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Dana's given more than thirty years of her life to PTMC. By now, she understands it the same way an scientist comes to know the ecosystems that they study. If someone ever decided that this place would make good fodder for one of those day-in-the-life documentary series, Dana figures that she could easily provide the voiceover. It'd be like one of those PBS nature shows that her husband likes to fall asleep in front of. Dana knows it all: the hospital's seasonal changes and its apex predators; the parts that are fertile and the ones that are fallow; which departments are easy prey and which are like those little birds that sit on a hippo's back and eat the ticks off it
And so Dana knows, when she spots Robby talking to Noelle Hastings, exactly what she's dealing with here. She sighs. She'll grant that Robby is far from the worst about this kind of thing. He doesn't often dip his pen in company ink, if you'll pardon her French. In fact, the Pitt—despite the general reputation of EDs—is fairly sedate as far as these things go.
(It's the surgeons you have to keep an eye out for. Don't think that the next time she takes Trinity out for martinis, she won't be dropping a few subtle stories about what went down at a notorious AANS conference in Albuquerque a few years ago. It resulted in one neurosurgeon quitting PTMC, a threatened lawsuit, someone literally being left at the altar and Dana having to learn what the word 'polycule' means. You learned life lessons from observing that kind of thing, and Dana felt obliged to pass them on, because let's be real, subtle is one thing that Trinity ain't and that Yolanda Garcia doesn't aspire to be.)
But you step back and you look at PTMC as a whole, and what you see is a pressure cooker. If you put things into a pressure cooker and leave them there long enough, they'll start to fold in on one another in ways that normally they might not. And so maybe Dana's never going to earn a cordon bleu for her cookery metaphors, but in her time here she's seen odd couples and ill-advised hook-ups like you wouldn't believe.
(Literally seen, sometimes, like a few years ago when Dana had walked into an exam room shortly after eight in the morning, thinking she'd left her phone there, and instead found that one respiratory therapist with the bowl cut fumbling around with the guy from Ortho who always wanted everyone to know that he did Crossfit.
"Just flopping around on top of him," Dana had told Benji over dinner that evening, waggling a limp hand around by way of illustration, "like seeing a walrus at the zoo trying to scooch back into the water, except this walrus was trying to scooch over the corpse of another guy that didn't make it, because I swear to God, he was just lying there staring up at the ceiling," and Benji had laughed so hard he'd almost choked on his pasta.)
On paper, Dana knows, Robby and Hastings are very far from being a bad match. She's pretty; Robby has those big brown eyes of his. They both have solid jobs, no criminal records, no off-putting tics like that one med student from a few years ago who was constantly sniffing and smacking his lips.
People have built an awful lot on so much less. Heck, if this was one of those cheesy Harlequins that her mom, God rest her, used to devour, then Dana might even be rooting for these two crazy kids.
But Dana watches Hastings watch Robby walk away, and she thinks about how the real world ain't like a romance novel.
Dana's known Noelle Hastings off and on since high school. Their mothers had often served on the same parish committees at St Dominic's; their kid brothers played Little League together. The ebb and flow of motherly gossip, as unstoppable as any tide, meant that Dana got informed of all the greatest hits of Hastings' life over the years: wasn't it great that that nice Noelle had earned that nursing school scholarship, and had Dana heard about how Noelle had put a down payment on a house, and oh, Betty Roberts' eldest girl just got engaged, and wasn't it sweet that her fiancé worked with her father, wasn't he such a nice boy?
(After that particular Sunday dinner, Dana's sister had helped her wash the dishes, and when their mother was out of the room had rolled her eyes about how of course Nice Noelle would end up with a Nice Boy, and wouldn't everything be so nice for the new Mr and Mrs Hastings.
"That's not exactly kind, Amy," Dana had said as she dried off a plate. As pushbacks went, it was far from being a full-throated one. Dana had felt faintly guilty, but not enough to say anything more. It wasn't that she properly disliked Noelle, or had any specific thing to hold against her. All of their parents' generation just liked her too damn much. Made Dana feel contrary, and feeling contrary made her feel stubborn.)
Noelle Hastings is a rules follower. Lord knows the world could use more of those these days—that, a little more empathy, a little more shame—because Dana has to trust that even if the system right now doesn't always work the way it should, that there is a way how it could. God's plans are mysterious.
(They may even be mysterious enough to encompass nurse case managers, who knows; Dana doesn't pretend to understand all of the workings of the Almighty.)
But Robby, well, Dana hasn't known him quite as long as she's known Hastings, but she knows him a lot better. That's not a man who's going to settle down with a stickler for the rules. Heck, right now she doesn't think he's a man to hit his customary six weeks with one. Best as Dana figures it, Robby asked Hastings out somewhere around Memorial Day. A little over a month. They've outlasted some celebrity marriages, sure, but not by a lot.
And Dana may not be particularly close to Hastings, but she heard that her divorce was rough and that there was some kind of nasty custody battle that dragged on for a while. Dana wouldn't like her to be getting her hopes up where Robby's concerned. Robby's got a heart of gold, but Dana's not giving him any of her good friends' numbers, either.
"Hastings," Dana says as Hastings passes the nurses' station. She watches out of the corner of her eye at Hastings pauses, flicks a quick glance her way.
"Evans." Polite but not encouraging. Dana can't say she blames her.
"Hope you know what you're doing." No point in beating around the bush with this kind of thing.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
Dana looks at her over the top of her glasses. No point in playing dumb with her, either.
"I'm a big girl," Hastings says and walks off.
"Okay, big girl," Dana says, and bites back a sigh. Now she's got the PBS documentary guy's voice in her head: a plummy British accent saying Sadly, not all of these creatures will make it through the rainy season unscathed. But Dana's made her point, and what Robby and Hastings choose to do... Well, big girl. Big boy. It's ultimately up to them.
Times like this, all Dana can do is sit back and watch.