Chapter 9
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Halfway down the corridor on my patient rounds, I had my chart tucked under my arm and I was feeling pretty chipper until I noticed the empty rectangle on the bulletin board. The tape was still there, a little torn, but the flyer itself was gone.
I slowed, pretending to reread my notes while my eyes flicked over the board. One of the NO CAKE ALLOWED flyers had definitely been on this one last night, right next to a blood drive announcement and a crooked flyer for a missing scarf that had been gone for weeks.
“Oh well, rest in peace, brave little cake,” I murmured to myself. “Thank you for your service to the hardworking folks of Saint Raphael.”
Honestly, I’d expected this to happen, the flyers disappearing as if they’d never been there at all.
Sullivan Crowne was many things, but oblivious wasn’t one of them.
If anything, this meant the flyers had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
They’d bothered him enough to make him have them taken down.
That should’ve felt like a win, but instead there was a small, uncomfortable pinch of guilt under my ribs. Maybe I should’ve given him more of a chance to settle in.
The thought surprised me enough that I stopped walking again, leaning against a wall as I exhaled a slow breath. Hospitals weren’t an easy business to be in. I knew that as well as anyone.
Ours wasn’t so much of a workplace as a living, breathing ecosystem held together with duct tape, caffeine, and people who cared too much. No one could just storm in armed with a spreadsheet and projections and expect the place to bend around their will.
But it was possible that once Sullivan actually saw what running a hospital looked like on a day-to-day basis, he’d soften.
Adjust. Learn. Stranger things had happened and I found it hard to believe that anyone could be on the ground every damn day like he, surprisingly, had been so far, and not notice the balance we tried to maintain here.
Even as I thought about it, however, I shook my head at myself and squared my shoulders, marching toward the next patient room and knocking lightly on the door. Wasting time trying to convince myself that Sullivan might just turn out to be a good guy was just that—a waste of my freaking time.
No matter what he learned or didn’t learn, it had become abundantly clear that he only cared about one thing and it wasn’t our patients. It was his company’s bottom line.
“Mrs. Oyama?” I called as I knocked, shoving all my thoughts and reservations about our own personal dictator to the back of my mind. “It’s Bree.”
“Come in,” she called, her voice tight.
Panic flared through me at the sound. Mrs. Oyama was always cheerful and kind, and something was definitely off about her voice today.
I opened the door immediately, stepping inside and rushing across the room.
It only took me about two seconds to clock the problem, though, the panic receding as fast as it’d flared.
Mrs. Oyama was perched stiffly on the edge of the bed, her hands clenched in the thin paper gown wrapped around her. She glared at it like she was about to rip it right off. Then she glared at me.
“I think there’s been some kind of mistake,” she said carefully, her voice dangerously wobbly as she held my gaze.
“Oh?” I said, even though I already knew exactly where this was going.
Obviously though, I wasn’t about to project my own problems onto my patient, which meant despite having a strong suspicion, I still wasn’t going to ask any leading questions.
“I’m so sorry hear that. If you can tell me what mistake has been made, I’ll do my best to have it fixed immediately. ”
“They took away my comfortable gown,” she said, her nose wrinkling in disgust as she tugged the sleeve between two fingers. “Then they told me to put on this one instead.”
It crackled when she flicked it and she lifted her narrowed eyes back up to mine. “It’s like wearing fire ants. Angry ones.”
I bit my lip to keep from smiling. Sullivan might not have wanted to hear it from me, but I’d told him there would be backlash from the patients about his decision. “Yeah. That checks out.”
She arched an eyebrow. “So it’s not just me. This isn’t some kind of mistake? I really thought that perhaps they were readying me for a procedure I didn’t know I was having.”
“Oh, no,” I said, setting my chart down and rushing over to squeeze her arm.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Oyama. There’s no procedure and no mistake has been made.
I promise we’re not about to take you to an operating room for something you don’t need.
Your antibiotics are working beautifully, your infection is subsiding, and your IV should be coming out within the next day. ”
Her other eyebrow joined the first, both now steeped so severely that for the first time, I could totally see her as the strict teacher she claimed to have been before she’d retired. “If it’s not a mistake, then why am I wearing it?”
“The hospital has made the switch from cloth to paper,” I explained.
“It’s really not just you. Everyone hates those gowns.
We’ve got universal, cross-departmental agreement on that front.
I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
The old ones are being removed from the premises, so I can’t even try to sneak you one. ”
“I see,” she said coolly, nodding as she swung her legs back onto the bed, cringing with obvious discomfort. “Am I being discharged soon? I don’t think I can take much more of this. It’s torture to have to wear this thing.”
I sighed. “I know, ma’am. If it helps, I vehemently opposed the implementation of this decision. We all did.”
“If none of you wanted it, why would they have made the switch?”
I hesitated for a few seconds, but when she cocked her head at me, I finally just told her the truth. “The only person who thinks it’s a good idea is the guy in charge, but since he is the guy in charge, his opinion was the only one that mattered.”
Her mouth flattened into a thin line. “Ah.”
“I think the key flaw in his logic is that he doesn’t have to wear one,” I said sympathetically. “It’ll be at least another couple days before we can discharge you, unfortunately. Here, let me see if I can help make you more comfortable.”
Mrs. Oyama huffed out a disappointed sigh. “Well, that figures. Thank you, honey.”
I helped her adjust the gown as best I could, but it was like trying to make a napkin dignified. She winced when I adjusted it over her shoulder. “It’s so scratchy.”
“I know. I can’t apologize enough.”
When she looked up at me, her gaze lingered on my face like she was studying me. “You sound genuinely sorry.”
“I am,” I said. “If there was anything I could do to change it, I would, but there isn’t. You might be able to, though. I know it wouldn’t help make you much more comfortable right now, but it could help other patients in the future if you spoke to him.”
Mrs. Oyama snorted. “I’d very much like to speak to him, actually.”
“Really?” I blinked hard. I hadn’t expected encouraging her to take it up with him directly would actually work. “You would?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, straightening. “I have opinions that I’d like to share.”
A slow smile spread on my face. Seeing her as desperately uncomfortable as she was while already having numerous IVs stuck into her eased any guilt I might’ve felt. “Funny you should say that.”
I pulled a pen from my pocket, glanced at the door, then leaned in and wrote a number on a scrap of paper, speaking quietly just in case. “This is his direct office line. Please don’t tell anyone where you got it.”
She took the paper from me with her eyes sparkling. “I won’t, but I will tell him exactly what I think about the decision he made. These are truly awful.”
“Bless you,” I said, and I really meant it.
She was taking up the good fight despite knowing that any reversal in this new policy probably wouldn’t benefit her, but she was doing it anyway. Sullivan Crowne could ignore me, but I’d warned him patients would complain and I wasn’t falling on a sword he’d readied for our execution.
Fuck him. If the patients had an issue with a decision he was responsible for, then he was the one who should face them.
“Alright,” I said, lifting my stethoscope over my head. “Let me check your vitals before you make that call. I still have a job to do and I know you want to get out of here sooner rather than later, so let’s see how you’re doing. On that note, how’s Caroline? Is she adjusting to her new school?”
As I went through my routine check, we chatted a bit about her granddaughter, and once I was done, I adjusted her pillows before I headed for the door. I wasn’t even fully in the hall yet when I heard her voice filtering out of the room behind me.
Jeez. She really doesn’t waste any time, this lady.
“Mr. Crowne?” she said, her voice not restrained or polite anymore, but as cutting as a knife and as cold as ice. “This is Mrs. Oyama in room 412. I would like to discuss this paper gown I’m wearing.”
I smiled to myself and kept walking. Good. This is what he gets. If he thought we were going to take the punches for him, he has a whole other thing coming.
An idea popped into my head as I passed the staff lounge and I ducked into it immediately, shutting the door behind me. After refilling the coffeemaker and setting it to make a new pot to give myself plausible deniability, I logged into the computer by the printer.
Mrs. Oyama’s voice, so firm and gloriously unimpressed, was still echoing in my head. I hoped she’d really let him have it—and that she’d mentioned the fire ants.
When the computer opened to the home screen, I opened a new document and started typing.
PROBLEMS WITH YOUR PAPER GOWN?
CALL SULLY.