“God,” she mumbles, flinging herself down into the plastic break room chair. It’s gray like concrete and just about as hard, but it may as well be a throne made of clouds for how great it feels after ten hours on her feet.

“He can’t help you here,” says a voice from behind her. She swivels and makes eye contact with a paunchy older man, his stubby fingers wrapped around a styrofoam cup of coffee.

He grins. “First day?”

She nods. She knows she should probably be making an attempt at conversation, but her social pleasantries wore off hours ago. She goes to put her head in her hands, then thinks twice. She eyes the layer of grime covering her skin and weighs the pros and cons of getting up to wash them.

“It’ll get better.” He takes a sip of coffee and coughs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before continuing. “I’ve been here 44 years this June. You start to get to know your way around, know what things gotta be sanitized and which can just get a quick once over. But don’t say I told you that. If anyone asks, I sanitize it all.”

She tries to imagine what part of a hospital could get away with not being sanitized, but she comes up short. The cafeteria, maybe, but then it’s a food hygiene issue. The break rooms. This break room. As a matter of fact, it does seem pretty grimy.

“I wanted to be a doctor,” she finds herself saying. She’s surprised when the words hit the air between them. She’d rather not be talking to him at all, let alone sharing her dashed hopes and dreams.

“Oh yeah?” he asks. It could sound like mocking, but something about his expression says he’s genuinely interested. She wipes her hands on her pants.

“As a kid. But I didn’t like school very much, and when I found out how many years it took to go into medicine, I changed my mind. Then I thought maybe nursing, but I don’t know. School is expensive. And who has the time? If I’m not working, I’m not eating. So, I thought, you know, I’ll just work. I’ll find a job I can go into right away.”

She looks around. There’s a big different between the ugly basement kitchenette and an operating room.

“I though maybe this was as close as I could get. Being here, in the hospital, at least. Brushing past the real doctors when we meet in the hall. But none of them will even meet my eye.”

He shrugs. “Well, don’t expect that to change anytime soon. But I get it. You’re still saving lives.”

She scoffs. “Not like they do.”

“If no one like us was around here to clean up, this place would be gone in two weeks,” he argues. “You can’t run a hospital drowning in its own blood and vomit. The O.R’s wouldn’t be sterile. Patients would get infections and die. They’d be sleeping in the dirty sheets of the guy who died in that bed before them.”

She supposes he’s right. No one wants to be in a dirty hospital. But it still doesn’t feel quite the same level of importance as the people who cut out tumors and shock people back to life.

“Maybe this place doesn’t run without the doctors and all them,” he allows. “But it doesn’t run without us, either.”