Coma

Susan slowed to a deliberate walk, avoiding the questioning expressions of the people using the corridor. Her emotions, she was afraid, could be read from her face like an open book. Usually when she cried or was about to cry, her cheeks and eyelids turned bright crimson. Although she knew she wasn’t going to cry now, the proper neural connections had been made. If someone she knew stopped her and said something innocuous, like “What’s the matter, Susan?” she probably would have cried. So Susan wanted to be alone for a few moments. As it was, she was more angry and frustrated than anything else as the fear generated by her encounter with Harris evaporated. Fear seemed so out of place in the context of a meeting with a professional superior that she wondered if she was becoming delusional. Had she really crossed Harris to the extent that he had had to keep himself in check to avoid some sort of physical encounter? Was he just about to strike her, as she had feared, when he came bounding out from behind his desk? The idea seemed ludicrous and it was difficult for her to believe that the situation had been so precipitous. She knew that she could never make someone else believe what she had felt. It reminded her of the situation with Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

The stairwell was the only haven she could think of, and she pushed through the metal door. It closed behind her rapidly, cutting off the raw fluorescent lights and the voices. The single bare incandescent bulb above her had a warmer glow and the stairway offered a soothing silence.

Susan was still clutching her notebook and a ballpoint pen. Gritting her teeth, and swearing loudly enough to hear an echo, she threw the notebook and the pen down the course of stairs to the landing below. The notebook bounced on the edge of a stair, then fell flat, cover down, onto the floor. It skidded across the landing and struck the wall, coming to a rest unhurt and open. The pen flipped over the edge of the stairs and a few telltale sounds suggested that it had descended to the bowels of the hospital.

Uninviting as it was, Susan sat down on the top stair, her feet on the very next step, bringing her knees up at acute angles. Her elbows rested on the tops of her knees. She closed her eyes tightly. So much of her experience in medicine with relationships had been reemphasized in the short time she had been at the Memorial. Professional superiors, instructors to professors, reacted to her in a manner that unpredictably varied from warm acceptance to overt hostility. Usually the hostility was more passive-aggressive than Harris’s had been; Nelson’s reaction was more typical. Nelson had been friendly at first, then later had slipped into an obstructive stance. Susan felt an old familiar feeling, a feeling which had developed ever since she had chosen medicine as a career: it was a paradoxical loneliness. Although constantly surrounded by people who reacted to her, she felt apart. The day and a half at the Memorial had not been an auspicious beginning for her clinical years. Even more than during her first days at medical school, she felt that she was entering a male club; she was an outsider forced to adapt, to compromise.

Susan opened her eyes and looked down at her notebook sprawled on the landing below. Throwing the book had given some vent to her frustrations, and she felt a degree more relaxed. Control was returning.

At the same time the childish aspect of the gesture surprised her. It was not like her to do such a thing. Perhaps Nelson and Harris were, in the final analysis, right. Perhaps being a medical student so early in training, she was not the right person to investigate such a serious clinical problem. And perhaps her emotionalism was a built-in handicap.

Would a male have responded in the same way to Harris’s reaction? Was she more emotional than her male counterparts? Susan thought about Bellows and his cool detached manner, how he could concentrate on the sodium ions while confronting a tragedy. Susan had found fault with his behavior the day before, but now, daydreaming in the stairwell, she was no longer so sure. She wondered if she could achieve that type of detachment if it were necessary.