The stairwell was the only haven she could think of, and she pushed through the metal door. It closed behind her rapidly, cutting off the raw fluorescent lights and the voices. The single bare incandescent bulb above her had a warmer glow and the stairway offered a soothing silence.
Susan was still clutching her notebook and a ballpoint pen. Gritting her teeth, and swearing loudly enough to hear an echo, she threw the notebook and the pen down the course of stairs to the landing below. The notebook bounced on the edge of a stair, then fell flat, cover down, onto the floor. It skidded across the landing and struck the wall, coming to a rest unhurt and open. The pen flipped over the edge of the stairs and a few telltale sounds suggested that it had descended to the bowels of the hospital.
Uninviting as it was, Susan sat down on the top stair, her feet on the very next step, bringing her knees up at acute angles. Her elbows rested on the tops of her knees. She closed her eyes tightly. So much of her experience in medicine with relationships had been reemphasized in the short time she had been at the Memorial. Professional superiors, instructors to professors, reacted to her in a manner that unpredictably varied from warm acceptance to overt hostility. Usually the hostility was more passive-aggressive than Harris’s had been; Nelson’s reaction was more typical. Nelson had been friendly at first, then later had slipped into an obstructive stance. Susan felt an old familiar feeling, a feeling which had developed ever since she had chosen medicine as a career: it was a paradoxical loneliness. Although constantly surrounded by people who reacted to her, she felt apart. The day and a half at the Memorial had not been an auspicious beginning for her clinical years. Even more than during her first days at medical school, she felt that she was entering a male club; she was an outsider forced to adapt, to compromise.
Susan opened her eyes and looked down at her notebook sprawled on the landing below. Throwing the book had given some vent to her frustrations, and she felt a degree more relaxed. Control was returning. At the same time the childish aspect of the gesture surprised her. It was not like her to do such a thing. Perhaps Nelson and Harris were, in the final analysis, right. Perhaps being a medical student so early in training, she was not the right person to investigate such a serious clinical problem. And perhaps her emotionalism was a built-in handicap. Would a male have responded in the same way to Harris’s reaction? Was she more emotional than her male counterparts? Susan thought about Bellows and his cool detached manner, how he could concentrate on the sodium ions while confronting a tragedy. Susan had found fault with his behavior the day before, but now, daydreaming in the stairwell, she was no longer so sure. She wondered if she could achieve that type of detachment if it were necessary.
A door opening somewhere far above brought Susan to her feet. There were some hushed and hurried footsteps on the metal stairs, then the sound of another door, then silence returned. The crude cement walls of the stairwell combined with the curious longitudinal rust-colored stains enhanced Susan’s sense of isolation. In slow motion she descended to where her notebook lay. By chance it had opened to the page copied from Nancy Greenly’s chart. Reaching for the book, Susan read her own handwriting. “Age 23, Caucasian, previous medical history negative except for mononucleosis at age 18.” Quickly Susan’s mind conjured up the image of Nancy Greenly, her ghostly pallor, lying in the ICU. “Age twenty-three,” Susan said aloud. In a rush she re-experienced the intensity of her feelings of transference. Susan felt a rekindling of her commitment to investigating the coma problem to the limit of her abilities despite Harris, despite Nelson. Without questioning why, she felt a strong urge to find Bellows. Within a single day her feeling toward Bellows had taken a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.
“Susan, for Christ’s sake, haven’t you had enough yet?” With his elbows on the table, Bellows placed his palms against his face so that his fingers could lightly massage his closed eyes. His hands rotated, bringing his fingers below his ears. With his face cradled in his hands, he looked at Susan sitting across from him in the hospital coffee shop. The place had a relatively clean appearance with indeterminate modern furnishings. It was primarily meant for visitors to the hospital, although the staff frequented it on occasion. The prices were higher than the cafeteria’s but the quality was equivalently better. At eleven-thirty it was crowded but Susan had found a table in the corner and had paged Bellows. She was pleased when he agreed to see her immediately.