, knowing what’s coming?” Mrs. Wilson whispered.
Emily nodded. “I understand what you mean,” she said. “It feels like there’s a cloud hanging over you.”
“Yes.”
“It’s all right to feel that. It’s normal to feel that. What you’re facing… it’s horrible and painful, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise. You don’t want to shove it all down,ignore it, and then let it hit you all at once later. You want to let yourself begin to prepare. Let your grief in, but don’t let it dominate you,” Emily said. “Don’t let it rob you of the happiness you still have left to share with Daniel.”
She wrote her phone number down on a piece of paper and gave it to Daniel’s mother. “Any time you want to talk, you can feel free to reach out. For anything.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Wilson whispered.
Emily placed a hand on Mrs. Wilson’s shoulder and then left the room, unsure if she had helped, but knowing all the same that she had done the right thing by trying.
CHAPTER 7
EMILY
The feeling of satisfaction lasted until she stepped out of the family waiting room. Dr. Berger was standing in the hall, arms folded across his chest. The rest of the interns had gone off somewhere — it was only the two of them now.
“What was that?” he asked, his tone ominous.
Emily stood her ground. “I was speaking to the Wilsons,” she said.
“That’s not your job, Dr. Swinton.” He had gotten into the habit of using the interns’ first names lately, and the reversion to calling herDr. Swintonindicated to Emily that he was especially angry. “What did you say to them?”
“I didn’t tell them anything that would have contradicted what you said,” Emily said, holding her ground.
“You’re not supposed to tell them anything at all. You’re an intern, Dr. Swinton, did you forget that? You’re not supposed to do anything without supervision and permission. The fact that I let you do the occasional blood draw doesn’t mean that you’reready to talk to a grieving family about the loss of their young son.”
“Someone needed to talk to them about it,” Emily said stubbornly.
“Excuse me?”
“You barely said anything to them at all, Dr. Berger. You told them there was no treatment option left for Daniel, and then you walked away from them.”
“Daniel isn’t my patient,” Dr. Berger said. “I’m telling them because Dr. Nash wasn’t able to be here today.”
“Yeah, that’s another thing. Why isn’t Dr. Nash here? Don’t you think he should be, at a time like this? If that was your child, wouldn’t you want to hear from the doctor who had been treating him, and not some random ER doctor who had been tagged in to deliver the news? That’s shocking to me.”
“No one asked you for your opinion on the matter,” Dr. Berger said.
“Well, maybe someoneshouldask me, if you and Dr. Nash think that sort of thing is acceptable,” Emily shot back. “How do you think that made them feel? They must have thought the hospital didn’t care about them at all — that they were dealing with a doctor they hardly knew at such a vulnerable time, and that he couldn’t even bother to spend time with them and talk them through their grief.”
“We have nurses and grief counselors on staff for that sort of thing,” Dr. Berger said. “To be perfectly frank with you, Dr. Swinton, if you’re going to make it as an ER physician, you’re going to have to toughen up a little bit. It’s tragic, what’shappening to that boy, but he is only one of many patients you’re going to have to think about today. You need to be able to move on from that quickly.”
“You’re saying that if I want to be a good doctor I need to not care about my patients?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. Nobody said you couldn’t care about them. What I’m saying is that you need to rise above your feelings from time to time and not get mired down by them. You shouldn’t have stayed behind in that room to talk to that family. That’s not doing you any favors.”
“I wasn’t trying to do myself any favors,” Emily said. “I was thinking of them, not myself.”
Dr. Berger sighed. “Listen,” he said. “I know it seems counterintuitive. I know it feels wrong. But the fact is that youhaveto put yourself first if you’re going to do this job. You have to take care of your own needs, because if you fall apart, you won’t be any good do your patients. Does that make sense?”
Emily shook her head. “I can’t just ignore what’s best for the patients,” she said. “The looks on their faces when we were in there — when they were trying to process what you were telling them…”
