Radclyffe - Turn Back Time

"Did you meet with any of the residents?"

"No."

Pearce clenched her jaw. It was perfectly within her father's purview as the chairman of the department to hire anyone he wanted, but it was very unusual to interview a new resident without soliciting the input of at least one of the senior residents. He had obviously known for a few days that Wynter would be joining the service, but he hadn't said anything to her. She'd been cut out of the loop, but then, no one ever said the hospital was a democracy.

"You didn't know anything about it, did you?" Wynter said quietly.

No wonder she's peeved.

"Doesn't make any difference." Pearce stopped and turned to face her. The hospital was waking, and nurses and other personnel hurried through the halls around them, preparing for the shift change. They stood like an island in the sea of white, ignoring the passersby. "We've been down a resident since September--one of the third-year guys decided that he wanted to go into anesthesia. We carry fifty patients on the service and it's every third night."

Wynter blanched. "Every third? That's rough."

Pearce grinned and a feral look came into her dark eyes. "We do things here the way they've been doing it for sixty years or so. We don't cross-cover at night. Every surgical service has its own residents in house. I guess Connie didn't tell you that, huh?"

"I'm sure it never crossed her mind," Wynter said steadily. She'd gotten her balance back. She was being tested, and she didn't intend to show weakness. "And if it had, it wouldn't have made any difference.

I was just surprised."

"Yeah, well, like I said. It's not the norm, but it's the way we do it here."

"No problem."

"We make dry rounds every morning in the cafeteria at five thirty. That means you have to see your patients before then. We need a rundown of vital signs, I and Os, updates on lab tests, that kind of thing."

Wynter nodded, mentally doing the math. If she needed to be at the hospital by five, she'd need to be up at four. She could handle it. She had to handle it. She didn't have any choice.

Pearce made a sharp left, and they descended a set of stairs into a basement cafeteria. The round tables in one half of the room were filled with residents and students, most of them in scrubs and white coats.

"Let's get some coffee."

"Amen," Wynter murmured.

As they made their way through the cafeteria line, Pearce said, "There are five of us on the service, counting you. Two first-years, a second-year, and me."

"You're acting chief?"

"Yeah."

"The other fourth-years are either in the lab, on the other two general surgical services, or on vascular." Pearce grabbed a bagel and a plastic container of cream cheese, then filled a twenty-ounce Styrofoam cup almost to the brim with coffee. "We only have one chief resident slot. The other fifth-years get farmed out to the affiliate hospitals in the system."

Wynter could tell by the tone of Pearce's voice that anyone who didn't finish their final year of training at the main hospital as the chief surgical resident automatically qualified as a loser in Pearce's mind.

She could understand the sentiment. You didn't give up five years of your life to come in second. She'd already lost one year of training because she had to accept a third-year slot or give up surgery. She felt the anger rise and quickly pushed it aside. What was done was done.

All she could do now was go forward. "If there's five of us now, why are we taking call every third?"

Pearce handed a ten to the cashier and said, "For both of us."

"You don't have to--"

"Tradition." Pearce looked over her shoulder at Wynter. "Chief buys. And as far as the schedule goes, on this service, you and I back up the first-years--so we're on every third and the second-year fills in the blanks. The chairman doesn't trust the first-years alone with his patients."

Wynter ran the night call schedule in her head. Two first-year residents and a second-year, also technically a junior resident. Then Pearce. It didn't jive. "So who's been backing up the other first-year if you're the only senior resident on the service?"

"Me. We have to stagger the call now so I can cover one of them every other night."

"Every other?" Wynter tried not to sound appalled. Twenty-four hours on, twenty-four off could get old really, really fast. She'd only ever done it for a day or so when another resident had a family emergency or had been too ill to get out of bed. She remembered one of the first rules of surgery she'd been quoted. The only reason for missing work is a funeral. Your own. "How long have you been on every other?"

Pearce shrugged. It didn't matter to her if she was officially on call or not. She was always around. She had to be. She knew what she wanted and what it took to get it. "A while."

"Okay."

Wynter decided it was not prudent to bring up the newly instituted eighty-hour rule. In theory, house officers--all the residents in any specialty--were prohibited by law from working more than eighty hours in one week, were required to have one day off out of every seven, and were supposed to be allowed to go home after twenty four hours in a row on call in the hospital. Surgical training programs, however, often interpreted those rules very loosely. The dictum was that surgery could only be learned in the operating room, and if there were cases to be done, the residents needed to be there, no matter what time of the day or night. Residents who questioned their hours often found themselves being assigned to the least interesting cases, or worse, being cut from the program. Pyramid programs like the one at University took more residents during the initial years of training than they could finish, knowing that some would quit or be cut before their fifth and final year. Wynter couldn't afford to lose her position. If she needed to work a hundred hours a week, she would. She'd just have to make some adjustments in her personal life.

"There's the team." Pearce nodded toward a table where three young men waited. "I bring reinforcements, guys," she said as she sat.

She did not apologize for being late.

Wynter took the seat between Pearce and a rangy Asian who looked too young to be a doctor. Must be one of the first-years. She nodded to each man in turn, fixing a name with a face, as Pearce introduced them in rapid-fire sequence. Liu, Kenny, and Bruce. They acknowledged her with a range of grunts and clipped hellos. It wasn't hard to tell which one had been on call the night before, because he was unshaven and he smelled like he could use a shower. It didn't bother her, because she'd gotten used to the familiarity bred by shared stress and the camaraderie that made it tolerable. She was exquisitely aware of Pearce just to her left, radiating energy that warmed her skin. She could still remember how hot Pearce's hands had been. All these years later, the memory burned as brightly as the touch.

"Bring us up to speed, Kenny, and then you can get out of here,"

Pearce said.

Kenny, despite his weary appearance, shook his head. "I want to stay for that lap chole that Miller is doing. I'm up for the next one, right?"

"There's one on the schedule tomorrow," Pearce replied. "You can have that one. You're supposed to be off at eight. The rest of the day's light. Take advantage of it."

He didn't look happy, but he nodded. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and began his morning litany.

"1213, Constantine, fem-pop bypass, postop day four. Tmax, 101.

Temp 99.9. I pulled his drain and wrote for him to be out of bed to a chair TID."

"Pulses?" Pearce asked, making a note on the clean sheet of paper where she had written the information just relayed to her.