The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [29]
As she neared, he looked away, inspecting a heel-mark by his shoe. He sensed her eyes measuring him. When they first met, he had been captivated by their gentle power and determination. Now, before their umber stare, he felt vaguely discomforted.
Moments before she spoke he breathed in her perfume—a muted suggestion of spring. “Dr. Shelton, we’re all very proud of the way you stood up for what you believe in,” she said softly. “Don’t worry. Things have a way of working out.”
Her words. The way she spoke them. Not at all what David had expected. He repeated them in his mind but could not seem to grasp the feelings behind them. “Thanks … thanks a lot,” he managed, preparing himself for the eyes before he looked up. By the time he did, Christine was gone. Activity behind the nurses’ station had returned to normal, but she was not there.
David elected to go and write new orders on Anton Merchado before putting the whole ghastly evening to rest. In the morning he would be on his own. As he shuffled away, thoughts of the day to come, of regaining control of his life, sweetened the distasteful events of the past five hours.
“Things have a way of working out.” He said Christine’s words out loud as he pushed through the door to the stairway.
CHAPTER V
Hidden in a doorway, Christine watched David leave Four South. She waited until she was certain he would not return before stepping into the dimly lit corridor. Her shift was nearly over. In the nurses’ lounge, as in similar rooms on every floor in the hospital, the evening staff was compiling notes in preparation for the 11 P.M. to 7 A.M. crew—the graveyard shift.
In less than an hour 263 nurses would leave the hospital and head for diners or bars or home to mates who would, as often as not, be too tired to respond as lovers. They would be replaced by 154 others, each struggling to maintain biologic equilibrium in an occupation that demanded life-and-death decisions during hours when most of the world was sleeping.
For a time Christine stood in the deserted hallway listening to the clamorous silence of night in the hospital. The sighs and coughs. The moans and labored, sonorous respirations. Oxygen gurgling through half a dozen safety bottles. The obedient beep of a monitor in duet with the mindless hiss-click of a respirator. And in the darkened rooms, the patients, thirty-six of them on Four South, locked in their own struggle—a struggle not for riches or power or even happiness, but merely to return to the outside world. To return to their lives.
At night more than any time Christine felt the awesome responsibility of her profession. Like any job, nursing had its routine. But beyond the drudgery and the complaints, beyond the scut work and the deprecating attitude of many physicians, there were, above all, the patients. At times, it seemed, a silent conspiracy existed among physicians, administrators, and nursing organizations whose sole purpose was to expunge from nurses any notion that their primary purpose was the care of those patients. It even included the nurses themselves, many totally drained of the sense of caring and kindness that had first brought them into the profession.
Christine gazed down the corridor toward Room 412. Silently she renewed a vow that she would never give in to the confusion and the negativism. She would never stop caring. If a commitment to The Sisterhood of Life was the only way to honor that vow, so be it. Somehow she knew that as long as she was part of The Sisterhood, she was safe from the frustrations and heartache that had driven so many out of hospital nursing.
For Christine the commitment had begun on a Sunday. Outside Doctors Hospital a winter storm raged. Inside the nurses’ lounge on Four South another kind of storm was brewing. Much of its fury emanated from Christine and all of it was directed