Coma

“Mark, you wouldn’t be hurt if I cut your first surgery lecture, would you?” Susan had a twinkle in her eye.

Bellows stopped the second half of his tuna sandwich midway to his mouth and regarded Susan. He had an idea that she was flirting with him, but he dismissed it.

“Hurt? No, why do you ask?” Bellows had a helpless feeling that he was being manipulated.

“Well I just don’t think I could sit through a lecture at this moment in time,” said Susan, opening her milk carton. “I’m a little spaced from this affair with Berman. ... Affair is not the right word. Anyway I’m really uptight; I couldn’t handle a lecture. If I do something active I’ll be much better off. I was thinking that I’d go to the library and look up something about anesthesia complications. It will give me a chance to start my ‘little’ investigation as well as sort out this morning in my mind.”

“Would you like to talk about it?” asked Bellows.

“No, I’ll be OK, really.” Susan was surprised and touched by his sudden warmth.

“The lecture isn’t critical. It’s an introductory kind of thing by one of the emeritus professors. Afterwards I planned for you students to come on the ward to meet your patients.”

“Mark?”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

Susan stood up, smiled at Bellows, and left.

Bellows put the second half of his tuna sandwich into his mouth and chewed it on the right side, then he moved it over to the left cheek. He wasn’t even sure what Susan had thanked him for. He watched her cross the cafeteria and deposit her tray in the rack. She rescued her unfinished milk and sandwich before leaving. At the door she turned and waved. Bellows waved in return but by the time he got his hand up, she had already disappeared.

Bellows looked around self-consciously, wondering if anyone had noticed him with his hand in the air. Replacing his hand on the table, he thought about Susan. He had to admit that she attracted him in a refreshing, basic way, reminding him of the way he felt early in his social career: an excitement, an unsettling impatience. His imagination conjured up sudden romantic pursuits with Susan as the object. But as soon as he did so, he reprimanded himself for being juvenile.

Bellows polished off his milk with another gigantic gulp while carrying his tray to the dirty-dish cart. En route he wondered if he dared to ask Susan out. There were two problems. One was the residency and Stark.

Bellows had no idea how the chief would react to one of his residents dating a student assigned to him. Bellows was not sure if such a worry was rational or not. He did know that Stark tended to favor married residents. The idea was that the married ones would be more dependable, which, as far as Bellows was concerned, was pure bunk. But there was little hope of keeping a relationship between himself and one of the students a secret. Stark would find out and it could be bad. The second problem was Susan herself. She was sharp; there was no question about that. But could she be warm? Bellows had no idea. Maybe she was just too busy, or too intellectualized, or too ambitious. The last thing that Bellows wanted to do was to squander his limited free time on some cold, castrating bitch.

And what about himself? Could Bellows handle a sharp girl who was in his own field even if she were warm and lovable? He had dated a few nurses, but that was different because nurses were allied with but distinct from doctors. Bellows had never dated another doctor or even doctor-to-be. Somehow the idea was a bit disturbing.

Leaving the cafeteria, Susan enjoyed a greater sense of direction than she had felt all day. Although she had no idea how she was actually going to investigate the problem of prolonged coma after anesthesia, she felt that it represented an intellectual challenge which could be met by applying scientific methods and reasoning. For the first time all day she had a feeling that the first two years of medical school had meant something. Her sources were to be the literature in the library and the charts of the patients, particularly Greenly’s and Berman’s.

Near to the cafeteria was the hospital gift shop. It was a pleasant place, populated and run by an assortment of gracefully aging’

suburbanite women dressed in cute pink smocks. The windows of the shop faced the main hospital corridor and were mullioned, giving the shop an appearance of a cottage smack dab in the middle of the busy hospital.

Susan entered the gift shop and quickly found what she was after: a small black loose-leaf notebook. She slipped the purchase into her pocket of her white coat and left for the ICU. Her jumping-off point would be the case of Nancy Greenly.