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Dennis had seen some gruesome things in his relatively short life. Some of which he experienced before he even reached double digits.
There was a particularly bad summer in his ninth year when a rather crotchety uncle of his got an arm caught in the harvester, the spray of blood that spurted from him arched through the air like the sprinkler he and his brothers used to run through on hot days.
Shortly after that his favorite dairy cow, Clover, birthed a deformed calf who entered the world confused and in pain that needed to be swiftly dealt with, which his Pa made him do. He had said it would help him build character but Dennis suspected that his father thought him to be too soft and wanted to nip that in the bud. Clover stopped shuffling over to him when he approached the fence that bordered her pasture after that.
Blood and guts weren’t something he shied away from but people weren’t his strong suit so it wasn’t their teenage patient’s gaping wound that drove him out of the room, it was when he started crying out for his mama.
Dennis cried out for his own mama for the last time when he was four and took a hard fall jumping in the mud puddles on their gravel driveway after a week of constant rain, slicing his hands and knees open. She had rushed out of the door, sleeves and apron wet from washing dishes, sighing angrily when she saw him muddy and bloody on the ground and dragged him around the back of the house where she blasted him clean with the ice cold spray of their hose.
Princess had called for Dr. Park but didn’t receive a response so Dr. Robby, in that omnipresent way of his, turned to Dennis and gently ordered him to seek out the surgeon. It sounded more like a thinly veiled order to go get some air. Dr. Robby had an odd way of knowing when Dennis was crumbling.
He scanned his badge and opened the doors to the surgical department revealing a quiet, dimly lit hallway with a vacant secretary station cut into the wall on the right and a single massive man in scrubs tapping away at a phone lazily dangling from his hand to the left.
The chill of the department already began to nip at Dennis’ skin, raising goose flesh. The complete opposite of the hot, frenzied energy in The Pitt. Peeking over the counter to make sure there really wasn’t someone on duty he resolved to bother the only other person in sight.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for Dr. Park?”
“What for?” The man replied, tone entirely uninterested and bored.
“We’ve requested his input on a patient in the ED. My attending paged him but got no response,” Dennis answered, trying not to make it sound like a question. It was something he had been working at lately in order to sound more confident— a pointer from Dr. Robby.
The man peered at Dennis over his phone, dropping his hand to his side upon finally making eye contact.
“And you are?” The man blinked at Dennis, his eyes dark and half lidded. He vaguely reminded Dennis of the coyotes that would stalk the outskirts of their family farm on cold nights when they were desperate enough to try and face off against their livestock guardian dogs.
“Whitaker, MS4. I, um, work in the ED,” he said.
“Whitaker, huh?” The man gave him a once over that Dennis had to fight not to squirm under.
“Yup, that’s me. If you haven’t seen him, I can look around for someone else to ask,” Dennis said amiably, attempting to steer the conversation.
“I know where he is,” the man said.
“Great! And that would be…” Dennis trailed off.
The man’s eyes landed on his badge and in a movement so casual he reached over, lifting it up with one finger to get a better look. He felt his heart skip a beat.
“Dennis,” he mumbled under his breath before letting his name tag fall to rest back against his hip, “You don’t look like a Dennis to me. Denny, maybe. Does anyone ever call you that?”
Dennis made a concerted effort to fix his face.
He knew that the OR was a different world, full to the brim of oddballs with little to no social skills from the past interactions with them, but their abrasive nature still caught him off guard. Broadly, interactions in Pittsburgh were so incredibly different from those back home but the disparity was much more prominent when dealing with the upstairs crew.
“No. I can assure you that I am Dennis Whitaker. I swear I didn’t steal a name tag or anything. It’s even got my picture on it,” he joked.
There was a beat of awkward silence when the man didn’t react.
“Cute. You ex-amish or something, Dennis? You have that look about you.”
“I’m not from around here,” Dennis replied shortly, “And I am kind of busy at the moment so I’m just going to—” he trailed off, attempting to slide past the hulking figure but a meaty hand was splayed in the center of his chest, stopping him in his tracks.
“You’re going to tell them I’ll be down in a minute,” the man said, rolling his eyes.
Dennis startled, “Wait, you’re Dr. Park?”
“In the flesh,” he drawled, palm still spread on his sternum.
“Why didn’t you say so when I asked?” Dennis huffed, allowing some irritation to coat his tone, “What if it was an emergency?”
“We work at the hospital. Everything is an emergency,” Dr. Park blinked at him. Dennis was at a loss for words, “Not my fault you can't read a badge.”
The man turned slightly to the side to reveal his full badge which did in fact have the name Brendon Park, Doctor emblazoned on across the bottom and in even smaller letters, Surgical Services.
Dennis didn’t think that was fair, it was half obscured from the way he was leaning against the wall but a glance at the man’s face told him arguing would be futile. Besides, there was a fifteen year old boy waiting on them who may or may not become an amputee in the next few hours.
So Dennis, ever the mediator, stepped back and away from the man, inhaled deeply, and smiled up at Dr. Park, “I will tell Dr. Robby that you’ll be with us in a moment. Thank you, Dr. Park.”
“Cute,” the man said, again, with a smirk playing on the corner of his mouth. As to what could be so adorable about the situation, Dennis was at a loss to know and didn’t particularly care to find out. He turned on his heels and retreated back to the ED, hoping to never need to venture up to the surgical department ever again or at the very least not in the near future.
*
When he returned to Trauma 2 Dennis found the room mostly vacant. The teenager was mercifully sedated, arm still ripped open and hanging by a thread but thoroughly cleaned and not weeping anymore. It was still a gash of stark red contrasting with the sterile white and blue of the room that he couldn’t help drawing his eyes too.
Princess, who was fiddling with the monitors, turned to him when he walked through the double doors, a smirk playing at her mouth and a mischievous spark in her eye like she had something she was dying to ask but before she could speak the doors swung open behind him and Dr. Park breezed in.
“Dr. Robby had to assist with another patient but he should be back shortly,” she said, giving him a pointed look as she retreated, leaving just the two of them left in the room.
“Assesment,” Dr. Park prompted, snapping on a pair of gloves. His features read even more severely in the bright light of the treatment room. The shadows made his brow appear heavier and accentuated the bridge of his strong nose.
“Traumatic subtotal amputation of the left arm attached only via the tissue with a devascularized forearm. No palpable distal pulse in the detached ligament. Significant disruption of muscle, nerves, and bone.”
Dr. Park nodded and leaned over the patient, gently poking and prodding the skin around the wound and then began assessing the range of movement in the fingers. His forearms bulged from underneath his scrub top as he worked. He looked exactly like the kind of guy who would have made Dennis’s life especially hard in high school.
Dennis stood out of the way, hands folded in front of him. He hoped that if he stood still enough, Dr. Park wouldn’t even notice him taking up space in the corner of the room. He could only stand so many off putting interactions in one day.
“What are you doing after work, Dennis Whitaker MS4?” Dr. Park asked distractedly, eyes trained on the patient’s forearm.
There went his plan.
“I’m sorry?” Dennis glanced up from the gore to the flat expression on Dr. Park’s face. He couldn’t possibly be making small talk.
Dr. Park tilted his head a fraction of a degree and smiled patronizingly, his jaw tensing which made it appear even wider than it was, “I hate repeating myself.”
He bore the facial expression one would give a puppy who pissed on the floor. Dennis winced.
“Uh, just the usual. Sleeping until I have to be back here in the morning,” he replied as casually as he could possibly manage. Dennis had found that jokes about being exhausted were safe material and relatable enough at work. Everyone in the medical field was perpetually so.
Dr. Park seemed to have finished his assessment because he stood abruptly, slipping his bloodied nitrile gloves off and tossing them in the trash, “Good. Then in that case I can take you out for drinks and you can tell me all about where you’re from. You are old enough to drink, right?”
Dennis’s stomach swooped low in his gut.
“I’m—” Sorry?, he almost said again before stopping himself
“You’re Dayshift in the ED which means you should get off at seven, right?”
“Yes?” Dennis responded automatically and it definitely came out sounding like a question. He mentally kicked himself, Dr. Robby would’ve been disappointed.
“Cool. I’ll be waiting at the entrance. Look for a black Audi A6,” Dr. Park winked.
Dennis felt his jaw drop without his permission.
“There is no way you're asking me out on a date,” he said although the way Dr. Park phrased it there had never been a question involved.
”Why not? You’re cute in a hopelessly naive kind of way,” Dr. Park.
”You mean in an Amish boy kind of way? Because that was one of the first things you said to me if you’ve forgotten on the long walk down here. Oh, and that too. We’ve just met five minutes ago, I don't even know you,” Dennis insisted.
“I’m already getting to know you. See, I just learned that you have a backbone under that polite exterior. Drinks are a great way to get to know someone,” Dr. Park shrugged, crossing his arms.
The action made him look even bigger than he already was somehow. Dr. Robby would look meek and thin next to him. As if summoned merely by thought, the attending pushed into the room followed by Mel, Princess and Perlah, apologizing for the delay.
“What do we think, Park?” Dr. Robby asked, eyes on their patient, his arms crossed.
Dr. Park turned away from Dennis to speak to the attending, “I think you lost a med student in my department, glad he was able to follow the breadcrumbs back home.”
Dr. Robby huffed a laugh before sobering himself. Dennis clenched his jaw to stay his tongue.
“Reattachment is not an option. We amputate below the elbow midway down the forearm. I’ll book him. Just cleared a room so it shouldn’t be long.”
“What a shame, he’s so young,” Dr. Robby mumbled before sighing and turned back to the surgeon who shrugged indifferently, “Will do.”
Dr. Park made for a swift exit but not before he made pointed eye contact with Dennis. As he passed behind Dr. Robby, unnoticed by any of his coworkers, the man mouthed Seven to Dennis, the curl of a smile on the man’s face was visible before he rounded the corner, disappearing from view.
They all turned to Dennis who was still sequestered in his corner, mouth agape, before jerking into motion, readying their patient for a trip upstairs.
“You sent the new kid to fetch Dr. Park? Oh, that’s cruel,” Perlah said, wincing at Dennis sympathetically.
“We build character as well as careers here,” Dr. Robby said from where he was updating the teenager’s chart on one of the roll away computers, only looking away from it to glance at Dennis with a playful smile threatening the corner of his mouth.
It was an expression his attending was beginning to give him a lot— when passing tablets back and forth, while hovering over a patient they were stabilizing— like they were both in on a secret that only they knew although Dennis was clueless as to what that could be. He tried not to let it fluster him when it happened. He failed pretty often.
Dennis also thought that his character had been torn down and rebuilt so many times he would like a break from all of the remodeling.
“They call him Park the Shark,” Princess whispered to him as she passed him like it was something scandalous.
“I can see why,” he mumbled.
“I wouldn’t take it personally,” Mel said gently, leaning toward him as though to offer a semblance of discretion, “He treats everyone like that.”
For the sake of the PTMC’s HR staff, Dennis sure hoped not.