Chapter 1 #2
Nobody had told her yet what was actually wrong with her father.
Somebody would, eventually, gently, the same way my nurse had told me about Grant.
I lay there and listened to a stranger insist nothing had happened to a body that had very clearly decided otherwise, and knew that insistence from the inside.
A resident came by with a clipboard and the standard forty-eight-hour talk, the one that assumes there’s a version of home worth rushing back to.
“We like to keep post-op patients at least two nights,” he said, eyes on the chart instead of me, the way residents look at paper until they’ve decided how much argument you’re going to give them. “Especially with an incision this—”
“I’m a licensed veterinarian,” I said. “I’ve palpated more incisions than you’ve written notes on. Mine’s healing exactly the way it should.”
That got him to look up. “Pain, zero to ten?”
“Four. Manageable.”
“And you understand the risks of leaving against medical—”
“Infection. Bleeding. Complications I’d catch faster than most people would, because I’ve spent twenty years catching exactly these things in patients who can’t tell me where it hurts.
Better than most of your patients do.” I held out my hand for the clipboard.
“I’d like the discharge paperwork now, please. Not after evening rounds.”
“Is there someone who can drive you?” he asked, reading from the form rather than the room.
“No,” I said, and didn’t offer anything to soften it, because there wasn’t anything true that would have.
“Family? A friend, a neighbor, anyone at all?”
“No.”
He looked at me the way I look at an animal that’s stood up on a leg everyone was sure was broken. Not disbelief exactly. Recalculation.
I called the clinic while I waited for him to come back with the paperwork, phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder because sitting up straight still cost more than I wanted to pay for it.
“It’s me,” I said, before Marisol could get past hello. “I’m not coming in the rest of the week. Move Thursday’s farm calls to whoever’s free, and push the gelding’s recheck to Monday.”
“Della. Are you okay? You’re supposed to still be in recovery.”
“I am in recovery. This is me, recovering, delegating things.”
A short laugh, more relief than humor. “Okay. Consider it handled.” A pause, weighing whether to say the next part. “I’m not going to ask if you’re really okay, because you’ll just say you are. Call me if that changes.”
“It won’t.”
“Call me anyway. Anything else?”
“Not yet. I’ll deal with the rest myself.”
A woman from patient services found me twenty minutes later, a laminate badge and a soft, unhurried manner that told me immediately she did this specific job on purpose and not by assignment. She had a clipboard, ostensibly about insurance authorization.
“Confirming your coverage is still active through your employer?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And the discharge address is the same as what’s on file?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s a good number to reach you at, if anything’s missing from the chart later?”
“Same number I’ve had for eight years.”
“And no known drug allergies we should have on file?”
“None. Never have.”
She worked through one or two more like that, competent and quick, but I could feel the real question underneath them before she asked it, the way you can feel a lameness building toward the leg that’s actually sore.
“The resident’s note says no one’s coming to pick you up,” she said, gently, not looking up from the clipboard, giving me the mercy of somewhere else to look while I answered.
“I just want to make sure that’s — I want to make sure you’re not alone because you want to be alone, versus alone because there’s genuinely no one to call. ”
I opened my mouth to give her the version I’d already given the resident, competent, procedural, nothing to see here, and found, for reasons I still can’t fully account for, that the version that came out instead was true.
“There’s someone,” I said. “He’s just not coming.”
She didn’t flinch, didn’t reach for sympathy the way people do when they don’t know what else to offer, just nodded once, like I’d handed her a vital sign, a number she needed for the chart and nothing more. “Okay. Is that a today thing or a general thing?”
“That part I haven’t figured out yet.” That much, at least, was still true. “I think I’m going to need to find out.”
“Is he the reason no one’s coming, or is that separate?”
“He’s the reason.”
“Does he know you’re planning to leave without waiting for him?”
“He doesn’t know I’m planning anything. He doesn’t even know I’m awake.”
“Fair enough.” She made a note, something brief, and looked up at me properly, meeting my eyes instead of the chart, and whatever she saw made her set the clipboard down on the rail of the bed instead of holding it between us like a shield.
“I’ll say this, since I’ve seen a lot of these, and you can take it for whatever a stranger’s opinion is worth.
The ones who leave on their own, on purpose, deciding it for themselves instead of waiting to be rescued — they’re usually the ones who do fine.
Better than fine, some of them. It’s the waiting that wears people down. Not the leaving.”
I didn’t have anything ready for that, and something in my chest, held rigid since the recovery room clock’s red second hand had first started its patient, indifferent circuit, gave way all at once, and I put a hand over my eyes and cried, once, hard, for about thirty seconds, the kind of crying that isn’t really about the sentence that triggered it so much as about six hours of not doing it yet.
She didn’t touch me, didn’t say anything else, just stood there and let me have the thirty seconds without turning them into a moment that needed managing, and when I took my hand away and said, “Sorry, I don’t usually,” she just shook her head once, like the apology wasn’t necessary and hadn’t been earned by anything wrong.
“You don’t have to usually,” she said. “You get today. Today’s allowed to be the exception.” She picked the clipboard back up, all business again, the kindness folded away as neatly as it had appeared. “I’ll get your discharge instructions moving. You said you have a way home?”
“I have a truck. I’ll manage the rest.”
“And if something goes wrong tonight — pain that won’t quit, a fever, anything that actually scares you?”
“Then I call my clinic. My tech picks up at two in the morning same as noon.”
“Good.” She made one last note and closed the folder, then studied me a second longer than the paperwork required. “You know, for someone who just told me nobody’s coming, you seem remarkably ready to go it alone.”
“I’ve had practice.”
“Good luck out there.”
“I don’t need luck. I need my keys, and I’ve already got those.”
“I believe you,” she said.
It took ninety minutes after that: one signature releasing the hospital from anything that happened to me on the drive, a wheelchair ride to the curb I didn’t need but accepted because refusing it would have cost more time than enduring it, and a call to the front desk about my truck.
“Silver pickup, lot C?” the woman on the line asked, already sounding like she knew the answer before she finished checking. “Yep, still there.”
“You want someone to walk you out to it?” she asked, before I could hang up.
“No. I’ve got it from here.”
“Your call.” She didn’t push it. “Drive safe.”
“I always do.”
“Thank you,” I said. My keys had been zipped in my bag the entire time, useless until they weren’t.