Coma

“I’m sorry, Don, for this intrusion,” said Oren. “I suppose we should have gone to my office. I’ll be finished ...” Oren redirected his attention into the telephone. “Yes, I’m here, Jim ... well that’s nice to know she’s been a good student. But nonetheless she had exhausted her welcome here at the Memorial. She is supposed to be on surgery but has decided never to attend rounds, conferences, or surgery. Instead, she has been irritating the staff, particularly our Chief of Anesthesia, and exacting unauthorized information from our computer storage facility by some devious means. We obviously have enough trouble around here without her kind of help. ... Sure, I’ll tell her you want to see her ... this afternoon at four-thirty. Good enough. I’m sure the V.A. would be happy to have her ... right (chuckle). Thanks, Jim. Speak to you soon, and let’s get together.”

Oren hung up the phone and smiled diplomatically at McLeary. Then he turned to Susan.

“Miss Wheeler, your dean, as you have plainly heard, would like to have a word with you this afternoon at four-thirty. From this moment on, your professional welcome at the Memorial has been terminated. Goodbye.”

Susan looked from Oren to McLeary and then back. Mc-Leary’s expression was unchanged. Oren sported a self-satisfied smile, as if he had just won a debate. There was an awkward silence. Susan realized that the scene was over, and she got up without a word, picked up the parcel containing the nurse’s uniform, and left.

Wednesday, February 25, 11:15 A.M.

Finding the hospital intolerably oppressive from an emotional point of view, Susan fled. She pushed her way through the lingering crowds, out into the rainy, raw February day. Once outside and without any particular destination in mind, she just walked, aimlessly, lost in her own thoughts.

She turned on New Chardon Street and then on Cambridge Street.

“Assholes,” she hissed as she kicked a stray, partially crunched Campbell’s soup can. The light rain flattened her hair against her forehead. Small droplets coalesced and dripped from the tip of her nose.

She wandered up Joy Street into the back side of Beacon Hill, preoccupied with her stream of consciousness. She saw but her mind did not record the clutter of life, dogs, garbage, and other debris of the decaying urban surroundings.

She could not remember ever feeling quite so rejected and isolated.

She felt totally alone, and sudden fears of failure kept reoccurring in her compulsively conditioned brain. Waves of depression alternated with anger as she went over the conversations with McLeary and Oren. She yearned to talk with someone, someone whose counsel she could trust and respect Stark, Bellows, Chapman; each was a possibility but each had a specific disadvantage. Bellows’s objectivity would have to be suspect; Stark’s and Chapman’s overriding loyalties would be to their respective institutions.

Susan thought of the worst: being dismissed from medical school in disgrace. Not only would it be a personal failure but she felt it would be a failure for all women in medicine. Susan wished there were some woman doctor to whom she could turn, but she did not know any. There were so few on the medical school staff, and none in any positions that made them accessible for counseling.

In the middle of her tormented musing, Susan felt her right foot slide as she put her weight on it. She had to steady herself with her hand on a nearby building to keep from falling. Expecting the worst, she looked down to see that she had stepped in a large steaming pile of dog feces.

“God damn Beacon Hill.” Susan cursed Boston and all the literal and figurative shit a city government tolerated. Using the curb to dislodge most of the material, Susan choked on the odor. Still she couldn’t help but think about the symbolic aspect of her misfortune. Perhaps she had been stepping into a pile of shit, and as she was forced to do in regard to the actual shit in the city, she should try to ignore the whole affair. Just walk around it. Her responsibility was to become a doctor; that should take precedence over everything. The Bermans and the Greenlys were not her concern.

The rain continued and rivulets ran down her cheeks. She began to walk more carefully, prudently noticing the innumerable piles of dog crap that characterized Beacon Hill as much as the gas lamps or the red brick. She watched where she put her feet and the going was easier. But she could not dismiss her sense of responsibility to the Bermans and the Greenlys so easily. She thought about the age similarity between herself and Nancy Greenly. She thought about her own periods and the several episodes when she had bled more heavily than usual; how it had frightened her and made her feel helpless and out of control. She might have had to have a D&C herself, possibly at the Memorial.

But now she was out of the Memorial, maybe out of medical school.