Dr. Grump’s Surprise Baby (Bossy Bachelors #2)

7. Emily

CHAPTER 7

EMILY

T he feeling of satisfaction lasted until she stepped out of the family waiting room. Dr. Berger was standing in the hall, arms folded across his chest. The rest of the interns had gone off somewhere — it was only the two of them now.

“What was that?” he asked, his tone ominous.

Emily stood her ground. “I was speaking to the Wilsons,” she said.

“That’s not your job, Dr. Swinton.” He had gotten into the habit of using the interns’ first names lately, and the reversion to calling her Dr. Swinton indicated to Emily that he was especially angry. “What did you say to them?”

“I didn’t tell them anything that would have contradicted what you said,” Emily said, holding her ground.

“You’re not supposed to tell them anything at all. You’re an intern, Dr. Swinton, did you forget that? You’re not supposed to do anything without supervision and permission. The fact that I let you do the occasional blood draw doesn’t mean that you’re ready to talk to a grieving family about the loss of their young son.”

“Someone needed to talk to them about it,” Emily said stubbornly.

“Excuse me?”

“You barely said anything to them at all, Dr. Berger. You told them there was no treatment option left for Daniel, and then you walked away from them.”

“Daniel isn’t my patient,” Dr. Berger said. “I’m telling them because Dr. Nash wasn’t able to be here today.”

“Yeah, that’s another thing. Why isn’t Dr. Nash here? Don’t you think he should be, at a time like this? If that was your child, wouldn’t you want to hear from the doctor who had been treating him, and not some random ER doctor who had been tagged in to deliver the news? That’s shocking to me.”

“No one asked you for your opinion on the matter,” Dr. Berger said.

“Well, maybe someone should ask me, if you and Dr. Nash think that sort of thing is acceptable,” Emily shot back. “How do you think that made them feel? They must have thought the hospital didn’t care about them at all — that they were dealing with a doctor they hardly knew at such a vulnerable time, and that he couldn’t even bother to spend time with them and talk them through their grief.”

“We have nurses and grief counselors on staff for that sort of thing,” Dr. Berger said. “To be perfectly frank with you, Dr. Swinton, if you’re going to make it as an ER physician, you’re going to have to toughen up a little bit. It’s tragic, what’s happening to that boy, but he is only one of many patients you’re going to have to think about today. You need to be able to move on from that quickly.”

“You’re saying that if I want to be a good doctor I need to not care about my patients?”

“Don’t be so dramatic. Nobody said you couldn’t care about them. What I’m saying is that you need to rise above your feelings from time to time and not get mired down by them. You shouldn’t have stayed behind in that room to talk to that family. That’s not doing you any favors.”

“I wasn’t trying to do myself any favors,” Emily said. “I was thinking of them, not myself.”

Dr. Berger sighed. “Listen,” he said. “I know it seems counterintuitive. I know it feels wrong. But the fact is that you have to put yourself first if you’re going to do this job. You have to take care of your own needs, because if you fall apart, you won’t be any good do your patients. Does that make sense?”

Emily shook her head. “I can’t just ignore what’s best for the patients,” she said. “The looks on their faces when we were in there — when they were trying to process what you were telling them…”

“You think I should have handled it differently.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“You already said it. At least have the courage to stand behind your opinions.”

“All right,” Emily said. “You’re right, then. I do think you should have handled it differently. You think I shouldn’t have stayed in there and talked to the Wilsons, but let me tell you, if I was Daniel’s primary doctor, I would still be in there with them. I would have stayed until they asked me to leave.”

“And ignore all your other patients?”

“We don’t have any other patients in need of urgent attention right now,” Emily said. “If we got a call that someone was being brought in, I would go. But until then, where do we have to be that’s more important than with that family?”

“You’re not going to make it as an ER doctor with that attitude,” Dr. Berger said.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Emily said quietly. “Look, you can wash me out if that’s what you feel like you need to do. But I’m not going to stop being the best doctor I know how to be just because I’m afraid of losing your approval.”

“You think you know more than I do about how to be a good doctor?”

“Not at all. I just think this is something I can’t let myself compromise on,” she said. “I got into medicine because I want to help people. And when I see people in need of help, I can’t just turn my back on them because you think it would be better to do that.”

“That’s very romantic of you,” Dr. Berger said. “The real world doesn’t work like that.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to cut me,” Emily said steadily. “Because this is the kind of doctor I’m going to be. This is more important to me than whether I work in an ER or not. I’ll work in any department, but I want to feel like I’m making people’s burdens easier while I do it.”

They faced one another. Emily had the strange feeling that he was paying more attention to her than he ever had before. It was as if he was truly seeing her for the first time.

Well, good. She wanted him to see her. She wanted him to understand this about her. If he didn’t like her because he thought she was a flake who showed up late to work because her priorities were out of order, that was a bad thing. But if he decided he didn’t like her because he couldn’t respect the reason she had gotten into the field of medicine in the first place… well, she wasn’t going to worry too much about that. She knew she was here for the right reasons.

Ruth would have approved of what I’m doing .

She thought of her sister. The family rarely talked about Ruth these days. Emily knew that it was simply too painful for her parents, that they couldn’t stand to bring it up. She was also sure they understood that Ruth’s story was what had compelled Emily to seek out a career in medicine — after all, what else could have driven her to it?

“I don’t want to cut you,” Dr. Berger told her.

“You don’t?”

“You’re good at the job. I’m trying to help you be better, not looking for an excuse to get rid of you.”

“I don’t think disconnecting emotionally from my patients and their families is going to make me any better,” Emily said. “Anyway, that’s not a compromise I’m willing to make. I came here to learn from you, and I’m ready to take your advice on almost anything… but not this. I think compassion for patients and their families is the most important part of practicing medicine.”

“You’re going to ruin your chances of being a great doctor,” he told her. “You’re never going to reach your potential.”

“Dr. Berger,” Emily murmured. “You must not have always felt that way. What about when you first got into medicine? Something must have made you want to do this job, and I know you’re not in it for the money. What brought you here, if it wasn’t passion for making your patients feel cared for?”

A shadow crossed Dr. Berger’s face.

Emily felt a pang. Maybe this had been too personal a question. She knew she wouldn’t have liked it very much if someone had asked her to describe the reasons she’d gotten into medicine. Hinting at it was one thing, but it was too painful to discuss when she wasn’t ready, when she hadn’t anticipated the question.

And perhaps that was the case for Dr. Berger as well, because he turned away from her. “Go and work on your paperwork,” he said.

“Don’t we have more rounds to do?”

“You’re finished for the day. I can’t trust you to follow my instructions, and I can’t expose my patients to an intern I can’t trust,” he said. “Dr. Swinton — Emily — the truth is that you have a lot of potential. I didn’t see it in you at first, but I do now. But if you’re determined to throw it away with both hands, I’m not sure there’s much I’m going to be able to do to help you. I’d like to see you become a success, but if you’re not willing to learn from me, I don’t think there’s anything I can do.” He pressed his lips together. “And stay out of my private life.”

So her question had gotten under his skin. She knew she had overstepped. She wanted to apologize to him, but he was already walking away.

“What was that about?” Sara asked, coming up alongside her.

“Oh, he’s mad at me,” Emily sighed. “Honestly, what else is new?”

“What did you do this time?”

“I hung back to talk to the Wilsons about Daniel.”

“Are you serious?” Sara said.

“What, you think that was a mistake too?”

“A big one,” Sara said, frowning. “You’re not his doctor, Emily.”

“Dr. Berger isn’t his doctor either,” Emily pointed out. “Somewhere along the way, they must have decided that it was find for people other than the primary care doctor to speak to the family.”

“Dr. Nash is on vacation,” Sara said. “That’s what I heard. He asked Dr. Berger to break the news because he didn’t think the family should have to wait until he got back to hear about it.”

“I mean, that makes sense,” Emily admitted. “Still, they deserve more than what Dr. Berger gave them. Didn’t you think that was cold, Sara? He just laid out the facts and then left the room. He didn’t even try to comfort them.”

“Dr. Berger isn’t a very comforting person,” Sara mused.

“No, he sure isn’t,” Emily agreed. “And I guess I think doctors should be.”

She thought again of her family’s experience when Ruth had died. It had been the most difficult time of her life, but even now, when she thought back on it, what stayed with her was the kindness she had been shown by the doctors and nurses, who had all seemed to really care about what she and her family were going through. It had been a nightmare, but it would have been so much worse if those people hadn’t been so caring.

That was the reason Emily wanted to be a doctor. She wanted to help other families who were going through the same thing. If that wasn’t going to be a part of it, there was simply no reason for her to pursue this career.

She had to wonder whether Dr. Berger had ever felt the same way. When he had first become a doctor, what had motivated him? There was no clue to that in any of the research papers he had written. She had never gotten to know the more personal side of him that she was wondering about now.

Was it even possible to get to know that side of him, or was that something he didn’t allow people to see?

She had come to this hospital specifically because of her desire to learn from the great Dr. Berger, a man she’d always admired. Even now that she was getting to know more about him, it didn’t change the fact that she wanted to learn from him. She wanted to see what he might have to teach her. But she wasn’t going to let him change who she was, and she wasn’t going to let him affect the reasons she’d gotten into medicine in the first place.

He had told her to go work on her paperwork. She would do that.

But he had said something else interesting as well.

He had told her that he didn’t want to cut her from the program. That he saw potential in her.

Something had happened to change the way Dr. Berger saw her, and even if he was critical of the way she dealt with patients on a personal level, he thought she could succeed here.

She was determined to prove him right.