I watch Katherine put on her ‘sensible’ black hipster-style briefs, followed by her loose-fit jeans with decoratively embroidered pockets. Then she pulls on an emerald-colored V-neck tee.
“Aren’t you going to wear a bra?” I ask, a little surprised.
“I didn’t bring any,” she answers, causing me to second-guess my earlier spontaneity all over again.
“Am I going to make you blush all through your lecture?” quips Katherine, after seeing my frown.
“I’m a bit worried that you’ll be the blushing one. Patient gowns are prone to wardrobe malfunctions. It happens daily in the wards,” and I was serious. Early in my career, patients would venture outside in their gowns for a cigarette, the gusty city winds would often surprise them with an impromptu Marilyn Monroe performance. Even indoors, our walking patients move about the halls with a fistful of gown clasped behind their ass and the other arm pushing an IV pole. Or, at least, this is how hospital staff depict patients when they’re telling a visual joke – it’s an instantly recognizable characterization.
Katherine slips on her comfortable shoes and grabs her coat. “Come on,” she says, “you don’t want to be late.” Alluding to my agitation whenever we have an approaching appointment we might miss.
The walk to the hospital takes just over fifteen minutes. Most of this time seems to be waiting for pedestrian lights, as the traffic won’t ease up for at least another hour yet. Katherine hasn’t walked this route before, so is taking in the sights while the sun is still up.
~ ~ ~ Essex Hospital. 6:20pm ~ ~ ~
On entering the Essex Hospital foyer, we find the public reception area to be pleasantly quiet. I guess that’s what happens when half the wards are closed for renovation. “Hospitals are at their most efficient when they have no patients,” joked the British in some old TV series, but I’m also aware the other hospitals in the city are being burdened with the Essex’s normal patient load.
As I’m leading Katherine towards the security desk, I notice a curvaceous brunette on an intercept course. I try not to dwell on her striking hourglass figure or inviting cleavage, especially since she’s looking straight back at us. Almost too late, I recognize her.
“Oh, hi Brooke,” I greet her, a little flustered, but thinking I’m hiding it. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your hair down and not wearing scrubs.”
“Hi, you must be Katherine,” Brooke says, extending a hand.
“Yes, I’ll be assisting Jason tonight.” Katherine accepts the handshake with a smile.
“So am I,” responds Brooke. “Assisting,” she clarifies.
“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” I interject.
Brooke turns to me, retaining her smile. “Actually, it is. The fifth floor is technically still a construction zone. Building works are finished, but the elevator is still locked out for non-essential staff, so I’ll have to escort you, if you want to use the Prayer Room.”
“My card can get us up there,” I offer.
“You’ve been given access for your inspection this week, but you can’t escort, you’re not an Essex employee. The Fast Track group won’t have swipe access either, so you’ll also need me there, if anyone has to leave early,” she explains. “Them’s the rules. And I hear you’re a stickler for rules, Jason.”
Brooke is enjoying having me off guard. Katherine is amused, too; she normally only hears hospital staff calling me ‘Doctor Barlow’ and sounding nervous of my seniority. She sometimes has to contain her giggles when I’m using hands-free in the car with her. Brooke would have been nervous too, about ten years ago when she first started nursing on campus. She must be about thirty now and has obviously found her feet, and confidence, after moving to Essex.
“Um, okay,” I acknowledge the situation. “Sorry to be keeping you late, you’re obviously in your street clothes.”
Brooke gives a quick shrug. “No problem. Actually, I volunteered when Jerome mentioned it. I just finished a shift twenty minutes ago and have another at oh-six-hundred. It’s a fifty-minute commute for me, so hardly worth going home when my shifts move from late to early. My roommate will feed the cat, so I can crash here tonight. So it was a toss-up between staring at my phone or listening to you talk, but I figured I might learn something and save someone else having to stay late.”
“Well, thanks for choosing me over Netflix,” I reply.
Brooke pulls a ‘Visitor’ badge from her pocket and turns to Katherine. “Clip this on until we get past security. Once we’re upstairs it won’t matter, there’s nobody up there.”
Brooke gestures towards the main corridor, while talking at her usual rapid pace. “Nick, TB, and Sarah were in the wagons today, but I moved them to the ER mid-shift so they wouldn’t get caught out. I also saw Sean in the cafeteria before, so I’ve asked him to gather the others there as they arrive. I’ve got that massage table and the other stuff parked in the MRI room, so we should shift it upstairs now. We’ve still got half an hour yet.”
The ‘wagons’ referred to the ambulance fleet, not under Essex control, but Brooke obviously got our three students released early to finish their shift assisting in the emergency room. The Fast Track group are all in their early twenties and EMT certified, except for Sean who is thirty-three from memory. Sean is an ex-Royal Army combat medic who served in Afghanistan; he’s now living in the US and studying for local certification. He looks like he’ll be well suited to an ER, but the Army trained him to deal with things like fractures and gunshot wounds, and not so much for kidney stones and diabetes. We’re working on that.
“Let me grab my training aid from the reception desk, too,” I tell Brooke. I had put the pelvis model in an opaque plastic bag and left it there earlier today. Doctors shouldn’t walk around the public areas of hospitals openly carrying large bits of skeleton, even if they’re plastic ones.
At the MRI room, the massage table turns out to be a little unwieldy. A commercial massage table is typically built to handle a two-hundred-fifty-pound athlete. This ‘hospital grade’ table was sturdy enough to support twice that load and was three feet wide to accommodate obese patients and I’m sure it cost ten times as much as the standard item. There are no fancy features on this table, like height adjustment or backrest riser, just a sturdy stainless tubular frame with a central shelf underneath that seems to hold all the other items I requested. The only adornments are an excess of decals warning against transporting patients and to ‘retract castors before use.’ I take the ‘head end’ with the oval face port hole, while Brooke and Katherine take the other, as we navigate the table into an elevator.
Brook looks at Katherine to ask, “I presume this table is for you. Are you a wife or sister?”
I realize Brooke will have seen Katherine’s full name on my email. “Wife of twenty-seven years,” Kath responds.
“Good for you,” says Brooke.
“It’s our anniversary today,” Kath adds, explaining why the number of years was relevant.
“Congratulations. I hope James is getting you something special in return for ‘donating your body to science’ tonight,” Brooke says, patting the blue-vinyl padding of the table at the end.
“She’ll just be demonstrating some basic anatomical movements,” I state to Brooke.
“Relax, I’m just teasing you,” she replies. “I owe you after all those impromptu medical quizzes you would grill us with as juniors.” Turning to Kath with a faux whisper, “We would scatter whenever we saw James approach, because if we got cornered, it would be like the Spanish Inquisition. What has the patient been administered? What are the potential side effects? What will you do if their blood pressure drops? If we didn’t know an answer he would then proceed to explain it to us again.” Brooke rolls her eyes at the last bit. “Guess what we called him…” Brooke leans in close to Kath’s ear to whisper something I can’t make out, but they both giggle at my expense.
We resume our struggle on the fifth floor, wheeling the table into the center of the Prayer Room.
There is certainly plenty of floor space. The pews were removed in 2020, replaced by a sparse population of stackable chairs with tape marks on the carpet showing the appropriate social distancing. That carpet was replaced with the current renovation, so even those tape marks are now gone, only four chairs remain that I can see. “I guess we’ll be standing,” I state, to the empty space.
I choose a final location for the massage table and retract the castors, then go to play with the lighting modes, until I find a setting with dim general room lighting and stronger central illumination over the massage table; I guess this mode was programmed for a wedding ceremony type event. I return to Kath and Brooke, who are chatting like old friends now.
“I don’t think we should reveal our relationship to the students. Let’s just say Katherine is a ‘volunteer model,'” I suggest.
“I’m sure it’ll be okay, they’re all sensible kids,” counters Brooke.
“Yes, but I think it’ll be a distraction. I want them learning, not teasing me,” I deflect. I wasn’t really worried about being teased, that usually happens anyway, but I’m worried about perceptions. I’m about to display my wife, in not much more than her underwear, to an audience of kids no older than our own. It feels less and less like a good idea the closer it gets to 7:00pm.
Brooke purses her lips, but Kath responds, “How about you buy me lunch tomorrow as payment. Then you can call me a ‘professional model’ rather than a volunteer.”
“Okay. That sounds better,” I agree. Although it’s only a slight improvement to my discomfort.
Brooke pulls a nurse’s fob watch from her pocket, it’s covered in a colorful rainbow of spots, more typical of a pediatrics nurse. “Well, it’s getting close to seven, we should go down and meet the group. The table will be fine here, it’s not going anywhere.”
Down in the cafeteria, I introduce Katherine to the group and simply describe her as, “Our model for the lesson”.
Then I introduce the students with a quick gesture towards each of them.
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