“What?”
“Miss, you have the wrong number.”
“You’re not the next of kin of John Potts? Phone number three-one-six, five-four-seven-eight?”
“Nine. Five-four-seven-nine.”
“Oh my gosh, I’m so—”
The dial tone hums in my ear. I hang up and hear a muffled noise behind me. The nurse is resting her head on her arms, her body shaking. She glances up at me and staggers off, shrieking into her cupped hands with delight.
My face flushed, I dial again, carefully this time.
“Yes?”
“Hi. Sorry for the hour. It’s Dr. Kapadia from Philadelphia General Hospital? I’m looking for Mrs. Potts?”
“Speaking. Is this about John?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m very sorry, but he passed away a short time ago. He died peacefully. . . .”
“Peacefully? Who are you?”
“I’m Dr. Kapadia, the intern.”
“Where is Dr. Herring? Where is John’s doctor?”
“He’s not . . . I don’t think he’s in the hospital right now—”
“He’s at home asleep, is that what you’re telling me?” I can almost feel the heat of her angry breath through the receiver. “And they asked some student to call me? I want to talk to Dr. Herring. You have him paged right now.”
I motion to a passing nurse and relay the request. She shakes her head.
“Ma’am, Dr. Herring won’t be available until tomorrow morning,” I say, flustered but trying to affect as professional a tone as possible. “I can have my supervising resident paged for you, if you would like.”
“What is your name? Spell it,” she demands.
I spell my name.
“Well, I’ll be calling the president of the hospital tomorrow. This is completely inappropriate. You are a student. You do not call me to tell me anything about my son. I want to speak to Dr. Herring, nobody else, you hear me?” She hangs up.
I find nothing in Ferri’s guidebook regarding what to do next in this situation. Shaken, I page the on-call resident, one of the third-years. Ten minutes later, the phone rings. “Internal Medicine resident,” a woman’s voice says.
“Hi, it’s the intern.”
“What do you need? Talk fast,” she says.
I rapidly explain what happened.
“Listen, I have two patients who are both simultaneously having strokes right now, so you’re going to have to handle that yourself. Good luck.” She hangs up before I can apologize for bothering her.
After a moment’s hesitation, I page the attending. I wait twenty minutes before paging him again. I stare at the phone and listen to the steady ticking of the clock on the wall. Every now and then, a nurse passes by, but otherwise it is eerily silent.
The phone rings loudly. I grab the receiver.
“Dr. Herring!” a booming voice with a British accent announces. “Dr. Herring! It’s Dr. Herring!”
“Yes, yes, hello, Dr. Herring, this is the intern. Sorry to page you at this hour,” I say.
“This is Dr. Herring!” He is shouting now.
“Yes, sir. Can you hear me?”
“Bloody hell, stop shouting. What do you want?”
I explain what happened, then say, “I think, sir, that the patient’s mother would like you to call her personally.”
There is a long silence. This is followed by an unusual guttural sound. He’s snoring.
“Dr. Herring?” I whisper.
I hear him startle and snort. “Who is this?”
“It’s the intern.”
He replies with a selection of colorful, decidedly British-sounding expletives. Then he says, “Don’t ever bother me with this drivel again,” and hangs up.
I sit there for a long while, stunned and thinking about the moment I graduated from medical school two months ago: the heady sense of accomplishment, striding buoyantly across the stage to seize my diploma from the dean, as if nothing could stop my ascent. Now it’s as if I’ve deflated and crashed into a heap on the pavement. I’ve failed a dead man. What if I’m not meant for this type of work? I was very good at school, at forcing myself to sit in a library cubicle for days or weeks at a time and commit facts to memory—what if that’s my maximal potential? What if I’ve already accomplished everything I can hope to accomplish in life, and I’ve just struck the ceiling of my natural abilities?
Finally, I write another note in the chart: Next of kin called and informed. I sign my name underneath: Norah Kapadia, MD. I write the two letters of my degree in microscopic print. I consider adding the words “kind of” after them.
The first rays of morning light streak in through a window. A wave of fatigue hits me all at once. I drag myself to the vending machine in the hallway and buy a can of diet Sprite and a roll of Oreos. Then I rest my back against the warm, humming machine and slide down it until I’m sitting on the floor. I can’t help picturing the dead man’s waxen face, his vacant brown eyes under hanging eyelids. I’ve been around dead people before, of course. The anatomy lab in medical school was filled with dead bodies, rows of them. But they were long dead. Preserved in formaldehyde, wrapped in plastic, and stripped of identity. This was different. This man was newly dead. His name was John Potts, and he had a mother who cared about him.
I lean my head back and close my eyes.
“Intern!”
I spring into a crouch position. The soda can rolls away, clattering.
Ethan smiles down at me. “Hi.” His scrubs are rumpled, and he has more scruff than usual. He looks like a rugged mountain man just back from splitting wood or otherwise maintaining the homestead. He wears his stethoscope around his neck, and the sleeves of his white coat are rolled up to his elbows. My heart jumps into my throat.
Squinting up at him, I manage to wheeze, “Hi.”
“Norah, it’s way too early in your intern year to be spooning with the vending machine.” He extends his hand. “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”
I hesitate. Then, I take his hand.
Pulling me to my feet, he says, “Cookies and soda at dawn, huh? I’m guessing it was a rough night?”
I meet his gaze, and his expression is so warm and sympathetic, it catches me off guard. A tear threatens to form at the corner of my eye and, panicked, I blink it back. “It’s nothing. I just got yelled at by an attending for calling to tell him his DNR patient died.”