Is it your mom? she asked. Oh my gosh, did she? Both parents back to back?
I said my mother was fine.
But your face, said Madeline. You look gray.
I felt gray, I said.
Doctors complained to each other all the time and to anyone else who would listen. The system is broken. Referring mostly to bureaucracy, insurance, the skyrocketing cost of care, Big Pharma’s focus on only lucrative drugs, the cost of medical training itself plus licensing, and the exorbitant salaries of some specialties like oncology. But who could have broken our own system if not us? And the system wasn’t so much broken as it was circuitous, self-blaming, and operating under false pretenses. A hospital is a business, and businesses like to make money whether that profit came from goods or the extension of human lives.
The medical system wasn’t perfect because no system is perfect, but I still admired it for being a hierarchical masterpiece of specialized skill. Moreover, how could a system be that flawed if it had allowed someone like me in?
Was I? I might’ve been—having my own moment of peak sadness like each of my residents and like Reese. But whereas they felt the training had stifled their personhoods, I relished that feeling of anonymity and of being a cog in the whole. So, what I was experiencing now was perhaps the reverse crisis, from having been repudiated by the group to be on my own. I could hear my father asking, What’s the plan, doctor-daughter, what’s the plan? I could feel the totally panicked doctor-daughter realizing she had no plan nor six weeks’ worth of person-y things to do.
When I continued to say nothing, Madeline felt my forehead and said I was a little warm. She plucked the notice from my hands and started to read.
Are you bereaved? she asked from behind the page, her eyes scanning line by line at an increasing pace.
I said I couldn’t be sure anymore. This all seemed too surreal.
Madeline then replied, slowly and softly, that she couldn’t lose me as well. Me and Reese. She couldn’t be on this side of the office alone after already committing to us as colleagues. When Madeline finally set the notice down, there was a look in her eyes, like that of a frantic gerbil about to go for a perilous sprint on a wheel. She knelt and turned my chair to face her. She expressed regret for what she was going to do, but she had to get her agitation out somehow and asked me not to take it to heart.
Madeline, I said, as a warning. Madeline, hang on, we can get you a stress ball.
But it was already too late.
When your feet can’t dangle off the seat, flying can feel a lot like sitting. When your armrests are being shaken by a co-worker, sitting can feel a little like flying.
As the entire chair rocked, I was back on that plane with my grainy apple slices. It was comforting at first, the rattling of all my limbs, the sloping around of my cheeks, the confusion as my brain sloshed in its own fluid like pickled vegetables in a jar, but eventually, I had to ask Madeline to stop shaking me and my chair. I was already nauseated.
My last resort was to head into the director’s office without a scheduled appointment. He was in the same position as before, seated at his desk, the view behind him the same set of bridges and cars, planes landing and taking off. He glanced away from his computer at me and seemed startled, as if he’d seen a ghost.
What are you doing here? he whispered. You’re supposed to be on leave.
Tomorrow.
He nodded solemnly and asked if there was anything he could still do for me. Nespresso? A handshake?
I asked to stay and he said that decision was out of his hands.
But what if I never told anyone and just never left. I could order a sleeping bag and store it under my desk. Shower with wet wipes.
They’ll make an example out of you, he said.
How? I asked. It wasn’t possible to make an example out of a model minority.
The director doubted it too but still urged me not to take any chances. What HR frequently said to them, the directors, about the proper running of a hospital: if you do not respect the corporate form, the corporate form will not respect you. He repeated this with a shudder.
Good news is that it’s just six weeks, he said. Go see your family. Go to Greenwich. Take naps, walks. Time will fly.
I couldn’t quite picture that, time flying six weeks or forty-two days at a time, unless I was put into a coma.
And when you come back, which you will, all this will be behind you and I’ll prioritize you for any shift you want.
I thanked him for his continued and unwavering support.
He said it was the least he could do.
Then I said something that surprised even myself.