Mending Broken Hearts

6. The Unexpected

And I had no choice but to stand there, letting my soul capture the music of her heart. 

A snickering in my ear jolted me back to reality, "Your Madi seems happy today", I nearly swung around and knocked down my co-intern. He ducked just in time. 

"Shut up, Jake. She's my senior resident",  I hissed at him and walked all the way to the other side of the room, to take up a workstation furthest from said resident. 

Who I respected more than anything else. 

And who was engaged - to a douchebag. 

*******

"You guys ready for sign out?", Jake asked me and Madi when the clock struck 7 am. That was when his overnight shift would be officially over. 

While the three of us settled down at the round table in the middle of the room and waited for his resident, he whispered to me on the side, "Dude, I am so sick and tired of Liam. I swear its either going to be me or him in this rotation"

"What did he do now?"

"We had a new patient admitted last night. Liam was no where to be found, so I did everything for this patient by myself. And when he finally showed up, he yelled at me for not finishing my notes on time, in front of the attending"

"You should have told the attending that Liam disappeared"

Jake sighed, "I tried. The attending didn't believe me"

Of course I believed him. He may have a tendency to fluster me with his unreasonable insinuations but he was a good guy at heart. I had seen him with his patients and at our teaching conferences. To me it had always been obvious that Jake was not the problem in their toxic resident-intern relationship. It was Liam. 

Speaking of the devil, the door of our work room opened and a scowling Liam walked in and headed towards our table. Jake took a deep breath and launched into the sign out. Of the 15 patients on our team, 4 had required certain interventions overnight, but the rest had remained stable. Which was especially reassuring when the senior resident apparently went missing in the middle of his shift. 

We were about to adjourn when Liam finally decided to speak up in his gruff irritated voice, "There's a new patient the ER just called me about"

He rolled his eyes at Jake, as he spoke to  Madi, "She'll go to your team, as long as you don't run crying to HR about one extra patient"

What is this jerk's problem? I frowned, in fact I felt like punching him.

"Liam, we know how to work hard and not blame everything on others like you do. Stop being mean to your intern and tell us about the patient", Madi retorted immediately, and I laughed internally at her tenaciousness.

Madi 1, Liam 0

"Fine", his scowl deepened, Jake's smile widened, "Its a 26 year old, almost 7 month pregnant woman, who was brought in to the ER about an hour ago with breathing difficulty, high fever, and changes in her mental status. ER said that she wasn't really able to answer questions or follow any commands. They are thinking she has either some infection or pregnancy related issues"

"Okay. We'll go see her in the ER if she doesn't come up to the ICU soon", Madi told him, and we started to get up from the table for a second time.

"Oh one more thing", Liam added, "Apparently she is a peds resident or something"

I froze.

So did Madi. 

We both knew a pediatric resident who was pregnant.