Third year med school is no joke.
I’ve been placed at Mary St Angela’s for Clinical Placement.
Placements vary in length depending on the field — up first was a six-week psychiatry placement and that was more taxing than I could ever tell you. Then four weeks of Family Medicine — not much better.
Right now I’m five weeks into the six-week Obstetrics and Gynaecology block.
Days are long and the tasks are thankless, but I wear a white coat and have a beeper, so that’s pretty cool.
“You had sex—” Eleanor Wells tells me, her bright sapphire eyes flickering up and down me in suspicion.
I roll my eyes and toss my bag down on the bench to find a hair tie. “I have a live-in boyfriend, that can’t be that surprising.”
“How do you have time to have sex right now?” She breathes out her nose loudly. “When I was a third year I waddled around permanently with a rally pack intravenously attached to me. My only relationship was with my vibrator—” She takes the homemade muesli bar1 I’m eating from my hands and finishes it in two bites. “How do you have time for sex?”
“How do you not, El?” Says Warner (your classic upper-class WPM.2 Don’t know if Warner is his first name or his last. Great head of hair, eyes like swimming pools, a real smooth talker, and I am positive (though do lack the personal experience to prove it) that his penis is gravely smaller than his ego would imply. “It’s the most important part of life. We’d die without it.”
“Are you maybe confusing sex with air?” Alfie Farran3 offers.
“What about a eunuch, then?” Grace Pal4 asks, folding her arms over her chest.
These are my colleagues, I suppose. We’ve all been assigned to shadow the same F2 doctor here, which has worked out well for me because that F2 doctor is Eleanor Wells.
The others don’t like me so much because I’m overtly her favourite. I’m fairly sure our relationship would be, on an academic level, deemed inappropriate. I don’t know how we became friends, really — I think she saw me fighting with Miguel the first day here in the stairwell and she asked me if he was stalking me and did I need help, and I thought it was so funny and sort of nice, and her relentless love of sweets5 made her endearing and significantly less threatening than a girl who looks like Olivia Munn should be.
I decided to be forthcoming regarding my family history in my small group. More so with Wells than the others but they catch dribs and drabs because we talk like they’re not there.
“We wouldn’t literally die without it,” Warner huffs. “Obviously.”
“Just metaphorically?” I say, tossing Wells a look as I grab my bag to put it away. Open my locker and something falls out.
I look down at my feet.
A bouquet of daisies.
“Oh!” El coos. “Someone gave you flowers! That’s so nice—”
I frown down at them. Daisies. That’s new.
“What?” she asks. “You don’t like them?”
“Are they from you?” I ask, probably too quickly.
“No?” She laughs, picking them up. “No card.”
She gives a mindless little shrug, how a normal person would, because to a normal person flowers would just be flowers, but to me, somehow they feel vaguely ominous.
I look up at the rest of them. “Did you see anyone in here?”
They all shake their heads and they’re giving me weird looks because they’re normal, and I’m worried I won’t ever actually be.
I take the flowers from Wells and shove them back into my locker and pull out my phone, dialing Tiller.
It goes to voicemail.
“Hey, it’s me. There were daisies in my locker today at the hospital. Did you—I know you said you didn’t, but did you? Because — never mind, it’s probably a coincidence. It’s fine, don’t worry. I’m just — bye. Have a good day, I love you, bye.”
I flash Wells a smile trying to prove to her that I’m calm6 and she gives me one back, mouth all stained from the Dib Dab she’s eating at nine in the morning.
Her coping mechanism for this life is sugar. No sleep.
Pure sugar and caffeine.
Eleanor grabs the charts from the nurses’ station as she checks her phone, clocking over her shoulder that we’re all following her.
She’d be late 20s. Well-to-do family, for sure. You can tell that much by how she holds herself. Good upbringing, great parents. She’s too confident in herself and her abilities not just as a medical professional but also as a woman and human in general that she must have had great parents. No mother issues there.
“Why are you so weird about flowers?” she asks, taking the coffee Alfie offers her. He’s my favourite of the lot. He’s sweet and really, honestly very good looking. Brown, warm eyes that swallow his whole face, smart but quiet, sort of a goody-goody always bringing Wells a coffee, but sometimes he brings me one too so I don’t care too much. If I was Wells, I’d shag him. That might be illegal though, I’m not sure.
“I’m not weird about flowers — they were just in my locker — how’d they get in my locker?”
“So you have a secret admirer.” She shrugs. “Maybe they’re from the patient last week, the one who had that boil on her labia and you drained it—”
“Oh, fuck—” Warner shakes his head. “I wanted to give you flowers myself for doing that.”
I glare at both of them. “That was fucking disgusting and I deserve more than daisies for that.”
“I mean, we technically don’t do this for the glory, but — yeah, no. I agree on that one.” She gives me a sorry glance then snaps her fingers twice. “Grace—”
Grace Pal looks up with her dark chocolate eyes that always look wound up. She has a face that reminds me of a cartoon fox and I can never tell whether that’s a nice thing or not.
Wells holds her hand out, waiting. Grace plonks a freshly opened packet of Jelly Tots in her hands.
“Thank you—” Wells pauses in front of the bed of Ms Green, nodding at Grace. “Go.”
“Ms Green is a 37-year-old female who presents at 36 weeks for dehydration due to gastroenteritis; her past OB history is significant for a full-term normal spontaneous vaginal delivery in 2015. Her Gynaecological history is significant for…..”
The day goes by fairly quickly for a twelve-hour shift. I love the feeling of taking off my scrubs, a bit because they’re usually disgusting by the end of the day and I get to put on clean clothes but a lot because it just feels like I’ve done something good and worthwhile with my time and my day.
I take my bag from my locker, bin the daisies and walk out into the lobby, fishing for my keys, and I bump straight into my boyfriend.
“Tills.” I blink up at him. “What are you doing here?”
He’s got stress-face. “This was at the door when I got home.”
He presents me with a box and lifts off the lid.
A bunch of mulched daisies.
My heart sinks as I nod once.
“Not a coincidence.”
Tiller shakes his head.
“Come on.” He nods his head towards his car. “We’ve got to go.”
“Where?” I frown, even though I already know.
He gives me a long look. “To your brother.”
1 https://goop.com/gb-en/recipes/homemade-granola-bars/
2 White Privileged Male
3 Very handsome, dark skin, kind eyes, short hair.
4 A bit annoying, but very clever. Sensible hair, perfectly fine eyes and a hint of a German accent that she inherited from her father.
5 Haribo, in particular.
6 I am. Why wouldn’t I be?
