Page 11 of Obeying

I roll my eyes and she grins, and for the next fifteen minutes, I bask in the feeling of being a normal person with a normal job and a normal friend who doesn't know the half of it. I lost most of my friends when I had to give up my life, and making new ones still feels like a skill I forgot I needed. But Priya makes it easy. She doesn't look at me like a puzzle. She just talks to me like I'm a person who's here now, and that's enough.

Back on the floor, I round on my patients. Mrs. Dart in 408 is recovering well from her cholecystectomy, alert and in good spirits, asking when she can eat solid food again. I check her drain output, review her labs, and tell her that if everything looks good by tomorrow morning, she's probably going home. She thanks me three times. I tell her once is enough. She thanks me a fourth time anyway.

I'm updating her chart at the nurses' station when a voice calls out from my elbow.

“Dr. Portland?" It's Ramirez, one of the floor nurses, and she's got a look on her face I can't quite read. It's not urgent or medical. More like she's trying to figure out how to phrase something diplomatically.

"It's Mr. Hale. He won't do his exercises. He told the physical therapist that she was, and I'm quoting, 'wasting his time and hers.' Rodriguez is about five minutes from putting in a formal complaint."

"I'll go."

Walter Hale is sitting in his chair with his arms crossed like a man who has decided the world can come to him because he is done going to it.

"Mr. Hale. I hear you're giving everyone a hard time."

"I'm giving everyone an honest time. There's a difference."

"Your honest time made Rodriguez lose his hair."

"Rodriguez talks to me like I'm five. I'm seventy-three. I've earned the right to be difficult."

I pull up a chair and sit next to him, because Walter doesn't respond to authority. He responds to people who sit down and look him in the eye. "You have. You've also earned the right to walk out of here on your own two feet instead of in a wheelchair. So what's it going to be?"

He's quiet for a moment, then says softly, "You remind me of my daughter, you know that? She doesn't take my crap either."

He says this every time. I stopped correcting him three visits ago.

"Smart woman," I say, the same way I always do.

"Stubborn woman."

He does all his exercises, slowly, with the occasional grumble and a running commentary about how the hospital floor is too cold and the grip on the walker is "designed for someone with baby hands". And when we're done and I've checked his range of motion and noted the improvement in his chart, he settles back in his chair and looks at me with an expression that's softer than he'd ever admit to.

"Same time tomorrow, Portland. Don't send Rodriguez."

"Rodriguez is a trained professional. He's your physical therapist, Walter."

"Rodriguez annoys me." He waves me off. "Go. Save some lives or whatever it is you do when you're not babysitting me."

I leave his room and I'm smiling, and it takes me a second to notice because smiling isn't something I do on autopilot anymore. It's something I have to remember, like a foreign language I used to speak. But Walter makes it easy. He's stubborn and rude and impatient, and he reminds me of my dad in ways that ache.

The rest of the shift is uneventful until we get a trauma case at around four. Car accident, single vehicle, driver extracted by fire rescue. Logan's leading, and the bay fills with controlled motion, monitors beeping, nurses hanging lines, the radiology tech wheeling the portable machine into position. I'm assisting, my hands gloved and my gown on, and for a few minutes, there's nothing but the work and the body in front of us and the rhythm of a team doing what it's trained to do.

The imaging comes up on the screen. Logan glances at it, then at me.

"Portland. Read it."

I step closer to the monitor and go through it fast. "Left-sided rib fractures, four through seven. Left-sided pneumothorax, small but present. No obvious mediastinal shift. There's a hemothorax tracking along the posterior costophrenic angle on the left."

"Rib fractures," he says, eyes on the patient, not on me. "What about the displacement on the fourth?"

"Lateral."

"You sure?"

I look at the scan again, then pull up the coronal. The fracture line is clean, and the fragment is displaced laterally. Not anterior, not posterior. Lateral. I've read it twice now, and I'm certain.

"Yes."