Chapter Text
“O, Gertie, my sweet Gertie! After all those lovely blood thinners, they might finally let you escape this hellhole.”
Dr. Cox’s voice echoed down the corridor. I peeked over the nurse's station counter to see him actually smiling as he pushed Mrs. Gertrude “Gertie” Myers’ wheelchair toward her room. It was one of those rare, unfiltered smiles that totally changed his face. For a second, he didn’t look like Dr. Cox at all. Watching him look that human always made my stomach drop in this dangerous way, a weird little flutter I had to pretend was just admiration.
Mrs. Gertie was a sweet old lady. She was a regular—is that even a thing?—around here. Frequent flyer? Let’s go with frequent flyer. It sounds a little less like she’s a piece of luggage. She’d been coming back here for about three months to be treated for her deep vein thrombosis. It sounds scary, but she’s been responding well to treatment. Today was her final follow-up, and she’d been brought in for a short observation stay while they repeated her ultrasound. If everything looked good, Dr. Cox could finally decide whether she was ready to come off the blood thinners. Judging from her chart, she seemed to be doing much better. Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction.
Because she came in so often, Dr. Cox had dropped the terrifying act around her. She was everyone’s favorite. She really was as sweet as candy. Over the last three months, they had grown close. Mrs. Gertie loved to tell stories about her youth, and Dr. Cox actually enjoyed listening to them. She was the polar opposite of stubborn patients like old Mr. Henderson in bed three, who flushed his pills because he believed some herbal tonic could cure a failing kidney. Mrs. Gertie didn't play those games. I used to linger by the doorway just to watch them, entirely fascinated by the warmth he poured into her, the warmth I hopelessly, embarrassingly wished he would direct at me just once.
The phrase "sweet as candy" always made me think of those old-school strawberry wrappers, the hard candies with the soft center that your grandmother kept at the bottom of her purse, entirely covered in loose pocket lint. Mrs. Gertie wasn't linty, thank God, but she had that exact same warmth. It was just wild to me that she could look at a clinical monster like Dr. Cox and find a soft spot that nobody else in this building could reach. I spent years putting up with the yelling just to get a glimpse of that side of him, and she could do it just by talking about her youth.
Then a sharp whistle cut right through my thoughts.
"Hey, Susan!" Dr. Cox barked, snapping his fingers. "Move your scrawny, daydreaming legs over here right now. Chief Clown Kelso is demanding my presence for a mind-numbing budget meeting down in the conference room. I'm already ten minutes late, Bobo's already whining about his precious golf budget, and if I don't go sign his ridiculous papers right this second, he's going to cut my department's funding. I am going to be trapped down there for the next fifty minutes."
I walked toward him, and he immediately ripped the clipboard out of my hands before turning to the wheelchair, pointing a dramatic finger right at my face. I became very aware that Mrs. Gertie was watching. I was also hyper-aware of how close he was standing, the faint scent of his soap cutting through the sterile hospital air.
"Now, Gertie, sweetheart, look closely," Dr. Cox said. "This right here is a rare, spineless creature known to science as the John Dorian. Notice the vacant, doe-eyed stare, the complete lack of a masculine jawline, the hair—God, look at that hair. You’d think somebody took a mop, gave it a medical degree, and told it to report for duty. I know I am rolling the dice on human life by leaving you with a little girl who clearly uses a pink loofah, but she is going to stand right here and look after you while I deal with the devil downstairs."
He slammed the clipboard back flat against my ribs, knocking the wind out of me. My face burned. Getting degraded in front of a sweet old lady should have made me want to run away and cry into a giant tub of ice cream. But the pathetic truth was, I was pretty much immune to the public humiliation by now. I was so used to being his personal whipping boy that having him stand this close and rip me to shreds actually felt… nice?
He stayed right there in my face, breathing hard, thoroughly invading my space. His eyes drilled into mine with that terrifying intensity that usually meant I was about to get a one-way ticket to his department's dumpster. It was intense and exhausting, but at least he was looking at me. I spent so much time daydreaming about him actually noticing me—about him seeing me as a real person instead of just a doormat he could wipe his muddy boots on whenever he had a bad day—that even this awful, mean attention felt better than nothing. I wanted to be the one guy in this hospital who could handle his rants without breaking. If he needed someone to take the brunt of it, I could handle that.
"If anything happens to her because you were busy staring blankly at the wall or panting and humping the furniture like an over-excited puppy, I will personally throw your residency into the hospital dumpster. Do we understand each other, Joanna?"
At least when he was calling me a furniture-humping puppy, his eyes were locked entirely on me. He was paying attention. I was anchoring him, even if it was only as his favorite target.
"Aye-aye, Captain!" I squeaked.
Dr. Cox turned on his heel and stormed out of the room. The door clicked shut, leaving the room completely quiet. I stood at the foot of the bed, shifting my weight uncomfortably, still feeling that sharp, tingling warmth right where the clipboard had slammed into me.
Mrs. Gertie let out a soft, maternal tsk-tsk sound, shaking her head. "Oh, Johnny-boy. Don't you listen to a single word that big old grump says. Panting like a puppy? If anyone around here acts like an aggressive bulldog, it's him."
A small, breathless laugh escaped my throat, and I rubbed the back of my neck. "Thanks, Mrs. Gertie. I'm used to it. He's actually being kind of gentle today. Usually, he tells me my hair looks like a tragic, mop-headed Muppet that got caught in a ceiling fan."
"Well, I think your hair is delightful," she smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "But he really shouldn't talk to you like that. You're a good doctor, John. He shouldn't treat you like a punching bag just because he's stressed."
"I’m just glad he has me around to vent to," I said, stepping over to check her monitors. Her blood pressure was a beautiful 120 over 80, and her heart rate was a steady sixty beats per minute. "Everything looks normal, Mrs. Gertie. Oh, and to be fair, if he kept all that pressure bottled up inside his own head, it would probably explode. Besides, I like to think the daily humiliation keeps me humble. Or gives me a thick skin. Or whatever it is I'm miserably lacking today."
It was a lie, of course. It didn't build character. Turk always tells me I have an embarrassing need for approval, which is totally unfair. I have a perfectly healthy, absolutely normal, definitely-not-concerning need for approval from a man who uses girl names as a form of punctuation. But as I watched the little green waves on her heart monitor bounce up and down, I realized it was deeper than that. The hospital could grind a person down until there was nothing left but a hollow shell with a stethoscope. If letting Dr. Cox vent all that poisonous rage onto me kept him from drowning in it himself, then I could take it. I would take it every single shift.
"You're far too good to him, dear," she murmured, leaning back into her pillows with a nostalgic smile.
I stayed in that room for the next forty-five minutes, doing exactly what I’d been told. I kept my attention on her and didn’t even let myself get distracted once. Mrs. Gertie passed the time by telling me this hilarious, rambling story about a jazz club she used to sneak into back in Chicago during the eighties, waving her frail hands around as she talked about a saxophone player named Arthur. The whole room just had this nice, easy, jazzy vibe to it. I found myself relaxing. I was doing exactly what Dr. Cox asked. I was keeping his favorite patient safe. I imagined telling him later, watching the tight, defensive lines around his mouth soften just a fraction when I proved I could handle the responsibility.
And then, Cabbage burst through the door.
The bumbling intern was white as a sheet and hyperventilating as he grabbed my arm. "Dr. Dorian! I almost gave Henderson Daonil! I caught it before he swallowed it, but his kidneys are already shot—I don’t know what I was thinking!"
I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. I looked back at Mrs. Gertie. Her monitors hadn’t changed. She gave me an encouraging little wave. "Go on, Johnny-boy. Fix the poor kid's mess. I'll be right here."
"I'll be back in exactly two minutes, Mrs. Gertie," I promised.
It took me less than five minutes. Mr. Henderson hadn't swallowed the pill yet because he was too busy waving it around and yelling about how his homemade herbal remedies were superior to our ‘western poisons’. I had to physically wrestle the blister pack out of his hand while giving Cabbage a quick, fierce lecture about checking medication labels before he killed someone. The second the chart was corrected, I sprinted straight back to Room 214.
Mrs. Gertie was exactly where I’d left her, still perfectly fine. She gave me a little smile when I walked back in, and I immediately apologized for leaving her. I checked her monitors again, adjusted her pillows, and settled back into the chair beside her. She picked up right where she’d left off with her story about Arthur, and for a few minutes, everything felt normal again.
And then the jazzy vibe was completely gone.
Mrs. Gertie was clawing at her hospital gown, her face turning blue as she gasped for air. The monitors were screaming, her oxygen saturation plummeting as her blood pressure crashed. My stomach completely dropped. The DVT. The sudden hypoxia. The hypotension. The distended neck veins. My brain put the pieces together before I could stop it. Massive PE?
“Mrs. Gertie!” I lunged forward, raising the head of her bed. I hit the emergency call button. “I need a crash cart in 214! Code Blue! Right now!”
Within seconds, a nurse burst through the door with an ambu-bag, followed by another nurse pushing the crash cart.
I started ventilating her, squeezing air into her lungs as her breathing became shallow and ineffective, shouting orders at the nurses scrambling into the room. We prepped the epinephrine, and I yelled for someone to get the tPA ready, desperate to break up the clot choking off her pulmonary circulation. My hands were steady, but internally, I was screaming. Please, God, not her. Don’t let me fail him.
Right in the middle of the chaos, the door flew open.
Dr. Cox stood in the frame. The look on his face shifted into pure dread the second his eyes locked onto the crash cart and the monitor.
“Get out of the way!” Dr. Cox roared, his voice completely cracking with panic. He aggressively shoved me aside.
His large hands slammed onto Mrs. Gertie’s sternum as he started brutal compressions. “Keep compressions going! Another epi! Get the tPA in! Come on, Gertie!”
He was sweating, his face contorted with panic as he pumped at her chest. He glared at me through his curls, his breath hitching with every compression. “What did you do, Newbie?! You had one job! Where the hell were you?! Look at her! Give the tPA, damn it! Nobody stops!”
Carla was right beside the bed, flawlessly managing the crash cart. She pushed the epinephrine and flushed the line while Dr. Cox kept up the exhausting rhythm of compressions. The monitor showed electrical activity, but there was no pulse. PEA. We kept going anyway.
The sheer force of his movements was agonizing to watch. He threw his entire weight into every compression, as if sheer force could somehow bring her back. After several more exhausting cycles, Carla gently placed her hand over his.
Her voice was quiet, full of a heavy sadness. “Perry. Stop. It’s over.”
Dr. Cox froze, his shoulders heaving as he stared down at Mrs. Gertie. Carla kept her hand over his arm, looking up at him with her eyes shining with tears.
"Perry," she whispered gently. "You need to call it."
He slowly lifted his eyes straight to the wall clock, his breathing coming in ragged, broken gaps.
"Time of death, sixteen forty-two," he muttered. His hands fell away from her chest, and the room went dead silent except for the steady whine of the monitor.
It felt like an eternity before Doug and the morgue crew finally showed up with the gurney. Seeing Doug walk through the door made my stomach do a miserable flip. No matter how much we joked around the hospital about his terrible track record, his presence meant there was truly no turning back. Watching him carefully cover Gertie and prepare to wheel her down to the basement made the heavy lump in my throat feel twice as tight.
The second the door clicked shut behind them, Dr. Cox snapped. He let out a strangled roar, shouting a furious 'Damn it!' as he swept his arm violently across the bedside table. Everything went flying. Plastic cups and the water pitcher crashed across the floor. Then he grabbed the IV pole, ripped it free, and hurled it against the opposite wall with a deafening metallic clang. I flinched, my back pressing hard against the wall as things smashed all around me. Dr. Cox stood there breathing hard, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
Then he slowly turned around. He walked straight into my space, backing me all the way up against the wall. His eyes were bloodshot and wild through his curls.
"You did this," he whispered. His voice had a jagged, quiet fury that cut right through me. "I left her with you for fifty damn minutes. Fifty minutes, Newbie."
He pressed a trembling finger hard into my chest, his breath hot against my face. I just froze. My brain stalled out, and all I could focus on was how ridiculously close he was standing and how loud his breathing sounded in the empty room. I spent so much time crafting elaborate daydreams where he finally claps me on the shoulder and tells the whole hospital that I’m a damn good doctor. But out here in the real world, where he treats me like a literal doormat, I’ve learned to take whatever attention I can get—even if it’s just him tearing me to shreds. Now that his eyes were burning straight into mine, I couldn’t even blink. I stood there pinned against the drywall, his anger making it hard to breathe. I wanted to apologize, to explain about Cabbage, to beg him to start shouting his usual rants instead of looking at me with that horrific, quiet disappointment, but the words wouldn’t come. I definitely had nothing to say.
“You couldn’t even keep your ass in the room,” he whispered. “Get out of my sight. Get the hell out of my sight before I ensure you never put on a pair of scrubs again.”
He didn't wait for an answer. He turned on his heel and stormed out, leaving the door to swing shut behind him with a loud, ringing slam.
I was left entirely alone in the middle of the ruined room. The medical part of my brain wanted to focus on the clot, the obstructive shock, the massive pulmonary embolism, anything that would make this feel like a regular hospital problem instead of what it actually was. But I couldn't. I just stared at the empty mattress, waiting for a punchline that wasn't coming. I knew how to handle the rants, the whistling, and the screaming. My entire day-to-day routine relied on turning his anger into a game so I could go home, eat some cereal, and actually sleep at night. But Dr. Cox broke the routine. He looked right at me, told me I did this, and walked out, leaving me entirely alone with a guilt I didn't know what to do with.
For the first time, I didn’t know how to laugh it off.