Epilogue

EPILOGUE

ONE YEAR LATER

This intern is the dumbest intern I've ever met in my life.

Her name is Maddie and I've been her senior resident for exactly two weeks. Two of the longest weeks of my life. At first, I gave her a pass because she was brand new and… well, I've been there before . I didn't want to make her cry. There's so much to learn when you're first starting out as a brand new doctor and I didn't want to say anything that would make her take a flying leap off the roof of County Hospital. I don't need that on my conscience.

But over the last two weeks, I swear to God, she's getting dumber . There are things she seemed to know during the first week that she doesn't seem to know anymore. At the very least, she's not retaining any new information. When I teach her something, it's like throwing a piece of paper into a completely full trash can and just watching it bounce off and roll away.

Right now, we're in the Emergency Room and Maddie is presenting a new patient to me. It's not even midnight yet and already she appears hopelessly frazzled. Her black hair is coming loose from the bun she tied it in, but only on the right side, so the right half of her hair is down and the left side is still up. She's got patient information scribbled all over the right leg of her scrub pants, probably violating all sorts of patient privacy laws. And she's got pit stains. How does she have pit stains? It isn't even that hot in here!

"Mr. Gomez has been coughing for the last two weeks," Maddie tells me.

"Is it a productive cough?" I ask.

Maddie looks at me blankly.

"Like, does he cough anything up?" I ask.

"Like… phlegm?" She appears horrified at the idea of it.

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking."

"I didn't ask." She glances back at the patient's room. "Should I check?"

"No, please just keep going," I tell her. Maddie's presentations tend to be long and meandering, sometimes involving side trips. I don't want to be here all night.

Correction: I'm definitely going to be here in the hospital all night, since we're on call. But I would rather not be standing in this very spot, listening to Maddie present Mr. Gomez until the sun comes up.

"So the ER doctor thought he had pneumonia," Maddie says. "His lungs sounded… um, junky to me. And her white blood cell count is elevated to 15,000."

"What did the chest X-ray show?" I ask.

That blank look again. "Chest X-ray?"

She's got to be messing with me. Even on her second week, an intern should know that you need to look at a chest X-ray to diagnose pneumonia, right? I mean, if you're suspecting an infection of the lungs, you need to look at a picture of the lungs. Even a medical student should know that. Hell, a child should know that.

I stare at Maddie, the rant on the tip of my tongue. How could you not know this by now? How?

Then I look at the pit stains on her scrubs and I sigh. "Come on," I say, "let's go look at the chest X-ray together."

I just don't have it in me to be mean. Intern year is rough—I don't have to make it worse for her.

Maddie and I discover a large left lower lobe consolidation on Mr. Gomez's chest X-ray and we admit him to County Hospital. My pager goes off just as I'm carefully looking over Maddie's admission orders, making sure she didn't leave off the antibiotics for his pneumonia (like she did last time). I finish double-checking the orders, give her a thumbs-up, then run off to answer my page.

When I dial the number, the person who picks up the phone doesn't even say hello: "Call room. Ten minutes."

I smile. "I'll be there."

Nine minutes and thirty seconds later, I'm standing in front of the surgery call room. Before I can even knock on the door, it swings open and there he is, looking handsome as ever in his eternal outfit of scrubs. Sexy Surgeon, a.k.a. Dr. Ryan Reilly—my boyfriend. Well, not really my boyfriend. But close enough. Close as I'll ever come when I spend most of my waking hours in the hospital.

He grabs me by the drawstring of my scrubs. "Get in here, you."

I grin up at him. "How long you got?"

"Gotta be in the OR in about twenty minutes. They're going to page me to come down. You?"

"Mm. Maybe half an hour before Maddie screws up and I have to go rescue her."

Ryan laughs. "You need to lay down the line for that girl. Make her cry , Jane. It's the only way she'll learn."

That's his answer to everything.

"Is that what you called me here for?" I say. "To give me advice about my intern?"

He leans in to kiss my neck. Well, not my neck, but that sensitive area where my neck meets my shoulder. "No time for that… we've only got twenty minutes…"

We've got twenty minutes in the call room. We've got less than one year until Ryan graduates from his surgical residency here and starts a fellowship in vascular surgery. We've got less than two years until I graduate medicine residency and need to decide what to do with my career. And we've got at least ten years before Ryan starts to show symptoms of the Huntington gene, if he's got it.

But for now, I'm going to enjoy this moment.

Well, at least until my pager goes off.

Hours awake: 18

Chance of quitting: 0.1% (Hey, after spending five freaking years in medical training, what else could I possibly do??)

Chance of living happily ever after:

THE END