The Shadow Wife - Diane Chamberlain [51]
“About how strong you are.” Carlynn expected to hear Dr. Shire interrupt her at any moment, but she continued, smiling at the girl. “You’re very strong. Even though you are quite sick, you still have the strength to ask me what I want to talk about. You’re an amazing and very brave girl.” She kept her eyes glued to Betsy’s, glad the students and Dr. Shire could not see the intensity of the shared gaze. She didn’t want to let go of the child’s clammy little hands. Any minute Dr. Shire would tell her she was wasting time, but she tried not to think about that.
“You have warm and pretty hands,” she said. She heard the students stir behind her and imagined they, too, were waiting, hoping, Dr. Shire would interrupt her so they could get on their way. “I’d like to listen to your lungs now,” Carlynn said. “Would that be all right with you?”
Betsy nodded and, with some effort, rolled onto her side, accustomed to the drill. Carlynn rested her stethoscope against the child’s back, but it was merely for show. She placed her hand flat over the disk, her other hand on the girl’s rib cage, just above her stomach. Closing her eyes, she breathed, imagining every molecule of her breath flowing through her hands and into the child. She held the position as long as she could without attracting any more attention than she already had from those behind her. As soon as she stood up, she almost keeled over from a sudden weakness in her own body, and she could not help but smile. The weakness was telltale: she had made a difference in this little girl’s condition.
“Feel better, sweetheart,” she said, resting her hand lightly on Betsy’s head. Then she turned away, ignoring the looks from her fellow students.
Dr. Shire cleared his throat. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s move on.”
Carlynn was last to leave the room. She looked back at Betsy, whose eyes were still on her, and smiled at the little girl, as though they shared a secret. In a way, they did.
Later that afternoon, Dr. Shire paged her over the hospital intercom. It was the first time she had heard herself paged, and it took her a minute to realize that it was her name ringing out through the corridors of SF General.
“Miss Kling,” Dr. Shire said when she called him on the phone in response to the page. “Do you have a moment to meet me in the cafeteria for a cup of coffee?”
It was an odd invitation, and she swallowed hard, wondering what sort of reprimand he would give her for her behavior in Betsy’s room earlier. “Yes,” she said. “I can be there in a few minutes.”
He was waiting for her in the corner of the doctors’ cafeteria, two cups of coffee on the table in front of him.
“Cream or sugar?” he asked, rising as she approached the table. He was being remarkably kind for someone about to chew her out.
“Black,” she said, although she wasn’t much of a coffee drinker. She knew this meeting was not about coffee, anyway.
Dr. Shire smiled at her, and she began to relax. “The patient we saw on rounds this morning, the little girl, Betsy, appears to be recovering,” he said.
“How wonderful,” Carlynn said.
“Yes,” he said as he stirred his coffee, “how wonderful…and how strange. I listened to her lungs while we were on rounds, as you know, and they were crackling and wheezing and generally—” he looked perplexed “—the lungs of a dying child. I just listened to them a few minutes ago, and they are now very nearly clear.”
“That’s amazing,” she said. “The antibiotic must have—”
“She’s been on an antibiotic since the beginning,” Dr. Shire interrupted her. He looked down at his cup of coffee. “Miss Kling…Carlynn,” he said, “I’ve been observing you. I know that you are not the…usual medical student, and not just because you are a woman. You are very bright and very knowledgeable, that’s for certain, as are most of your fellow UC students. But you deal with the patients in a much more personal way than most of them do. Than most doctors do, don’t you?”
“I think it helps to view a patient as a human being rather than merely as a diagnosis. We should treat them the way we would