The Doctor's Undoing (Doctors in Training 3)

Chapter One

“Will you marry me?”

Haley Wright smiled fondly at the man who had just popped the question—for the third time that week. “It’s sweet of you to ask, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

He sighed heavily. “Already married, huh?”

He responded that same way every time she turned him down. “No, still single.” It was the same reply she always gave him. “Just too busy to get married right now.”

“I could make things easier for you,” he suggested hopefully. “I’m a great cook. I can even do the laundry.”

“As much as I appreciate the offer,” she said, making a note on the pad in her hand, “I still have to decline.”

Edgar Eddington, a sixty-two-year-old Caucasian male presenting with congestive heart failure and cirrhosis of the liver, nodded in resignation against the pillow of the hospital bed in which he lay. “Can’t blame a guy for asking a pretty young doctor.”

Smiling, Haley looked over her notes to make sure she had everything she needed when she presented her patient to the other students, the residents and the attending physician when they made rounds a short time later. Assuring herself that she had checked everything she was supposed to know about Mr. Eddington for that morning—she hoped—she held her notebook at her side and smiled at the patient. “I’ll see you in a little while, Mr. Eddington.”

He winked, a flirtatious smile lighting his illness-ravaged face. “I’ll look forward to it, doctor.”

She had told him several times that as a third-year medical student, she wasn’t yet entitled to be called doctor, but his answer to that was always, “Close enough.” Many patients on her internal medicine rotation tended to call anyone in a white coat “doctor,” making no distinction between the students’ shorter, hip-length white coats and the physicians’ longer coats, which fell almost to the knees. While she had been instructed to politely correct the misidentification, she was not expected to argue with the more stubborn patients.

Hurrying toward the students’ room in hopes of snagging a free computer on which to write her notes, she was still smiling a little in response to Mr. Eddington’s outrageous flirting. She never failed to be impressed by his bravely cheerful attitude even in the face of the pain he suffered in what both he and the medical staff realized was the final stage of his life. He had weeks to live, at the most, but during the days she had worked with him, she had never once heard him complain.

She was assigned to monitor three patients during the month she would spend on wards in the Veterans Administration hospital near her medical school campus. When one patient was discharged, she picked up another, so she always had three.

Every morning at six, she visited each patient to record any problems noted during the night, to make note of the vital signs that had been taken every two to four hours and to ask if they had any questions or concerns. She always did a physical exam—checking head, eyes, ears, nose, throat, heart, lungs, abdomen, blood flow, pulses in the hands and feet—writing down what she observed. Because she’d been doing those exams for only a week during this, her first rotation, she tried to look more confident than she actually felt.

After she had seen her assigned patients, she had to write notes on each before rounds started at 8:00 a.m. It wasn’t easy getting it all done in time, but she knew bette

r than to be late or unprepared when her resident or attending physician asked her a question during rounds.

Aware of rapidly passing minutes, she rushed into the students’ room, hoping a computer there would be free. If not, she would have to find an available one somewhere on the floor, and she had very little time remaining before rounds. To her relief, only one of the two computers was being used. Sandy-haired Ron Gibson looked up from the keyboard with a grin when she stumbled into the room. “Running late again?”

She glared at him. “That’s easy for you to say. You only had two patients to see today. I had three.”

“Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time flirting with Mr. Eddington…”

Plopping into the uncomfortable chair in front of the spare computer, she snorted. “Says the guy who can usually be found flirting with the nurses.”

“What can I say? They love me.”

Sadly enough, it was true. Ron was most definitely the nurses’ pet student. His infectious grin and twinkling blue eyes helped him get away with things no other student would even attempt. He was also a favorite with his patients, treating them with respect and sincere concern.