Clash Of Cultures

37. I Don't Recognize Me

I was in love with him! How could I have let that happen? 

My story was supposed to be a friends-to-spouse one...with Omar.

I was not supposed to fall for my broody senior resident with multiple personalities.

Thoughts about him raced through my mind as I walked back to the cardiology unit with my cup of late night coffee. I might as well have been a young girl, sitting in a field, pulling petals off a daisy crying out loud 'he loves me he loves me not'. Salman was the man that had saved me from thugs one morning, and yelled at me the same afternoon that he would never need me, only to tell me I was the most important person in his life a few weeks later. He was the same person who had had gazed at me lustfully outside the ballroom but then seemed revolted when I touched his face just now. I cringed at the memory of him almost jumping out of his chair when I reached out to look at his scar. 

That was such a stupid thing to do on my part!

But that was the thing about him. He repeatedly made me question myself. I always had good instincts about people and situations...except when it came to him. I just could not trust my judgement around him.

The shrill beep of my pager immediately cleared the haze in my mind. Suddenly my hospital phone also started ringing. It was my frantic senior resident asking me to run down to the ER. An 8 year old recent heart transplant patient was in the ER with what seemed like a bacterial infection in his blood.

When I reached the ER, the team there had already given the patient some fluids but his blood pressure was still very low. I asked the team to also start two different antibiotics that would cover the most common bacterial infections in this age group. Given that his immune system was heavily suppressed to ensure that his new heart was not rejected putting him a high risk for rapid deterioration from an infection, we quickly moved him to the Peds ICU for closer monitoring. But despite the treatment his heart stopped beating soon after we reached the ICU. So we started CPR on him, and gave him one dose of epinephrine to help his heart beat. Thankfully, his heart rhythm came back and we were able to put him on a ventilator

Just as I was leaving the heart transplant patient's room I received an urgent page from the nurse of one of our patients on the cardiology floor. There was something wrong with the a chest tube that was draining fluid from the lungs of the patient and she couldn't get a hold of the surgery resident who typically managed pediatric chest tube. I quickly sprinted the four floors up to where the patient was.

Running up the stairs reminded me of the first day I was on call with Salman and our code pager had gone off. I had followed him to the 6th floor but managed to get lost because I couldn't keep up with him. That was the first time he had made me cry, and it wasn't the last.

Yet somehow I had still managed to let myself fall in love with him! So much for having self-respect

When I reached the patient's room the 2 year old was struggling to breathe as her blood oxygen level dropped to 85%. The nurse had gotten a chest x-ray already which showed a collapsed lung on the right side, probably because of the chest tube puncturing the lung and air leaking in to the space between the lung and the chest wall. I would have to do a needle decompression and let the air out and then make sure that the chest tube is adjusted properly. I had not done either of the procedures on my own before and technically should be supervised by a senior resident.

"The resident just called back and said that your heart transplant patient is coding again...Noor you'll have to do this on your own!", the nurse informed me.

Crap....I've seen this in training videos only! Maybe I could ask Salman for help

But before I could call Salman the patient's oxygen level dropped to 80%. Salman's deep voice came in my head: Come on Newbie! You can do this!