Chapter 2 #2
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“That’s not an answer, Della. That’s a sentence.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“I didn’t ask that either.” A short pause, the sound of her deciding to let it go for now.
“I asked where you are, because your discharge nurse called the clinic line looking for a home address to send paperwork to, and the one on file is the house, and something told me that wasn’t where you’d actually gone. ”
“I’m at the apartment. Over the clinic.”
“Did you at least sign the AMA paperwork, or did you just leave?”
“I signed it. I know how paperwork works.”
“Nobody said you didn’t.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking a lot of things. That wasn’t the loudest one.”
A pause, not surprised so much as recalibrating, the sound of a woman doing quiet arithmetic. “Four hours after surgery, you drove yourself twelve miles and climbed the stairs.”
“I did.”
“Okay.” No lecture, which I appreciated more than I could have said out loud right then. “You need anything tonight? I can run by.”
“I have what I need. I just need to sleep.”
“Did you eat before you took whatever they sent you home with?”
“I took it with water.”
“That’s a no.” She didn’t argue, though I could hear her want to. “There’s saltines in the cabinet over the sink up there, unless somebody’s cleared them out since March. Put something in your stomach before you pass out on me, Della. I mean it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t yes-ma’am me. Eat something.”
“You’ll call me if that changes.”
It wasn’t a question, not really, the way most things Marisol says aren’t really questions, and I found myself almost smiling into the phone, something I hadn’t managed since the recovery room. “I’ll call you if that changes.”
“Good. I already moved your Thursday farm calls to next week and told the Hendersons their gelding’s recheck can wait a few days. Nobody’s dying if a horse’s teeth wait till you’re upright.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I didn’t ask you, either.” A pause, different this time, the kind that meant she was deciding whether to ask the real question. “Does Grant know you’re not coming home?”
“Not tonight.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” I let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “Let’s leave it there for now.”
“Your call.” No judgment in it either way, and I was grateful for it, because I didn’t have the energy left tonight to defend a decision to anyone, including myself.
“One more thing.” A beat, gentler than before. “You don’t have to have this figured out by morning.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. Nobody’s grading you on speed.”
Then, quieter, less like my technician and more like a woman I’d known eleven years: “For the record, Della, whatever happened today, you didn’t do anything wrong leaving like that.
I’ve watched you run yourself into the ground managing everybody else’s version of okay for as long as I’ve worked here.
Today’s the first time I’ve ever seen you manage your own. ”
I didn’t trust my voice enough to answer that properly, so I just said, “Goodnight, Marisol,” and she let me have the silence instead of pushing for more, a mercy in itself, the kind that doesn’t announce itself as one.
There was a go-bag in the closet, the kind every vet who does farm calls keeps stocked without thinking about it: a change of clothes, toiletries, a phone charger, protein bars gone soft at the edges.
I hadn’t restocked it in longer than I wanted to calculate.
I found a T-shirt three sizes too large, from a conference I’d stopped attending years ago, and worked myself out of my hospital-day clothes one arm at a time, favoring the right side, biting down on nothing in particular when the left one had to move anyway.
My pain medication was in my bag, half a bottle, the kind you’re supposed to take with food I hadn’t eaten.
I took it dry, with water from the bathroom tap, because food could wait and the alternative to the medication could not.
Downstairs, through the floor, I heard a horse shift its weight in the recovery stall, boards creaking under four hundred pounds redistributing itself, and then quiet.
Bramble, most likely, three days post-colic surgery and still touch-and-go on appetite.
I made a note in my head to check her at four, then remembered, the way a day that’s already asked too much of you twice leaves you forgetting things you’d otherwise know, that I had a technician on overnight and did not, actually, have to be the one who checked.
I didn’t stay down long. Two hours, maybe less, a thin unsatisfying doze broken clean through around two in the morning by the incision reminding me, sharply, that lying on my side was a decision my body hadn’t actually agreed to.
I lay there in the dark working through the standard mental checklist I give every owner whose animal just had surgery, is this pain worse than it should be, or is this just what pain is supposed to feel like at this stage, and found I couldn’t answer it cleanly for myself the way I could for a patient, which struck me, even fogged with exhaustion, as a diagnostic failure all its own.
I know exactly what day-one-post-op pain looks like in a horse.
I apparently had no idea what it was supposed to look like in me.
I got up anyway, slow, one hand flat against the wall the way I’d done the stairs going up, and went down to check on Bramble myself, not because I didn’t trust Dawson, the nineteen-year-old overnight tech I’d hired mostly for his willingness to work nights nobody else wanted, but because some part of me needed to see with my own eyes that at least one patient in this building was resting easy.
He was in the aisle when I came down, sitting on an overturned bucket with a paperback held up to the one bright bulb we leave on for the night shift, and he startled hard enough at the sight of me that the book nearly went into the muck bucket beside him.
“Dr. Marchetti, you’re supposed to be resting.” He was on his feet fast, hands out like he might actually need to catch me. “Marisol said you had surgery like four hours ago, you shouldn’t be—”
“I’m just looking. How’s she doing?”
He hesitated, clearly weighing whether arguing with his boss hours post-op was a fight worth having, and apparently decided it wasn’t. “Ate about three-quarters of her evening flake. Vitals are all where you’d want them.”
“Temp?”
He flipped back a page on the clipboard hanging off the stall gate. “Ninety-nine eight, at eleven.”
“Heart rate?”