Bad Doctor

V

That’s me an hour ago, approaching the conference room to meet Lainey’s parents, Jordan and Will Calfee.

Of Calfee Coffee.

As I enter, Jordan and Will are on the sofa, grim-faced, holding hands. Nurse Sally’s in the straight-back chair, giving me the evil eye. Security Joe’s standing at the doorway.

As always, I nod at Security Joe and say, “Are you feeling okay? Because you don’t look so good.”

As always, he ignores me.

Jordan and Will jump to their feet, searching my eyes.

If my eyes could talk, they’d say I’m dying inside, thinking how the Calfee’s lives will change forever when I kill their kid on my operating table.

Nurse Sally hates me. She’s black, two hundred fifty pounds, her age a complete mystery. Could be forty, could be sixty. She’s a wonderful, caring person, my polar opposite. She visits the parents before they meet me, warns them about my notoriously foul bedside manner, and attempts to calm them down after I leave.

Security Joe is early-forties, former Marine, big, tough, freaky quiet. The kind of guy you’d expect to see guarding the president.

Joe’s chief of security, here to guard me from possible assault. He blends into the background, always ready to step between me and an angry parent. While Joe couldn’t care less if I offend the parents, Sally constantly wants to slap me up the side of my head for doing so.

I’d love to have Nurse Sally’s attitude, and probably would, if I had her job.

Or any other job.

I’m not asking for sympathy, but imagine if your job required you to do something that made you physically and mentally sick every time you did it. I know you can’t relate, and there are no good examples, but you know that chalky stuff you have to drink the day before getting a colonoscopy? It tastes like hell and makes you shit for twelve hours straight?

Let’s say your job was to drink that chalk every day of your life.

You’d like to quit, but you’re the only one in the world who can do it, and every day you don’t drink the chalk, a child you’ve met will die.

That’s a lot of pressure.

After a few years, it gets to your head.

Makes you do crazy things in order to cope.

So that’s what I do, perform one or two of these horrific, impossible operations, then go bat shit crazy and run out into the world and do stupid, dangerous things, like breaking into people’s houses when they’re on vacation, and assuming their lives.