Writing Prompt

The two knights stood at the base of the thrown, staring at the immensely beautiful women. She had a blank face but her eyes danced with curiosity. “Your majesty, we were told there was a vicious beast that roams these lands and we have been sent to kill it.” She did not respond. The knights were confused and turned to find someone else to talk to. “You should see your faces,” a silvery voice giggled. And realization flashed as they realized that the women on the thrown was not an aged queen, but a young lady. “As for the beast, you are looking at her.” And with that she morphed.

A loose glob of blood dangles from my nose. There’s mold on the back half of the Wonder Bread next to the toaster. A dog pisses in the corner. Dry knuckles pythoned around a hand gun. The teeth of the missing girl already added as pendants on one of my necklaces. The men in the room wide eyed and mangy, as adolescent hyena’s. They’ve managed to trap the Lion, whose name is known throughout this dark trailer park. The microwave beep startles the men. The one with the missing eye lid grabs the hot bowl barehanded and sets it on the table. Skin wrapped so tight around his knuckles, they look like the bones could rip out as Wolverine. The chicken seasoning finds its way into the ramen and is slid over to me.

Lime green seaweed exuberantly dancing with the current. A broken piece of coral scowls at its colorful brethren. Tiny claws, paired with a big bodied hermit crab, summersault around a potential new shell-home. A dead faced moray eel anchors itself in its grotto. Mouth gaped open as a starving wolf. Blood pollutes the water as a spear fisherman finds its mark. Sharks idly swim towards the commotion as an internal compass. A selfie on a yacht turns into a dropped phone, a donation to the ocean. A turtle passed away from old age. A school of fish, shining as glinting money, frantically scatter. The “Swordsman”, with his blue speed and keen agility, lunges towards his prey.

Dear Diary,

Today might have been the most chaotic day of my entire life. It started out normal with waking up and eating breakfast and heading to my new job, a junior doctor! I walked into the Maine Children’s hospital, and was greeted by Darcie, the front desk worker. She is a tall sounder woman with a peppy attitude. She told me I was needed in room A10 for a treating a patent. I was greeted by a tall stern man, Doctor Hugh. The whole time he was carefully staring at ever move I made, EVERY MOVE! Then I went to B81 and the E16 and then S42. And I got lost at least 5 times. Hopefully tomorrow is less crazy!

Sincerely,

Marie the new doctor in training

Small hands grip the pillow as she bounces in the backseat. Pink glitter shoes that just learned how to lace themselves. Leftover Smucker’s Uncrustables hiding in her teeth. The window cries as it’s rolled down. The whisper of gasoline as it nourishes the vehicle. Long nails and 80’s hair from the rusted Toyota. Sweat drips from a Big Gulp. A man in a black suit caresses his black berry, soft clicks from his thumbs. Two young boys run their hands through a rack of solid colored sweatshirts. A finch bobs it’s head, picking up crumbs. White laces as a lighthouse strung out on the telephone pole. Birds gossip as the southern elderly on the telephone line. A herd of cattle pass by, tails working overtime for the horse flies. A stray cat nourishes it’s paw as a tick cozies up in its ear.

The first thing that I notice as I walk into the hospital for the first time is there are people in every corner at various levels of sickness. I feel a pit of disgust in my stomach. There are too many sick people and not enough to cure them. Ever since this new virus the hospitals can’t seem to catch up with the number of patients. That’s why they started letting junior doctors operate on patients. They didn’t have any other choice. After all, how are you supposed to choose who to save. How can you pick who’s life is more valuable, one person or another. Nobody deserves to die from this virus. I feel a sense of hope in my stomach for the first time sense i got here. I can do this. I can same so many lives with this opportunity. It’s time to check in and start doing my job. I get my keycard soon enough and head to my assigned room. The patient lying in the desolate room is covered in the worst purple welts that i’ve ever seen. I look at their name because my mentor told me that this will help. I need to think of them as an actual human, not just some disease. “Marilyn Sinks” My heartbeat stops. This cannot be her. Marilyn Sinks is the most cautious girl I know. She would never ever let herself become subject to this gross virus. Then again, would anyone. I take a moment to pray that I can save her, then i’m off into surgery.

It was my first day. I had been shadowing this one doctor all day. Finally he tells me we are headed towards our last stop of the day. We turn the corner to the part of the hospital I have never been to. The rooms are larger with more equipment and in the deepest corner of my mind I realize this is where patients go when they have a life or death surgery that determines whether or not they die. We walk to the end of the long hallway and I get more freaked out as we go along. I’m not prepared for this. I’m just a junior doctor. I’m not prepared. As we enter the dark dingy hospital room a see a glimpse of a face under the blankets. My ears block out the doctor as the doctor says they are here to check whether or not the surgery went well. He explains that this patient is the oldest and longest the hospital has. I’m just thinking about his face. The face had a virtually dead face. Not dead yet, but almost. I hear the beeps go loud. Very loud. As the doctors scrambles to bring the patient back to life i stand in the dark corner. I’m reminded of when my little sibling died. I just stood there in the corner feeling nothing. Absolutely nothing. Then I hear the machine stop. I look to the doctor and down to the patient and back again. I see the doctor cover the patients face with a white cloth. I just felt nothing. That person died on my watch. My watch. And I did nothing.

“What are you doing? He’s in asystole, you plan on shocking him just for fun? Move!”

“No, um…”

“One mil epi. The drawer. Right there!”

Oof. I knew where it was, but my brain wasn’t functioning correctly. Everything was moving so quickly—or I was moving so slowly, not sure which. And, of course, the whole drawer came out, spilling everything. “Dammit.”

“Look at me.”

I did.

“Relax. Grab me the epinephrine. That one, right there.”

I did.

Then I did nothing. I just watched as one of the many nurses who’s name I had yet to learn compressed the patient’s rib cage into his heart in order to push oxygenated blood throughout his system—the oxygen coming from a bag, itself being compressed by another nurse.

Dr. Biswas—in who’s capable and demanding hands my career, and basically my life, had been placed for the next so many months—stared at the EKG, as did we all. Again, as I would learn is common in emergency medicine, time seemed to be at once speeding up and slowing down as we all watched for any sign of cardiac rhythm.

You don’t shock asystole, dumbass! You know that! At that point, though, I may as well have never taken a medical class in my life. It was like jumping into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson and suddenly forgetting how to fight.

“There we go, Mr. Johnson. That’s what we like to see.” With great relief, we all watched as the patient’s heart once again started to beat on its own. It meant very little for his long-term prognosis, but it meant he wasn’t going to die right then, on that table, in that room. With me doing basically nothing.

“Alright, let’s hand Mr. Johnson over to these nice folks and get to the day job, whaddaya say, Nguyen?”

I couldn’t say anything other than, “Ok.”

My own heart returned to normal sometime later, as Dr Biswas and I sat together in the hospital cafe. “You’ll be fine. It’s like this for everyone. Literally, every resident since the invention of modern medicine has gone through the same shit you’ll be going through. You‘ll be fine.”

“Yeah. It’s different, though. Like—“

“Like the training wheels coming off?”

“Yeah.”

“I get it. But remember back, when you were a kid, you came home with more scraped knees and skinned elbows riding without them, but didn’t you enjoy riding that much more? Controlling where you went, how fast you got there?”

He was right. I took a sip of much-needed coffee, letting the caffeine course through my now-constricting veins, stimulating increased respiration—which, in turn, increased my levels of dopamine and serotonin in response. The stimulant properties were no longer as acutely felt, but they also no longer raised my blood pressure—the advantage of being an addict.

The smell and soothing warmth of it also just made me feel better.

We talked for a few more of what I’d soon discover were precious non-chaotic moments before heading to our ‘day job’ in the Mother-Infant Unit. The fate of Mr. Johnson would remain a mystery, handled by the folks in the emergency department. Weird thing, this: One moment I’m being pulled into the ER, simply because my boss and I were proximal to it (must be why they put the cafe close by), to save a life and the next moment I’ve completely forgotten all about it, focused instead on helping brand new humans safely enter into the world.

“She’s at ten; fully effaced.”

“Thanks, Gary,” Biswas said to the nurse, before motioning at me to follow.

The scene was not completely unlike what I’d seen in the movies: Sweating; Screaming; Legs held aloft in stirrups; Nervous, ashen-faced father pacing, helplessly; Seen-it-all nurses silently going about their business. I’d been slotted for the MIU rotation during practicals, but it had been during what one grizzled vet of charge nurse called a “strangely un-fertile time.”

“You remember last summer, don’t you?” she’d inquired. “The heatwave? Power outage? I guess no one was ‘in the mood’ with no AC. But you just wait until nine months from the snow storm we had in January,” she offered with a cigarette-rattled cackle.

What it meant to my education was that this—the inherently chaotic nature of child birth—was all painfully new to me.

“What should I do?”

“You should watch,” Dr. Biswas said as he held his arms out, letting a nurse put on his front-facing protective gown.

“Watch?”

“You were Navy, right?”

“Yessir. 8404. Combat Medic.”

“So you understand.”

He sat on a stool in front of the panting mother, wheeling himself closer as he lifted the pale blue sheet that was giving her the last bit of privacy she’d have until it was over. “You’re doing great, momma. Shouldn’t be too much longer here.”

“I Understand? I mean, I mostly treated healthy, young Marines, you know, in the field—“

“Not that. You understand ‘See one; Do one; Teach one,’ yes?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course.”

“Okay, then. Same thing here. You watch me. Next one, all you. Then, you teach me how to do it.” He turned his attention back to the patient. “Okay momma, I want you to hold off for a second. Don’t push yet. I know, it’s almost impossible, but you have all the strength you need. Just… hold on… one…” He looked at the nurse nearest the monitors. “I see it. Okay, momma, this is going to be uncomfortable, but it looks like the umbilical cord is wrapped—I know, I’m sorry—I just have to, there we go, okay, one more big—You did it!”

Textbooks tell you what meconium is. And vernix. And fecal matter and blood. What they don’t tell you is that all of the above will be smeared all over the wriggling purple cone head the arrives in the world screaming in surprised anger. Or how it smells. Or how the room suddenly gets so much smaller.

But at least I had some inkling of what was coming. Dad—as the crash of a rolling table and the plap of two-hundred pounds of man hitting linoleum would alert us to—did not. Without missing a beat, the nurse that had been at the monitors was quickly helping Dad back up, sitting him in a chair, and providing him with O2.

“Happens all the time,” the nurse called Gary reassured me. “Dad, you going to be able to stand up and cut the cord?”

The new father didn’t speak but simply stood and did what he was told; The sight of his unbelievably strong wife and his brand new baby boy bringing strength back into his limbs.

Once clamped and cordless, the naked newborn was placed on momma’s chest. “Meet you new little boy.”

Exhausted, sweaty, hair matted to her forehead, she somehow looked like a painting; Historical; Meaningful; Eternal. This was my job, for the time, and I was supposed to be clinical, but the romantic in me connected this moment to all those that had come before—all those lives that started the same way, linked through history to this moment: An unbroken chain that reached back to the beginning of time.

I snapped out of it when Gary lifted the newcomer again. “We just need to get some numbers on junior, here.” The child’s first interaction with his new life would be to go through a series of evaluations: Length; Weight; Apgar scoring; PKU. Gary took him to a table and placed him on a chucks pad kept warm by a heat lamp. I moved with them, to observe, when I was directed to come back.

“Nope. You stay with me. Gary’s got Little Man; We take care of momma. Okay, sweetie, you’re just about done. We just need to wait for the placenta, oh, there we go. You did so great.” I watched as Dr. Biswas and the “monitor nurse” gave each other a knowing glance—Momma was fine. He got up, removed his PPE, and shook Dad’s hand. “You survived, Pappa!”

The man’s color had come back. “Thank you, so much, Doctor.”

“She did most of the work,” Dr Biswas said, patting the young father on his shoulder.

Later, Dr. Biswas and I sat together near the nurses station. I felt drained and energized all at once. He, on the other hand, looked like he’d just come back from a shopping trip or the library—Like it was just another day at the office which, I realized, it was.

“So, how you doing? You thinking that you should have gone to law school?”

“Hah. No. I, that was intense. It’s amazing. I felt so useless, though.”

“You were. But that’s good. Mom’s have been birthing kids since forever, so the more useless we are in the process the better; It means everything is happening as it should. It’s when we are necessary in the process that things get dicey.”

“Like the cord.”

“Exactly.”

He took a sip of Pepsi. “Just think,” he said, looking at his watch, “only 33 more hours in your shift!”

Ugh. But also… yay? I was getting sort of stoked. Reenergized. I knew the “imposter syndrome” wouldn’t last. I was ready.

“I’m hungry. Let’s get—“

“Dr. B. EMS is bringing in another one. They think she could be ready any second.”

“Thanks, Gary.” To me, “Okay, kid, your turn!”

Monitors are beeping everywhere, but I’m not the patient anymore. Twelve years through medical school did a number on me. My name is Fran, and this is my story. I was five when I was diagnosed with skin cancer, all those days by the pool might have been a bad idea. I went through many trials of chemotherapy before my doctor cleared me. After ten years of fighting, I finally won the battle. College was difficult but I pushed through. My inspiration to follow through was my previous doctor, Dr. Montgomery. She had a soft spot for children, I hoped she remembered me. If she didn’t I would t hold it over her.

Today was my first day and I was an intern at Mitchell Hospital. I was finishing paperwork on a patient when I heard a scream behind me. “Francesca Santiago? Is that really you? I remember when you were a patient here many years ago!” “Dr. Montgomery, it’s so wonderful to see you again. I believe I get to train under you, this should be fun.” “Ah yes, you are one of my new ones aren’t you?” I finished the patient’s paperwork and continued to walk with my new teacher.

She gave me a tour of the facility, I knew most of it from living here for years under chemo. No, today she went further into the hospital, the places I never got to go as a child. I met some of the other doctors, and learned where the materials were. When we were finished, she took me to the locker room. “This is where you will change for work, you will also get to meet your new coworkers.” “Okay, sure. I’m excited to meet everyone. My mother would have been so proud of me.” “She would have been, I heard what happened. I’m sorry for your loss.” “It’s okay, really, it happened so many years ago.” She looked at me frankly and walked away.

I turned in to check out the locker room. I see many younger adults like I am. I walked to where my locker was, it was in the middle of the crowd. “Hey, I’m Fran. It’s nice to meet you guys.” “Aren’t you the girl who had cancer? How could you even afford college with that hospital bill?” A young girl said. “I’m Ericka, sorry for the questions, I’m always so forward.” “I get it, my mom paid for everything before she got into her accident. She already had the college fund saved up for me. I know kids aren’t that lucky.”

Ericka and I became the best of friends, it didn’t take long. We had so many things in common, she grew up the same way I did. We both came from a rich family, but money wasn’t everything. Most of it got saved for rainy days, or went to charity. It felt good to relate to someone new, also to have a friend in a big place. Sometimes I still got scared, but I never faltered. I was afraid to mess up, I could feel my mother watching down on me. Being an intern was a big responsibility, I had to watch my health along with others.

It’s 6:30 in the morning, and I’ve just arrived at the Westfield Family Hospital for my first day as a junior doctor. I know, I should be happy that after all that time of studying and hard work, I'm finally here, but I'm not. Because the truth is, I don't even know how I got here.

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I'm sitting at the front desk on a not-at-all-busy day when someone walks up. “Hello my name is Sam Cook and I'm here for my first day. I'm a junior doctor.” Although they talk calmly (and a bit too seriously) I can tell by their expression that they're confused about something, “Hello Sam, I'll get you checked in, but while I do that do you have any questions?” He hesitates a bit before beginning, “No miss, Thank you for your concern though.” I smile at them but when they smile back I feel my heart jump. How didn't I notice earlier?!?! All of their traits, their big warm smile, tall lean frame, chocolate brown eyes, fluffy black hair, their voice, their manners, everything about this human was exactly my type!

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Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. I ran over the lines Michael had taught me, and so far I think I was believable. (All except my expressions, but I could fix that.) Now all I had to do was reap my way into the main office, and I think I found a way. “So what's your name?” I had noticed the blush earlier and believe me, This is what I do best. She looks up at me but turns away quickly when our eyes meet, “My name is Wensley!” I lean down to her ear and whisper, “Cute.” And with that, I'm gone.

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Sam walks away as I burst into flames, blush spreading across my whole body until I'm as bright as a tomato. At this moment I only have one thought. This. Is. Love.

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When I first noticed a small, orange-haired girl waving at me, I was alarmed.

I soon realized that this was the assistant Wensley had called to help me out, and that's when I decided to make the big step. Now it was official, Wensley was my target. Not only could she help me get into the office, but she could also be of some higher value to me. And don't get me started on how easy she was going to be, because gods all I had to do was be a flirt!

But for now, I had bigger problems. Like how to be a Junior doctor...

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