The Book of Song Ch. 03

All people depicted in this story are fictional and any resemblance between them and real people is accidental.

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Chapter 3: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Just like my freshman year, my sophomore year was intense right from the start. School consumed all that I had to give. But unlike my freshman year, I now had a different, nicer roommate, and she had a boyfriend who lived off campus, so I had the room to myself most nights.

Until Christmas break I didn't feel the need to date anyone or otherwise have sex. Whenever I felt lonely, I closed my eyes and thought about the amazing experiences I had the previous summer or during the end of freshman year. Sometimes, when I was alone in my room, these thoughts were accompanied by my fingers playing inside my pajamas, turning the purely metal act of thinking about sex into physical pleasure.

But then, after I had learned that Zack had moved on, fantasizing about him didn't work anymore. Late at night, after hours of studying, when I was finally ready to go to sleep, the hurtful feelings would come back, preventing me from falling asleep.

That whole summer I didn't think I had felt anything for Zack. I was so careful not to hurt his feelings, not to let him get too attached, that I didn't notice I was getting attached myself.

It wasn't that I loved him or anything. I never felt the need to be with him forever or to have children with him or any other stupid thought girls often feel when they are with a guy. I just felt happy when I was with him, and unhappy when I wasn't. It was that simple. And now, when I had lost him for good, I was stuck with the unhappiness.

So in order to be able to sleep again I knew I had to do something. I had to somehow numb my feelings. Make the memories and the sadness that followed them go away. I know that many people in similar situations turn to alcohol or even drugs. My fix was sex.

As I mentioned before, I wasn't lacking guys hitting on me. That was true for sophomore year just as much as it was for the year before. Before Christmas break I didn't feel the need to respond to their affection. I had my memories of Zack, and of-course, my fingers. But now my memories of Zack were too painful to bare, and I needed to make new ones. Or at least, be in a place where I didn't have to remember anymore.

So I started saying yes to guys. I would go out with them to wherever they would propose, sit with them for a while, drink something, eat something, talk about things that usually bored me to death, and then I would usually invite them to my room, where I would spread my legs to them and let their dicks inside me, to numb my pain.

It took me about a month, and something like six or seven such encounters, all with different guys, to stop thinking about Zack. To stop feeling hurt. Actually, to stop feeling anything at all.

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Not feeling anything helped me focus on school and succeed. Thanks to my grades, I won scholarship after scholarship, which were important to allow me to keep attending this Ivy-League collage without bankrupting my parents or sentencing myself to a lifetime of returning student-loans.

At times I still felt the urge to fuck someone. When I did, I would wait until someone would hit on me and would just go with the flow. The flow usually lead to either my bed or theirs. In three different cases, the guy was persistent and nice enough so I agreed to have a second time with him, and then a third, and so we ended up fucking for a few months at a time. I guess these guys considered me to be their girlfriend, but to me they were nothing than a source for regular sex. In all three cases it were they who broke up with me, as they realized I didn't feel anything for them and was there purely for the sex.

My focus on school allowed me to graduate from pre-med summa cum-laude, and to get accepted to the Yale Medical School.

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Medical school was different than collage in that we were a relatively small group, all taking the same classes. Couples started to form pretty fast along the first year, and these couples were relatively stable, with many of them getting married before graduation.

I wasn't into coupling. I couldn't understand how so many of my classmates found the ones they believed were the loves of their lives, before they even stood on their own feet.

Obviously, not everyone was coupled. There were a few students still single, mostly men. During the four year program I came to know almost all of them, in the biblical sense. In most cases this was a one time thing, but in two cases it lasted longer. One of them, Alan, who I started sleeping with at the beginning of my fourth year, stuck with me all they way to the end.

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After four hard, lonely, but also inspiring years of med-school, I graduated with honors. I was able to select almost any hospital in the country for my internship, and had two eager parents who wanted me to choose one in the bay area. But I chose a large teaching hospital in Pittsburgh, PA. I would really love to say I chose this hospital due to its high standard of treatment and advanced research, which is all true, but the sad truth was I chose this hospital, and by association, Pittsburgh, because of a Alan.

Alan grew up in Pittsburgh (he was the first member of his family not to graduate from CMU), and when we were to make our choices, Alan begged me to join him there. At the absence of other strong candidates, I agreed, and placed Pittsburgh as my first choice. Unfortunately, Alan and I broke up before our internship even started.

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My third rotation as an intern was in the surgical ward. Academically speaking, this rotation has been the toughest thus far, with the largest number of conditions and procedures to memorize. I had no intention of becoming a surgeon. I wanted to be a doctor so I could treat people, not organs. But still, I couldn't ignore the glamor that surrounded surgery, so I wanted to ace that rotation to prove to myself I could be a surgeon if only I chose to.

Dr. William Gallagher was an attending in the surgical ward. He was about 35 years old, around six-foot two, had light brown hair and blue eyes, hidden behind large horn-rimmed glasses. While the immediate responsibility for mentoring the interns fell on the residents, William was responsible for overseeing this mentorship, and, the thing I cared most about, had the ultimate responsibility for intern evaluation.

We were introduced to Dr. Gallagher as part of the surgical staff when we started the rotation, but the first time I really noticed him was when I had to present a patient during rounds, one week into the rotation.

Presenting patients is one of the most stressful tasks an intern has to perform, and doing so in the surgical ward is especially so. My patient was a 51 years old woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through lumpectomy in her left breast. I updated the staff of the woman's status and mentioned what tests she still needed to go through before being released to the care of her oncologist. I knew this case top to bottom. I understood the procedure she went through, knew what pathology tests they were running on the tissue they had extracted and all the lab results that were already available. The residents were pleased with my presentation, but Dr. Gallagher wasn't satisfied.

"What are the treatment alternatives for a patient with her condition?" He asked.

"The alternatives were either a lumpectomy to remove the tumor and the affected tissue around it, or mastectomy, which is a complete removal of breast tissue," I replied, citing what I had learned.

"Correct," he said. "And given this patient's condition at admission, what course of treatment would you have recommended?"

I hesitated. The medicine said her case was a clear-cut mastectomy. Her tumor was just too big for a partial removal. But this wasn't the procedure she went through. Someone, who was much more experienced than I was, saw her case and decided to go against what I knew for a fact was the correct treatment for her.

"I don't know," I said.

"Look at the chart," he said. "If that were your patient, how would you have treat her?"

I didn't have to look at the chart. I knew the chart by heart. "I would have gone with mastectomy," I said quietly.

"Mastectomy?" He asked. "Are you saying Dr. Remirez, the attending who treated this patient, performed the wrong procedure?"

"No," I said, and after a short pause I added, "I don't know."

"Dr. Cheddleton," He said. "You graduated cum-laude from Yale Medical School, an establishment far more prestigious than most of us have graduated. This is not rocket science. This patient has gone through one procedure, and you said you'd have performed a different one. Was this patient mistreated?"

"I'm sure Dr. Remirez had her reasons," I said, almost in tears, unable to settle the paradox.

"I was the reason," the patient came to my rescue. "Dr. Remirez recommended the complete removal, said it would improve my chances of recovery significantly. But I didn't want it. I'd rather die with dignity than be butchered and live."

"The patient's will comes first," Dr. Gallagher said. "They don't teach THAT at Yale!"

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I felt awful. That was my opportunity to make a good impression, and I blew it. I thought I had done everything right, but I missed this one, super-important detail. On the up-side, I learned that Dr. Gallagher actually learned about me - who I was, where I went to school. But on the down-side, he caught me unprepared.

Beyond being wrong, I was embarrassed for missing the one thing that mattered to me the most. The patient. Since I was ten, since meeting Dr. Sharon for the first time, not only did I know I wanted to be a doctor, but also I knew exactly WHAT KIND of doctor I wanted to be. I wanted to be the kind of doctor who looks my patient in the eyes and discusses their condition and possible treatments at eye level. I wanted to be the doctor who doesn't butcher a patient just because her tumor was larger than some arbitrary threshold. What has become of me?

These thoughts haunted me as we moved to the next patient. Donna, my fellow intern, presented a 34 years-old man with a broken tibia.

Dr. Gallagher, who stood across from me when I presented my patient, was now standing behind me. As Donna described the procedure her patient had gone through, I noticed Dr. Gallagher's stood very close to me. He turned to me and sniffed my hair. I recoiled and looked at him with disgust. But he didn't give up. He took a group of hair from my pony-tail, and brought it to his nose.

"Your hair smells so good," he whispered. "What are you using?"

I was appalled by his behavior. People can't just walk around smelling other people's hair, right? And besides, shouldn't he be focused on Dona's presentation? Regardless, I decided to give him an answer and put it behind me. I whispered the name of the discount, supermarket-brand shampoo I was using at the time, and hoped that would be the end of it.

But it wasn't. Dr. Gallagher brought his lips close to my ear and whispered slowly, so I would surely understand, "Your hair smells so good It just gave me a boner."

I looked away from him, trying hard to un-hear what I'd just heard. I stopped listening to Donna and started thinking about my new situation. Suddenly, I saw Dr. Gallagher's interrogation during my presentation in a different light. He wanted erode my confidence. The fact he did his homework about me showed me that he had made me his mark long before he smelled my hair.

I knew my options were limited. On the one hand, the hospital had a clear policy against sexual harassment. On the other hand, I was an intern, and Dr. Gallagher was an attending, and not just an attending - he was in charged of my training and evaluation. If I filed a complaint, and for some reason he managed to refute it, he would have had all the power in the world to make my life a living hell, up to the point of not completing my internship.

So I decided to do nothing. For now.

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That afternoon, after I'd changed my scrubs to a normal-person's clothes and was ready to leave the ward, Dr. Gallagher stopped me.

"Look," he said. "I'm sorry for my behavior earlier. I was way out of line. I got divorced last year and haven't been with anyone since. Being around an attractive young woman like yourself... it is hard. I know this is not an excuse to the way I behaved, but I hope at least it's an explanation."

I looked at him and didn't know how to respond. He looked pretty shaken by his own actions. All the confidence he had before was gone, and gave its place to what seemed like regret.

"If you want," he continued, "I can recuse myself from being in charge of the interns for this rotation. I can pull a favor, find an excuse. Just say the word."

"Just don't do anything like that again," I said. "Not to me, not to anyone."

"I won't," he promised.

I turned away and started walking toward the door, but he had something else on his mind.

"I really do like you," he said. "I want to do this properly. Would you have dinner with me sometime?"

I turned back to face him. "That would be greatly inappropriate," I said with a serious voice. "I'm an intern. You're an attending. Even if you weren't my direct supervisor..."

"You're right," he said. "I'll wait until the end of your rotation here. Can I try again then?"

I wanted to say I wanted nothing to do with a guy who could harass people like he did. But I couldn't. He looked so vulnerable, and so sad. "Sure," I said. "We'll see then."

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During the rest of my rotation in the surgical ward, Dr. Gallagher was nothing but professional. During case presentations he asked questions and provided insights, but always in a pleasant way, never pushing us to a corner. Then, on my last day, just as I was about to leave the ward for the last time I saw him running towards me.

"Hey, Dr. Cheddleton," he said. "Can we talk?"

I already knew what he wanted to talk about. I wondered if he'd forgotten about it, or started dating someone else. But apparently, he waited. "Sure," I said,

"I just handed in my reviews for you and the other interns," he said.

"Good for you," I said, and turned towards the door, pretending I thought this was everything.

"Would you have dinner with me tonight?" He asked.

I looked at him. He looked at me as if his life depended on my answer. All of the sudden he wasn't that hot-shot surgeon anymore. He was a boy asking girl he liked on a date.

"Sure," I said, as saying no to free food went against my principles.

"Great," he said. "I have to scrub-in for some simple procedure, but I believe I can meet you around seven. Would that work for you?"

"Sure, Dr. Gallagher," I said.

"Oh, please," he replied. "You can call me William now."

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On the way home I thought about Dr. Gallagher, that is, William, trying to figure him out. He was kind of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The polite, apologetic Dr. Jekyll, versus the sexual pervert Mr. Hyde. I knew I was stupid to think that Mr. Hyde was a one-time slip. He was part of who William was, and if I were going to date Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde would come with the package. The problem was, as I was reluctant to admit it, I was kinda attracted to Mr. Hyde, much more than I was to Dr. Jekyll.

There was something about the way he did what he wanted to do, said what he wanted to say, that I envied. In my previous relationships, I wanted things. Sexual things. Bold things. But most of the time I felt the need to restrain myself to avoid hurting others. He didn't have this regard. He didn't care who was in the room, who could hear, who could get offended. He wanted to make sure I knew he had a boner, so he just told me. Regardless of the consequences. I wanted to learn how be that way too. I wanted to be able to come up to a guy I found attractive and whisper in his ear that he had made me wet. Thinking about this, made me want him.

William didn't call. I was nervous, hungry and horny. Although I was starving, I didn't want to eat anything because I wanted to save my appetite for the free food I was promised. But at 9PM, after having not eaten anything since lunch, I realized he wasn't going to call, and went to the kitchen to grab something.

I was half-way through my second sandwich when he finally called.

"Hi Song, It's William," he said.

"Hi William," I replied.

"I'm so sorry, there were some complications in the procedure, nothing serious, but it took me two extra hours," he explained.

"It's OK," I said, trying to hide the fact my mouth was half-full of lettuce and pastrami.

"I guess it's too late for dinner," he said. "But can I maybe buy you a drink instead?"

"Sure," I said, as my craving for food was satisfied, but my other craving was not.

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The apartment I shared with two roommates was a twenty-minutes walk from the hospital. William was supposed to meet me at a bar right outside the hospital, some ten minutes after we had talked. I decided to take an Uber so that he wouldn't have to wait.

But when I got to the bar, William was already there. He sat at the bar next to what looked like a glass of scotch.

"Hi Song," he said. "Sorry about dinner."

"It's OK," I said.

"I'm happy you came," he said. "What's your poison?"

"Light beer, please," I told the bartender.

William told me about the procedure he'd performed. It was an appendectomy that got complicated because of internal bleeding. It took two extra hours, but at the end the patient was OK. I asked him if such things happened to him often and he started telling me about similar cases he had, where things that started as simple procedures turned into a life-threatening events, but thus far, with no fatalities.

I was fascinated by his stories. He remembered every case to its smallest details. As he was telling them I could imagine myself there, in the OR, fighting for a patient's life. Suddenly, the prospect of being a surgeon didn't seem so awful as I had previously thought it would be. Also, Dr. Jekyll started to seem more and more attractive.

Then, as he finished his scotch, story-time was over. "Do you want to continue this evening in my apartment?" He asked out of the blue.

"You are direct," I replied without answering his question. "I'll give you that."

"I don't know about women," he explained, "but men need stuff. A guy can go a few weeks without sex, but eventually it makes us crazy. All we can think about is sex. Did you ever wonder why men don't treat women as equals in the workplace? Well, when a guy who hadn't fucked in a month sees a woman, he doesn't see brain. He sees pussy. And tits. So I haven't fucked in over a year. And you are a very attractive woman."

I was mostly amused by his explanation. I knew men sometimes get crazy when they are sex-deprived. I would get crazy too sometimes, after long periods of sex-deprivation. But the colorful way in which he explained it... A part of me was glad Mr. Hyde was back.

"Sure," I said with a smile. "I'll come home with you."

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William drove a black BMW that looked very expensive. The leather seats were so comfortable, I would have gladly replaced the bed I had in my apartment with one of them. William drove for ten minutes or so, and then pulled into the underground garage of a residential high-rise. He parked in his reserved spot and we made our way to the elevator.

Using the elevator we arrived at his condo, on the twenty-first floor. This was a spacious two-bedroom apartment with a large kitchen that looked as if it came out of an interior design magazine, a spacious living room equipped with a large, comfortable-looking sofa and a very-very big screen TV. The living room was separated from the kitchen by a counter, which also served as a dining table. On its far end there was a wide glass sliding door which lead to a balcony, through which I could see the lights of the city.