A Cut Above: A Lakeside Hospital Novel Read online

  A Cut Above

  A Lakeside Hospital Novel

  Cara Malone

  Copyright © 2018 by Cara Malone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  1. Ivy

  2. Chloe

  3. Ivy

  4. Chloe

  5. Ivy

  6. Chloe

  7. Ivy

  8. Chloe

  9. Ivy

  10. Chloe

  11. Ivy

  12. Chloe

  13. Ivy

  14. Chloe

  15. Ivy

  16. Chloe

  17. Ivy

  18. Chloe

  19. Ivy

  20. Chloe

  21. Ivy

  22. Chloe

  23. Ivy

  24. Chloe

  Epilogue

  Also by Cara Malone

  Sneak Peek: Love Trauma

  1

  Ivy

  “I have sudden-onset abdominal pain,” Ivy Chan said as she took a sip of her soy caramel latte and looked across the small café table at Chloe. She was tapping the tip of her pen against her plump lower lip, thinking.

  “Can you tell me where in the abdomen you feel pain, Miss Chan?” she asked.

  “Great bedside manner as always, Dr. Barnes,” Ivy said, watching as the corners of Chloe’s mouth curled into a slight smile. Then she added, “Center mass, near the breastbone.”

  “Hmm,” Chloe said, her eyes tracing over Ivy’s face and upper body as if doing so would actually give her insight into this case study. “Are you experiencing any other symptoms, Miss Chan?”

  “Vomiting,” Ivy said. “And back pain.”

  “Are you jaundiced?” Chloe asked, connecting the dots much faster than Ivy expected with the vague symptoms she’d given. Ivy smiled approvingly and nodded, so Chloe said, “We’ll need to run some tests to be sure, but I believe you have gallstones, Miss Chan. Don’t worry, the treatment is a minimally-invasive surgery and you’ll be feeling better in no time.”

  She sipped on a smoothie that had mostly melted over the course of their study session, and when Ivy didn’t confirm the diagnosis fast enough, Chloe asked, “Is that it? Was I right?”

  “Yes,” Ivy said. “Very good. Now give me one.”

  They’d already run through at least a dozen case studies and Ivy could go all night. She was lucky to have Chloe as a study partner – a lot of their fellow medical students wouldn’t have been up for spending their break week running through practice scenarios for the medical licensing exam, especially since their breaks had become few and far between now that they were entering their fourth year of medical school.

  Even Chloe had her limit, though. By the time they finished the next case (she was a teenage male presenting with poor balance and confusion, which Ivy correctly diagnosed as a concussion resulting from a sports-related injury), Chloe was tapped out. She finished off the last of her smoothie and sat back, putting her arms up in an exaggerated stretch. “What do you say? Have I fallen mysteriously ill enough times for you tonight?”

  “Sure,” Ivy said. She reached for the notecards she had spread across the small table, beginning to sort them into neat stacks according to body system. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Any time,” Chloe answered. She smiled at Ivy, her blue eyes catching the overhead lights in just the right way to make them sparkle, then she gathered her own notes and tucked them into her backpack. As she got up from the table, she said, “You’re going to go back to your apartment and keep studying, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Ivy said and Chloe laughed.

  “We still have four months before the exam, you know,” she said. They were both scheduled to take the medical licensing exam at the end of December, along with almost everyone else in their medical school class. That didn’t stop Ivy from studying for it as if it were tomorrow – she wanted to be as prepared as possible for one of the most important exams of her career, and that meant studying in every moment of free time that she got. Chloe added with a chuckle, “I’m already sure you’re going to pass it.”

  “Don’t say that,” Ivy said, rapping her knuckles once on the wood tabletop.

  She wasn’t a superstitious person, but when it came to her education she didn’t take chances of any kind. She got up and slung her heavy backpack over her shoulder, then followed Chloe out of the café, watching her blonde ponytail bounce with every step. They’d been studying together ever since their first year of medical school and Ivy was beginning to think of Chloe as her lucky totem.

  “Same time next week?” she asked when they got to the door.

  “Probably – hopefully the fact that we’re both going to be working in the Emergency Room means we’ll be on the same schedule for once,” Chloe said.

  It had been a challenge to coordinate study times ever since they started their hospital rotations last year, but they’d managed to get together to review notes and run through cases about once a week through it all.

  Chloe put her hand on Ivy’s shoulder and the contact surprised her. She told Ivy, “Try to get a little bit of rest this weekend.”

  Ivy nodded, her tongue suddenly feeling fat and useless. Then Chloe took her hand away, her fingers brushing Ivy’s arm, and started walking up the sidewalk toward the apartment that she shared with Ivy’s academic nemesis, Megan. They’d chosen this café as their study headquarters because it was an equal distance for them both to walk - about six blocks - but it always felt like a longer walk on the way home. Maybe it had something to do with the weight of Ivy’s backpack, or maybe it was something else.

  She lingered on the sidewalk, watching Chloe go and filling her lungs with the last crisp night air of the summer. Then she turned in the opposite direction to go back to her uninspiring on-campus housing. It was just past eight-thirty when she reached her dormitory – a building full of tiny, one-bedroom apartments for graduate students – and because the caffeine from her latte was still going strong, she sat down at her desk and pulled out her notes.

  2

  Chloe

  Chloe was still thinking about Ivy when she got back to the apartment.

  She’d gotten to know her in their last three years as study buddies - as much as Ivy let anyone get to know her - and there was about as much chance of Ivy taking a break this week as there was of her struggling with the medical licensing exam. Ivy was the smartest person Chloe knew (her roommate, Megan, was a close second) and the pass rate was good for the portion of the exam that they’d been studying for tonight.

  Chloe was shaking her head at Ivy’s completely unwarranted insecurity as she walked through the door and heard, “Hey, Chlo.”

  “Hi, Alex,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  “Hi, Chloe,” Megan said, sounding distracted. She and her girlfriend, Alex, were spread out on the couch. Alex had her legs across Megan’s lap and was watching TV with the volume turned down low, and Megan was absorbed in a thick binder full of notes that she was balancing on top of Alex’s shins.

  Chloe laughed at the scene and asked, “What are you two up to?”

  “Watching Wynonna Earp,” Alex said, trying to move down to make room for Chloe on the couch. “Want to join us?”

  “Nah, I’m a few episodes behind you two,” Chloe said.

  After Megan and Alex’s relationship got serious, she started spending a lot of time at the apartment and the three of them had settled
into a surprisingly comfortable living arrangement. They made dinner together often and it was a lot of fun to get into debates over television shows with Alex, but Chloe also tried to give the two of them space so that she wouldn’t become a third wheel in their relationship. Tonight she would curl up in bed with a book, but first she had to ask about the comically large binder that Megan was using her girlfriend’s legs to prop up.

  “Whatcha studying?”

  “My emergency medicine notes,” Megan said. “They switched my next rotation at the last minute and I don’t want to walk into the ER on Monday with my head full of obstetrics.”

  “You’re rotating into the emergency department?” Chloe asked. “Awesome. You’ll be with Ivy and me.”

  “Ivy Chan?” Megan asked, glancing up from her notes to roll her eyes. “Great.”

  “You two really should bury the hatchet,” Chloe said. “Do you even remember why you hate each other?”

  “Yeah,” Megan said. “I remember that she started it.”

  Megan and Ivy had been rivals ever since the beginning of medical school, when she said that Ivy was needlessly rude and competitive upon their first meeting in the college bookstore. It was true that Ivy sometimes went out of her way to show Megan up in class, but she’d never been that prickly toward Chloe, and she also never offered her side of the story. Chloe had tried to help the two of them make nice several times over the years – they were the smartest women she knew and they would make an unstoppable team if they worked together – but Megan and Ivy both stubbornly refused to have anything to do with each other.

  “Someone has to finish it,” Chloe reminded Megan, then she said, “Enjoy the show. I’m going to go read for a while.”

  “Have fun,” Alex said. “If you change your mind and want to join us, I can always catch you up on what you missed.”

  “Thanks, but I’m good,” Chloe said.

  Megan set her binder on the coffee table and pulled Alex into her arms, and Chloe paused for just a second to admire them. She’d always wanted a relationship like theirs – they complemented each other perfectly, challenged each other, supported each other, and could still be perfectly happy spending the whole night snuggling on the couch.

  Sometimes being Megan’s roommate and having a front-row seat to a love like that was inspiring, and at other times it simply inspired jealousy. At times like that, Chloe found it was best to get out of the apartment, head to the gym down the street or set up an impromptu study session with Ivy – something Ivy never objected to.

  Chloe went down a short hallway to her room, closing the door softly behind her. It was a decent-sized bedroom and she’d done what she could on a limited budget to make it feel like home. There was a desk beneath the window and her bed – really just a futon because it was cheaper and easier to transport than a mattress and bedframe – was tucked into the corner.

  Chloe turned on her desk lamp to cast the room in a cozy glow, then slung her backpack over the back of her office chair. She moved the futon into its couch formation, then pulled out her copy of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. It was on the school’s list of elective reading texts and her parents bought it for her last Christmas along with a few others, but she’d been saving it for her emergency medicine rotation.

  She curled up on the futon with the book in her lap just as the familiar opening theme music – Jill Andrews’ Tell That Devil - began playing from the living room.

  3

  Ivy

  On Friday morning, Ivy finally took Chloe’s advice and stepped away from her desk. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much rest involved in that act because she had promised her parents she would come home for the weekend.

  Ivy packed a bag with a couple changes of clothes and – more importantly – as many of her notecards and textbooks as she could carry, then boarded a bus to Michigan. It was a trip that she’d only taken a handful of times since starting medical school – there were very few breaks, especially in years three and four, and one thing Ivy and her parents agreed on was that at this stage in her career, studying took precedent over visiting family.

  So while most of her classmates went home for everything from major holidays to long weekends, Ivy stayed during most of her breaks and enjoyed the solitude of a nearly-empty campus. She went home for Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, and now she was going to watch her younger brother graduate from law school.

  Victor was only a year younger than Ivy and forever nipping at her heels when it came to academic excellence. When he announced three years ago that he was going into law, she was half-convinced that he’d chosen it simply because it took less time than becoming a doctor and would thus provide the opportunity to bask in their parents’ attention sooner. Now that day had come and she wasn’t particularly looking forward to it.

  She spent the six-hour bus ride with her nose in an emergency medicine textbook, then called an Uber to take her the last leg of the journey, from the bus station to her parents’ house in the suburbs of Dearborn. When her driver pulled up in front of the stately brick colonial, Ivy automatically sat up a little straighter and fixed a slight smile to her lips that would not falter until she got back on the bus Sunday evening.

  She went inside, setting her heavy duffel bag at the base of the staircase, then followed her nose into the kitchen at the back of the house, where she could smell something delicious baking. Her brother and mother were sipping tea and nibbling at a plate of gingersnaps at the bar counter that ran the length of the large kitchen island. Her mother got up to hug her.

  “Hi, Ma,” Ivy said, savoring the rare show of physical affection. Neither of her parents were particularly emotional people, and most of the time their love came in the form of praise for specific accomplishments. After her mother released her, Ivy nodded at her brother and said, “Hey, Victor.”

  He was wearing sweatpants, his black hair shiny with grease, and he didn’t look particularly collegiate. Ivy had to stifle a smile at how battle-worn he looked after his three fast years in law school.

  “Hey, sis,” he said. “How’d the bus treat you?”

  “Alright,” Ivy said. “Are Ma and Pa withholding shower privileges? You look rough.”

  Victor ran a hand through his hair and shrugged, saying, “I’ve been up since six studying for the bar exam.”

  “Are you hungry from your journey?” their mother asked Ivy, pretending as always that she didn’t hear their rivalry. “I’m making a pot pie. It’s almost ready.”

  She went over to the oven on the wall across from where Victor sat to check on it. Ivy slid onto a kitchen stool at the end of the island and said, “It smells wonderful.”

  “It’s nothing,” her mother said, waving her hand. “Victor was hungry so I threw it together.”

  “Careful you don’t get fat from studying so hard,” Ivy said to her brother, lowering her voice just slightly.

  On the bus, Ivy had resolved – like she did every time she came home – not to give in to the urge to compete with Victor. Just like always, though, she found it impossible to resist – especially when he started right in on her. He knew the bus gave her a short temper, and he’d mentioned the bar exam explicitly to brag about his study habits. As if Ivy didn’t have important tests of her own to study for.

  “Thanks for the concern but Ma is keeping me well-fed,” he said, just as their mother opened the oven and the room filled with the heavenly aroma of buttery puffed pastry and mouth-watering chicken. Then Victor cocked his head and asked, “What about you, sis? You’re looking thin.”

  “My study habits don’t involve cookies,” Ivy said, nodding at the gingersnaps. Victor had eaten three or four more since she sat down and if he wasn’t careful, he really would become fat. He’d moved home after graduating from law school so that he could study full-time, and their mother treated keeping her family’s bellies full as if it were a job.

  “Do you want tea?” she asked Ivy, misconstr
uing her comment about the cookies.

  “No thanks, Ma,” Ivy said. “I’ll wait for the pot pie.”

  “It’ll just be a few more minutes,” she said. “How are your rotations at the hospital going?”

  “They’re going well,” Ivy said, wishing she had more to brag about. She’d received excellent feedback on her last rotation - internal medicine - but she already told her parents about that over the phone last week so instead she said, “I’ve practiced over two hundred cases for my medical licensing exam and I don’t anticipate any difficulty with my next rotation in the emergency department.”

  “Emergency medicine must be stressful,” Victor said, trying to get under her skin. “Acting fast and hoping that you’ve made the right decision.”

  “It’s just triage,” Ivy said confidently. “I’m excellent at prioritizing, and I’ve memorized a large number of symptoms and conditions which will help me work efficiently.”

  “That’s hard work, too. You wouldn’t believe how much information I’ve got to memorize for the bar,” Victor said.

  Ivy clenched her teeth for just a moment. Her brother had long ago mastered the art of subtle bragging and she was sure he’d make a good trial lawyer. Then she smiled and said, “Good thing you have an entire month to do nothing but study. I wish I had that luxury.”

  “Oh, you two,” their mother finally chastised them with a shake of her head, but then she turned around and checked on the pot pie again without further comment. She grabbed a pair of pot holders from the counter and said, “I think it’s ready.”