Coma

There were advantages, though, to being bright and beautiful, and Susan was slowly beginning to realize that it was reasonable to exploit them to a degree. If she needed a further explanation regarding some complicated topic, she only had to ask once. Instructors and professors alike would hasten to help Susan understand a fine point of endocrinology or a subtle point of anatomy.

Socially, Susan did not date as much as people imagined she would. The explanation for this paradox was severalfold. First, Susan preferred reading in her room to a boring date, and with her intelligence, Susan, found quite a few men boring. Second, few men actually asked Susan out, just because Susan’s combination of beauty and brains was a bit intimidating. Susan spent many Saturday nights engrossed in novels, some literary, some otherwise.

Starting February 23, Susan feared her comfortable world was going to be blown up. The familiar lecture routine was over. Susan Wheeler and one hundred and twenty-two of her classmates were being rudely weaned from the security of the inanimate and tossed into the arena of the clinical years. All the confidence in one’s abilities formed during the basic science years were hardly proof against the uncertainties of actual patient care.

Susan Wheeler had no illusions concerning the fact that she knew nothing about actually being a doctor, about taking care of real live patients. Inwardly she doubted that she ever would. It wasn’t something she could read about and assimilate intellectually. The idea of trial by fire was diametrically opposed to her basic methodology. Yet on February 23 she was going to have to deal with patients some way, somehow. It was this crisis of confidence that made sleep difficult for her and filled the night with bizarre, disturbing dreams in which she found herself wandering through foreign mazes searching for horrible goals. Susan had no idea how closely her dreams would approximate her experience during the next few days.

At 7:15 the mechanical click of the clock radio broke her dream’s feedback circuit and Susan’s brain awakened to full consciousness. She turned off the radio before the transistors had a chance to fill the room with raucous folk music. Normally she relied on the music to wake her.

But on this particular morning she needed little assistance. She was too keyed up.

Susan put her feet onto the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. The floor was cold and uninviting. Her hair descended from her head haphazardly, leaving only a two-to-three-inch gap through which to regard her room. It wasn’t much of a room, about twelve by fourteen feet, with two multipaned windows at the end. The windows gave out onto another brick building and a parking lot so that Susan rarely looked out.

The paint was reasonably fresh because she had painted the room herself about two years previously. The color was a pleasing pastel yellow which accented perfectly the Marimekko Printex fabric she had used to make the curtains. Their colors were several shades of electric green, separated by dark blue. On the walls hung a variety of colorful posters, framed with stainless steel, advertising past cultural events.

The furniture was medical school issue. There was an old-fashioned single bed, which was too soft, and difficult for entertaining. There was a worn, overstuffed easy chair, which Susan never used save for depositing dirty laundry. Susan liked to read on the bed and study at the desk so that the easy chair really wasn’t “critical,” in her words. The desk was oak and ordinary except for the pattern of initials and scratches carved in the top. In its right corner, Susan had even found a few obscene words associated with the word biochem. A physical diagnosis book was open on the desk. During the last three days she had totally reread it, but the text had failed to buoy her sagging confidence.

“Shit,” she said out loud, with little inflection. The remark was directed at no one and at nothing. It was a basal response as she comprehended that February 23 had indeed arrived. Susan liked to swear and she did it a lot, but mostly to herself. Since such language contrasted sharply with her wholesome image, the effect was truly remarkable. She had found it a useful and entertaining tool.

Having pulled herself from the warmth of her covers with such dispatch, Susan realized that she had an extra fifteen minutes to spare.

That was the usual duration of her ritual of repeatedly turning off her radio alarm before actually making it into the bathroom. Her ambivalence toward starting this day made her squander the time by just sitting and staring ahead, wishing that she had gone to law school or graduate school in literature ... anything besides medical school.

The coldness of the bare waxed floor worked its way into Susan’s feet.