Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Ten Months Later
Ani
“The new head of the ER is a real hunkadoodle.” Angie, the head staff nurse in the Oak Bluff ER, waggled her brows and nudged me with her elbow as we walked at a steady clip down a corridor of the emergency department.
“I haven’t met him yet.” I’d only been doing ER shifts for a few months, and it was a little nerve-wracking, but Angie always had my back. Just so long as her poking meant she wasn’t secretly trying to fix me up. That was the very last thing I wanted.
I vowed to take at least a full year to focus on getting used to my practice, getting settled back in my hometown, and learning not to hate the ER shifts that I had to do four times a month, like all the other primary care docs who worked in our small community.
We helped out because there simply weren’t enough ER docs to go around.
“He’s coming in to work tonight,” she said. Who? Oh, the hunkadoodle. “So you’ll get to meet him. Except…”
I halted. “Except?”
Angie stopped before a closed exam room door and handed me a rectangular plastic package containing a sterilized set of tweezers. “Except he’s a teeny tiny bit grumpy. The staff’s started calling him Dr. Grumpenstein.”
I didn’t care about the hunk part, as I was off hunks since my failed wedding last summer.
(Well, except for the angel hunk I’d met on my honeymoon trip—but he was too wonderful to be real.) But the grumpy part gave me cause for concern.
A grumpy boss could make life hell, and my new life in Oak Bluff already felt like that in some ways.
My life was still so unsettled, and one thought kept tugging on my brain: Coming home had been a huge mistake.
I just wasn’t gelling with my partners. My mother was troublesome—I still didn’t think she’d forgiven me for all the wedding headaches.
The house I’d fully bought out from my ex was still a war zone of remodeling.
And while my two best friends had met their forever people, I was convinced that I would never meet any eligible men under the age of sixty in this small town. Not that I wanted to date right then, but someday. Maybe. So my move home was adding up to my making another big whopping mistake.
I frowned. “How grumpy is he?”
“He’s a stickler for rules. And he’s all business.”
“That’s a good thing,” I said carefully. I didn’t need a boss who noticed me in any way except as a colleague. No matter how messed up my personal life might be, I was a good doctor. And I worked damn hard at it. That was the only thing I wanted to be noticed for—being good at my job.
I was just about to ask his name when Angie adjusted the band of the high-intensity lamp on her forehead. “How do I look?”
“I hear coal miner chic is all the rage for ER nurses now.”
It was near midnight on a blustery April 14th, and it was snowing, which was not unusual for central Wisconsin at this time of year.
Above our heads, paper tulips hanging from the ceiling tiles twirled in the breeze from the heat.
Lights salvaged from the ER Christmas stash flashed gently as they looped around colored Easter eggs.
Spring should be on the way, but winter was lingering forever.
Plus, the ER was a little scary. I was a pediatrician, not an ER doc.
I didn’t like the scary stuff that could walk through the door at any moment, even though the staff was very nice and always competent.
Crash and dash simply wasn’t my personality.
I loved talking with families, teaching new moms, and dealing with little kids, but I hated knowing that anything could walk in the door at any time—an infected hangnail one minute, a full cardiac arrest the next.
Despite my ER fears, I’d always dreamed of practicing in my hometown, in a small practice where I actually knew my patients and could spend time with them.
My mom had said that no one should make any major life decisions within a year of a crisis, so I took that to heart and kept hanging in there, hoping for all my feelings of dread to turn around.
Angie was adjusting the settings on her headlamp.
Except she accidentally turned on strobe mode, nearly blinding me.
“Sorry,” she said in a sheepish tone, quickly hitting the off switch.
“When there’s a foreign body up a toddler’s nose, you need all the help you can get.
It’s like a cave in there. Especially when you’re working through snot and tears. ”
I laughed. Angie had been working the Oak Bluff Hospital ER way before med school was even a twinkle in my eye. She always managed to make me laugh, regardless of my worries.
“You ready?” she asked, seeming to sense my fear.
“I know you’re ready,” I countered. Angie had been born ready. Being an ER nurse suited her no-nonsense, adrenaline-fueled personality.
I opened the exam room door and walked in. A mom and the rosy-cheeked toddler on her lap both looked up from a book, where the little girl was studiously pointing at farm animals with her finger.
The mom happened to be my practice partner, Penelope Pendergast. She was sweet as could be.
The moms in our practice loved her, because she always took time to talk with them.
Her only problem was that she sometimes had difficulty making decisions and often sought reassurance from the other two of us.
Most of the time she made good choices, but she was low on confidence.
Except right then, she was simply a stressed-out single mom sitting in the ER with her kid, her three-year-old Taylor, who just so happened to have shoved an unknown quantity of leftover Christmas M&M’s up her nose.
“Oh, Ani. You’re here,” Pen said with a slight hint of desperation, then quickly checked herself. “Taylor,” she said in a more excited voice, “look who’s here.”
“Hi, Tay,” I said as I sat down on the stool and wheeled myself over. She immediately burrowed into her mom’s chest.
I met Pen’s gaze. “If this blows the fact that I’m her number one favorite person, I’m going to be really upset at you.”
Pen shrugged. “I’m really glad it’s you working tonight and not me. Besides, you’re the best.” She peeked at her child. “Right, Tay?”
“Thanks for that.” I ruffled Taylor’s hair. “Hey, Tay-Tay girl, why in the world did you put M&M’s up your nose?”
She gave me a look that was half blank, half mischievous. Which made me understand that sometimes there was no why. The answer was simply that she was three, and anything was possible.
While I originally spotted two candies, one in each nostril, experience told me that there might be even more. I mean, if you’re going to shove M&M’s up your nose, might as well go for it.
“Just get them out,” Pen whispered to me. “Her snot on the left side is bright yellow and gross.” Hence the late-night visit. “I mean, it’s practically fluorescent.”
The purulent drainage meant that the candies must have been wedged in there for at least a few days, and a bacterial infection was starting up from the blockage.
I rubbed Taylor’s arm. “Aunt Ani’s going to get the M&M’s out of your nose, okay? Easy peasy.”
Judging by the fact that they were wedged waaaay up there, it wasn’t going to be easy.
I really wanted to tell her that it wouldn’t hurt, but I couldn’t promise that.
I just knew that I would do everything possible to make this quick, painless, and positive.
So I spoke the language that only she and I understood. “If you hold still and let Aunt Ani
get the M&M’s out with my special tool, I’ll take you to Target on Saturday, okay?”
She lifted up her head and peeked out at me. “Fwench fwies too.”
A girl after my own heart. “You bet, girlfriend.” I did a fist bump that involved a little
dance and a kiss on the top of the head. At least my antics got me a small smile.
But not from her mother, who preferred to feed her daughter better food.
“I couldn’t let my her grow up without McDonald’s French fries, could I?” I said.
Angie cleared her throat, which I took as a subtle reminder to get going.
“Okay, baby girl,” I said. “Can I carry you over there to the exam table?”
I know, pediatrics can be horrifying. I was always aware of this. I was anxious about extracting the discs, but I also knew that I had a good shot at getting this done. Maybe I hated ER shifts, but stuff like this was my forte.
As soon as I delivered her to the exam table, Angie reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. “Want to see my pet squirrel?” she asked Taylor.
Angie was the queen of distraction. Maybe I could borrow her as a grandmother one day.
Except I doubted that being a mom would ever be in the cards for me.
I’d already had a long-ago divorce and a recent left-the-groom at the altar scenario behind me.
What could I say? Relationships weren’t my strongpoint.
Honestly, I didn’t know what my strongpoint was. I was totally confused. At a crossroads. But for right now, I focused on doing my job.
I peeked over to see what was causing Taylor to become totally focused. Sure enough, there was an up-close video of a squirrel stuffing his cheeks with round dark objects.
“Are those blueberries?” I asked.
“Yep,” Angie said. “This is video from inside my bird feeder. Taylor, can you count how many that little rascal popped in his mouth? Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…”
Meanwhile, I suddenly had a brilliant thought. “Ang, I need a Katz extractor.”
“A what-whozit?” she laughed. “Okay, you go, Dr. Green. We’ll be looking at my pet opossum.”
I popped out into the ER and walked up to a wall of supply cabinets. There was a nurse in scrubs loading one of them. I thought I would try and find it before I had to ask, so I peeked in a few doors and drawers.