Chapter Two #2
Players came and went each year, each one carrying ambitions that reached well beyond college hockey.
Some reached the NHL exactly as they'd planned.
Others discovered different futures waiting after graduation.
Watching them leave for teams all over the country had never made me bitter.
There had been a time when I imagined following the same path, but life had changed direction so early that I'd long since stopped measuring myself against dreams that had belonged to another version of me.
My future had become nothing like the one I'd imagined as a child, yet I couldn't honestly say it disappointed me anymore.
Medicine had gradually filled the space hockey once occupied.
Medical school had become Dad's latest source of private anxiety, although he'd never admitted it outright.
He supported every examination, clinical placement and impossible week that left me surviving on caffeine and stubborn determination, but beneath his encouraging smiles lingered the fear that I was asking too much of myself.
He worried about the workload. He worried about the endless hours.
Most of all, he worried about how I'd ever manage as a surgeon when I couldn't speak, and no matter how many times I reminded him that communication involved far more than words alone, I never completely convinced him.
Worrying had become part of who he was. Losing Mom had seen to that.
My earliest memories of home always centered on Dad.
There were photographs of Mom throughout the house, smiling from mantelpieces, bookshelves, and hallway tables, but photographs were all I had.
Cancer had taken her when I was three, leaving Dad to raise me alone while building one of the most respected college hockey programs in the country.
Looking back as an adult, I had no idea how he'd managed it.
Coaching demanded ridiculous hours and endless travel, yet he never allowed me to feel as though I came second.
He attended parent-teacher meetings, kept the refrigerator stocked despite barely remembering to feed himself, mastered laundry, school lunches, and last-minute science projects, and never once allowed me to believe my life lacked anything important.
If anything, I'd grown up surrounded by too much love rather than too little.
Everything changed when I was six, and Dad had blamed himself ever since.
He'd never actually said the words. He didn't need to.
I saw the guilt when he thought I wasn't looking, in the way his expression tightened whenever conversations swung toward my childhood or when well-meaning strangers asked whether I'd always been unable to speak.
As the years passed his explanations became shorter until eventually they disappeared altogether, replaced by a polite smile and an effortless change of subject.
Whatever burden he'd carried all those years had become so deeply woven into who he was that I doubted even he remembered what life had felt like before it rested permanently across his shoulders.
I'd stopped trying to convince him otherwise a long time ago.
Some regrets refused to listen to reason.
Perhaps that explained why he watched over me with the determination of someone forever expecting disaster to strike again.
At twenty-six I was perfectly capable of crossing a street without supervision, yet if I arrived home ten minutes later than expected he'd already be standing at the front window pretending he wasn't checking for my headlights.
If I developed so much as a head cold, he'd insist on cooking enough soup to feed half the neighborhood.
He respected my independence in theory but not always in practice.
Coaching hundreds of young men had taught him to prepare for every possible problem before it happened.
Being my father had magnified that instinct beyond all proportion.
I loved him for it.
Sometimes...
I wanted to throttle him.
A smile touched my face as I pushed away from the boards again, gliding effortlessly through another lazy circuit of the rink.
No matter how fiercely he worried, I knew exactly why he did it.
We were all the family either of us had left, and after everything we'd already survived together, neither of us took the other's presence for granted.
That knowledge had shaped every important decision I'd ever made, including choosing a career that Dad secretly feared would demand more of me than I had left to give.
Choosing a specialty, however, had never been difficult.
While many of my classmates ping-ponged between surgery, emergency medicine, cardiology, and orthopedics before finally deciding where they belonged, I'd known from the beginning.
Ear, nose, and throat surgery fascinated me in ways no other discipline ever had.
The anatomy demanded extraordinary precision.
The procedures required patience, discipline, and absolute attention to detail.
More importantly, each successful operation possessed the power to restore something many people accepted without ever giving it a second thought.
Breathing.
Hearing.
Swallowing.
Speaking.
Especially speaking.
Dad had never asked why I'd chosen ENT because he already knew. Every lecture I'd attended, examination I'd sat and hour I'd spent working toward becoming a surgeon had grown from the same heartbreaking chapter of our lives. Neither of us needed to explain it. We'd lived it together.
One day, when I wore the title of surgeon rather than student, I intended doing everything within my power to make certain that children and their families never endured the same heartbreak ours had.
Medicine couldn't rewrite the past or erase the memories that still surfaced without warning, but perhaps it could alter someone else's future before regret became something they carried for the rest of their lives.
That belief had sustained me through anatomy laboratory, exhausting clinical placement and every examination seemingly designed to convince us we knew absolutely nothing.
Whenever exhaustion whispered that another hour of study wouldn't matter, I reminded myself why I'd started. The answer had never changed.