AT SIX AM, Samantha parked her car in the children’s hospital lot and climbed the stairs to the inpatient wing. It was her second day back from a four-week maternity leave. Truth be told, she was relieved to be getting away from her child. The apartment was devouring her whole. Now she carried the gear, the portable pump, the cooler, and the bottles, in a large tote over her shoulder, tethering her to home.
She held up the badge, waited for the locks to click, and the double doors to open, then shut, behind her. The locks and alarms were all intended to prevent a code pink, a rare occurrence when an infant or child was abducted from the hospital. It had only happened once in Samantha’s three years of pediatric residency and turned out to be a misunderstanding between two divorced parents.
At the desk beside Samantha, the unit secretary cleaned her keyboard. Samantha pulled the stethoscope out of her bag then kicked the rest of her things out of view. There was a whiteboard on the wall with the patient names, room numbers, and assigned nurses, and beside it a poster about the benefits of breastfeeding.
Samantha tried to print the list of patients, but the massive machine shuddered and didn’t obey. She asked the secretary to print from her computer. The woman pointed at the sticky note now visible on the side of the printer that read “Broken :(“. How long would the secretary have let Samantha struggle with it?
…
Lila Flavin lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her spouse, two sons and golden doodle. She is an addiction psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and also in private practice. Her work has appeared in The Examined Life and The Healer’s Burden among other publications. Her writing centers on the intersection of queerness, motherhood and medicine. She is at work on her first novel set on a psychiatric inpatient unit about the strange and sometimes miraculous world of the hospital. www.lilaflavin.com