While I examine him, I hear Jaden talking nonstop to his wife. Her voice is quiet; at times she sighs wistfully, at others fearfully.
I prescribe my patient painkillers and intravenous fluid therapy. In addition, I’m going to suggest an ECG, blood gas analysis, extensive lab work, X-rays, and a cardiac CT to Dr. Franks.
I hesitate briefly. Is the CT too much? Would an echocardiogram be enough for now?
What would a normal doctor do? I don’t know.
While my thoughts are racing like a roller coaster, Jaden and the old lady suddenly burst out laughing.
‘Wow, seriously? That’s insane.’ Jaden shakes his head in amusement. ‘That’s really special.’
He’s doing it again. He negates the gravity of the situation and focuses on something beautiful.
‘He was a pilot and I was a flight attendant, you know. For us, there was never any question of getting married anywhere but on a plane.’ Countless little wrinkles appear around her eyes as she smiles.
It’s good for her, this moment of happiness that Jaden has just sparked in her. As strange as his behavior sometimes is, in certain situations it somehow also seems to be the right thing.
The woman closes her hand more tightly around the patient’s, her expression softening. The constant beeping of the monitoring equipment fills the room. For a while she gazes at the face of the person she loves. Watching her, imagining how many years they have shared, how they have laughed, loved, and lived together, makes my heart ache with longing.
‘We knew this day would come,’ she whispers now, as if she can sense that her husband is not doing well.
At once I see myself sitting in my oncologist’s office tomorrow. Fearfully I look into his light-blue eyes, searching in vain for a smile on his lips, but all I see are the wrinkles that cut across his forehead like deep trenches.
Then he shakes his head.I’m sorry.
‘Give me your hand.’ Jaden’s voice pulls me back to the here and now. The lady trustingly places her fingers in his, and he guides them to our patient’s chest. ‘Do you feel that?’ he asks.
She takes a deep breath. ‘His heart.’
Jaden nods. ‘It’s beating.’
There is nostillin his sentence, no fear, no expectation.
His heart is beating, and that is enough.
‘Yes,’ the lady breathes, and I feel tears running down my cheeks.
My gaze fixed on Jaden, who in that moment lifts his lids and looks at me in a way I feel everywhere inside me, I reach for my own pulse at my wrist.
My heart is beating too.
Still.
And for a fraction of a second, I wonder if that couldn’t be enough for me as well.
Chapter Twenty
JADEN
Something about Nyla is different today. She’s been tense all day, and ever since tears suddenly started running down her cheeks in Treatment Room One, she’s also seemed pensive.
She’s been feeling bad for hours now and seeing her like this is hard for me. I wonder what’s tormenting her, and also how I can help her get rid of it.
Now she’s standing in front of our quirky patient, from whose hand a splinter has to be removed, and asking him how the accident happened.
‘It was the perfect day to finally get my garden gnomes properly into position. After all, it was a project I’d been putting off for a long time. New gnomes keep turning up, and of course they all have to go in exactly the right place,’ he replies without pausing for breath even once.
Our eyes meet. While I can barely keep from grinning, her expression stays neutral. Even when the man with the wild hair and professor glasses starts talking about his garden gnomes as if they were people, she can’t laugh.