Code Blue: A Grumpy Doctor–Nurse, Secret Baby Romance (Forbidden Doctors)
1. Michael
The water was almost painfully hot as I plunged my hands beneath the flow for the third time. The scalding sensation jolted me back to reality, reminding me of the weight of responsibility resting on my shoulders. As I scrubbed furiously, reciting the Hippocratic Oath under my breath, I thought about the person lying on that table. They had a family waiting for them, a life to return to, and it was my duty to ensure they could do so. With each wash, I timed my movements carefully, making sure the bacteria-killing soap had enough time to work its magic before I moved on to the next step. This ritual wasn”t just about cleanliness. It was a reminder of the sacred trust placed in my hands as a healer.
“Ready, Dr. Lawson?” The nurse, whose voice held a comforting familiarity, stood before me with gloved hands and a sterile towel ready for me to dry. She was dressed in the traditional white scrubs, her hair pulled back into a tight bun. Her eyes sparkled with determination and kindness as she prepared to assist in the prepping process, just as all nurses do. However, she was not someone I had seen before. Perhaps she was new to the hospital, or maybe just new to my unit. Regardless, I felt a sense of trust and reassurance in her presence.
“Thank you,” I mumbled through the mask covering my face. As I dried my hands on the towel, I couldn”t help but be captivated by her warm hazel eyes. They seemed to hold a familiarity that I couldn”t quite place, like we had met before in some other world. She gently tugged the first layer of gloves over my hands, her touch sending a warm feeling through me. I couldn”t tear my gaze away from her eyes, searching for any hint of recognition or connection. But for now, they remained a beautiful enigma, drawing me in deeper the longer I looked into them.
The first set of gloves went on and she taped them in place—my choice, to avoid the glove rolling up—and then the second set went over them. With the help of a second nurse, my hospital gown was tightly tied in the back, leaving me feeling vulnerable and exposed. I followed the first nurse into the cold, sterile operating theater, where a team of medical professionals awaited me. Two additional nurses stood ready at their stations while the anesthesiologist checked his supplies.
My resident, who had been working with me for a full year now, greeted me with a reassuring smile. Although he was more than capable of performing surgeries on his own, state laws required him to complete his final year under supervision before becoming a licensed surgeon. Today”s procedure was a simple bypass, but the gravity of the situation still weighed heavily on my mind as I walked to the operating table, surrounded by bright lights and beeping machines.
Each step of the procedure was fraught with complexity, but to a skilled and experienced surgeon like me, bypass surgeries had become second-nature. Every movement, every incision was executed with precision and confidence, like riding a bike down a familiar path. My patient rested peacefully on the operating table, knowing they were in capable hands with both me and Dr. Levitz.
“Hey, hey, Mike!” Dr. Levitz was the picture of extroversion, happy and bubbly all the time, though he was levelheaded and grounded too. I wasn’t sure whether I approved of his using my first name, but if I had to have surgery on my heart, I’d choose him.
“Dr. Levitz, how’s the patient?” I stalked to the side of the bed and positioned myself at our patient’s side. A middle-aged man in his forties with almost full occlusion in his left internal thoracic artery, he was lucky his family doctor had requested an echo when he did. This man was a sitting duck, just waiting for the big one to hit.
“All schnockered up and ready for us to resect his femoral artery.” Dr. Levitz had a unique way of communicating which I found slightly annoying, but it always made me chuckle. My operating room was tremendously brighter with him around. Nurses called me the grumpy old man, but he’d come in. I didn’t know how I’d feel when he graduated into his own operating room.
“Alright, let’s begin, then…” I leaned over the man’s thick form, his large, rotund abdomen covered in blue surgical drape. The nurses had already placed the fenestrated drape over his thigh and used Betadine to cleanse the area. I held a hand out and said, “Scalpel.”
The familiar nurse placed the surgical tool in my hand, and I felt the man’s skin, searching for the femoral artery beneath the thick layer of subcutaneous fat on his leg. I made the first incision, careful to ensure I was feeling the throb of his pulse beneath my fingertips to avoid nicking the artery we needed to resect, and I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d heard that nurse’s voice before.
“BP is one-thirty over eight-seven, doctor,” she said, standing with her hands outstretched away from her body to keep them sterile.
I paused for a second, trying to place the sweet din of her tone, but it still evaded me. Where had I heard her before? And why was it so distracting that I found it challenging to keep my focus? I was a professional, one of the best, actually. I never lost my train of thought like this.
I took a deep breath and said, “Someone turn on my music.” I had a routine of listening to Beethoven when performing a procedure. It was encouragement to me that even the deaf could create beautiful music. It encouraged me to be confident in my abilities after years of living with imposter syndrome. Then I continued the incision until the artery was visible.
“Clamps,” I said, feeling irritated with myself for not focusing well. I knew it came out as sounding grumpy, but I was struggling. And in my profession, struggling and being distracted could be fatal. My promise to “do no harm” also meant not performing surgeries in suboptimal mental states, like distraction.
“Here you go, sir,” the nurse said as she placed the clamps in my hand, and I paused yet again as a wave of such strong déjà vu hit me that I almost figured it out. Her name was on the tip of my tongue, yet still so far away that I had no idea what it was.
“Dr. Levitz, I’m going to let you do this one yourself.” I turned to my resident, who stood observing me. He’d done this particular coronary bypass artery graft procedure—what we called a cabbage—several times, and I knew he was focused, while I myself had done it hundreds of times but felt too unnerved to feel confident that I wouldn’t make any mistakes.
“Right-O, Doc,” he said, taking the clamps from my hand. I laid the scalpel to the side and stepped back. My only job was now to observe him and keep my cool.
But as he placed the clamps on either side of the one-inch section of artery from which we’d take the half-inch resection, I snuck a glance at the gorgeous hazel eyes that were haunting me. She was focused too, eyes locked on the incision site. She had a sterile tray ready to accept the artery and held it steady for Dr. Levitz to work. I’d trained him well, and I had zero doubt that he’d do a fantastic job.
I, however, got distracted every single time she spoke. That honey-coated tone, the way she batted her eyelashes. I knew I’d at least met her. Maybe I knew her. But I’d worked here at St. Anne’s for the past ten years as one of three cardiothoracic surgeons, and I knew all of the perioperative nurses. She was definitely new.
Surgery went off without a hitch. Dr. Levitz showed his professionalism even as he struggled to restart the patient’s heart after inserting the graft. He stayed calm and followed procedure, and when the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor resumed, everyone in the room breathed a sigh of relief and mumbled their celebratory words.
“Well done, Dr. Levitz. Go ahead and stitch this gentleman back up, and we’ll go talk with his family,” I said, pulling my top layer of blood-stained gloves off.
“No prob, Doc. Go wash up! I got this.” I couldn’t see Levitz’s cheesy grin, but I knew it was there. He was a humble man but had no problem celebrating his victories, and this was a victory for him.
I ducked out of the operating room and tugged my mask off, tossing the soiled gloves and the dirty mask into the trash. Then I turned toward the sink to scrub out and watched them work. My music, played only in the operating theater, was gone now, replaced with the music that played over the intercom. It was piped into the scrub rooms and doctors’ lounges throughout the hospital—usually some pop song from the last three decades that annoyed me.
That nurse had gotten into my head and shaken me up, and I decided I’d wait in the scrub room until she came to scrub out and see if I recognized her face when she removed her mask. But when the song Tubthumping by the band Chumbawamba came over the radio—the cheesy instrumental version—I stopped in my tracks, hands being scalded yet again by the hot water. Her name came to me instantly.
Sarah Bennett.
I pressed my eyes shut as a memory hit me, flashes of her skin on mine, my body inside hers. She was hot and sweet and downright kinky, and I was instantly smitten. And God, did she taste good too, like salty vanilla cream that gushes out of a pastry, and I made her gush too. God, we had sex like four times the night of Jacob Riddle’s combined bachelor/bachelorette party—the night we met.
Sarah and I talked for hours, and of course, we had a few drinks. She played shy until I put the moves on her. We found a spare bedroom in Jacob’s fiancée’s house and screwed like horny teenagers. Then we talked about how much older I was than her and screwed again–missionary, doggy style, reverse cowgirl, and God, when she sucked me off, I left my body and watched her in third person. I was so spent I couldn’t even come the next day when I masturbated while thinking about her. She literally sucked me dry.
Wow, that had to have been almost five years ago now, and even though I swore I was in love, I’d still managed to shake her off enough that I had a hard time recalling her in my memory just now. In my defense, I was supposed to be focusing on surgery and the only parts of her I could see were her sparkling hazel eyes and that incredible curvy figure.
When I pried my eyes open and looked up through the window again, she was facing me, placing instruments on a rolling cart behind herself. She smiled—I could see it in her eyes—and then wiggled her fingers at me, and my heart flipped. She recognized me too. I’d have sworn it. And she was so casual about it, as if no time had passed or nothing had transpired between us.
I pulled my hands from under the running water and turned it off, then shed the gown and the surgical cap, shoving them into the trash bin, and pushed the door to the scrub room open. My mind raced with questions. Why hadn’t she ever called me? I never got her number, but I gave her mine. I waited for days hoping she’d call. I knew she was a nursing student, almost ready to pass her state exams and begin her medical journey. At the time, she wanted to be a certified nurse practitioner, so why was she now in perioperative?
I ran a hand through my loose hair, smoothing it down after its being covered for the past four and a half hours, and sighed hard. No wonder I was so distracted and unable to focus in there. Sarah Bennett gave me the ride of my life and never called me afterward. I knew her name but had no way to look her up. She was in Savannah for the bachelor party, but she’d never even told me what city she lived in—or state, for that matter—and when I went to look her up, there were thousands of Sarah Bennetts to choose from, far too many to check out individually. Especially considering the differing spellings of both names.
Crap, what was she doing here? Why now? After all this time, was this my second chance? But how could it be? If we were both working here, we’d be banned from dating or anything more serious than a casual work friendship.
Just when I thought I’d gotten over her.