Mentor
The day the Chief of Pediatrics stormed into the Emergency Department to berate me for prematurely pushing IV antibiotics as I was withdrawing the needle from the Three-Year-Old’s spinal canal, was the same day I quit medicine. The Chief had been the reason I’d moved from Washington, D.C. to Farmington, Connecticut, but I no longer cared about the opinion of this man. Others did care though, as he had a reputation as an excellent doctor and mentor, and he had been the one who taught me that suspected meningococcus was the one exception to the spinal tap-before-antibiotic rule. But The Chief also had a big ego and liked the spotlight and always had to be right and hadn’t bothered to get the full history on the Three-Year-Old before he accused me of wrong judgement. In addition, I knew that The Chief was having an affair with his administrative assistant while he brought his wife to all the staff functions and pretended that he was above the judgement of others, especially from Interns like me. So, I didn’t bother to tell him that the Three-Year-Old had the deadly scarlet pinprick rash on her shins and that is how I knew to give her the antibiotic first. He was The Chief, and he had taught all the Interns to be on the lookout for the deadly rash. It would be my fault if I left the training program now and with one slash of his pen on a requested reference I would be barred from any other residency. He was gesticulating on the other side of the Three-Year-Old’s body and shouting at me in his loud know-it-all voice. I looked him in the eye, handed him the tubes of spinal fluid, and said, I quit. I had been up all night, so I drove home from the hospital and went to bed. The Chief called me later that day and asked me to return but he did not apologize so I hung up the phone and went back to sleep. I arrived the next day to clean out my locker and he called me into his office. He bounced the end of his pen up and down on his desk, then stated that the Three-Year-Old’s lab results were positive for meningococcus and we stared at each other for another three beats until I said, does your wife know?
Karen Laugel is a physician and emerging writer who lives on the Delaware coast with her kayaks. Her work has appeared in Pen in Hand and the Tipton Poetry Journal and will soon be featured in the Ginosko Literary Journal. She is a student of The Writers Studio in New York City and is a member of the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and the Eastern Shore Writers Association.