Her hair was the color of winter wheat and very wispy. Since it was long and fine it drove her batty in the wind unless she had it pulled back and clasped with a barrette at the back of her head. From there it fell in a sheen to the lower edges of her shoulder blades. Her face was broad with high cheekbones, and her eyes, set well back in their sockets, were a mixture of blue and green with flecks of brown so that the chromatic effect changed with different light sources. Her teeth were ultra white and perfectly straight, the result of fifty percent nature and fifty percent suburbanite orthodontist.
All in all Susan Wheeler appeared like the girl of the Pepsi-Cola people’s dreams. At twenty-three years old she was young, healthy, and sexy with that American, Californian style that made eyes turn and hypothalamuses awaken. And on top of it all, perhaps in spite of it all, Susan Wheeler was very sharp. Her grammar school IQ ratings had hovered around the 140 range and were a source of infinite delight to her socially committed parents. Her school record was a monotonous series of A’s with numerous other evidences of achievement. Susan liked school and learning and reveled in using her brain. She read voraciously. Radcliffe had been perfect for her. She did well but she earned her grades. She had majored in chemistry but had taken as much literature as possible. She had no trouble getting into medical school.
But being attractive as Susan was had certain definite drawbacks. One was the difficulty of missing class without being noticed. Whenever questions were asked, she was among those unfortunate few who served to demonstrate the stupidity of the students or the brilliance of the professors. Another drawback was that people formed opinions about Susan, with very little information. She so resembled models glaring out from advertisements that people continuously confused her with those frequently mindless girls.
There were advantages, though, to being bright and beautiful, and Susan was slowly beginning to realize that it was reasonable to exploit them to a degree. If she needed a further explanation regarding some complicated topic, she only had to ask once. Instructors and professors alike would hasten to help Susan understand a fine point of endocrinology or a subtle point of anatomy.
Socially, Susan did not date as much as people imagined she would. The explanation for this paradox was severalfold. First, Susan preferred reading in her room to a boring date, and with her intelligence, Susan, found quite a few men boring. Second, few men actually asked Susan out, just because Susan’s combination of beauty and brains was a bit intimidating. Susan spent many Saturday nights engrossed in novels, some literary, some otherwise.
Starting February 23, Susan feared her comfortable world was going to be blown up. The familiar lecture routine was over. Susan Wheeler and one hundred and twenty-two of her classmates were being rudely weaned from the security of the inanimate and tossed into the arena of the clinical years. All the confidence in one’s abilities formed during the basic science years were hardly proof against the uncertainties of actual patient care.
Susan Wheeler had no illusions concerning the fact that she knew nothing about actually being a doctor, about taking care of real live patients. Inwardly she doubted that she ever would. It wasn’t something she could read about and assimilate intellectually. The idea of trial by fire was diametrically opposed to her basic methodology. Yet on February 23 she was going to have to deal with patients some way, somehow. It was this crisis of confidence that made sleep difficult for her and filled the night with bizarre, disturbing dreams in which she found herself wandering through foreign mazes searching for horrible goals. Susan had no idea how closely her dreams would approximate her experience during the next few days.
At 7:15 the mechanical click of the clock radio broke her dream’s feedback circuit and Susan’s brain awakened to full consciousness. She turned off the radio before the transistors had a chance to fill the room with raucous folk music. Normally she relied on the music to wake her. But on this particular morning she needed little assistance. She was too keyed up.