Novacane

Chapter 9

Seattle Grace Hospital was a second home to Meredith. Eighty hours a week she haunted the halls, delivering news to families, fetching labs, monitoring patients. Her life had been working toward one place, one job, and once she had that coveted scalpel in hand Seattle Grace had enveloped her entirely. If she closed her eyes she knew what part of the building she was in just by inhaling. The rooms where she talked to worried families, grieving parents, anxious children, smelled of air freshener and window cleaner, a hint of plastic from the vinyl chairs. The operating rooms were antiseptic, chemically clean, the metallic tinge of blood permanently tinting the air. The patient rooms were like strange homes, the scent of foreign soaps and perfumes and aftershaves, the feel of unknown bodies living and sleeping in sheets that would be changed after they left, an endless flow of house guests. The lounge where she kept her things smelled much like the other areas only doctors went, like the detergent the hospital laundry used, the spray the cleaning crew wiped down the benches and chairs and desks with, food about to go bad and clothes moist with sweat tied in plastic bags bound for laundromats.

The Emergency department smelled like bodies, like fluid and solid and plasma, the messiness of life and frantic attempts to clean up after it. The floor under Meredith's squeaky shoes reflected the bright lights from the ceiling making it hard to look down. It had been mopped wall to wall three times that day, something Meredith knew just as certainly as she knew the time. It smelled like lemons that had never known sunlight, fruit coaxed forth by science, sick-sweet and astringent. Lemons and fear, that was what she thought the ER smelled like.

Meredith's third day on the job, nearly five years ago, was the last twenty-four hours of a seventy-two hour shift, and already she had been overwhelmed by responsibility, by her own fallibility, and then Mandy Bailey had sent her down to the pit to do sutures. Stitching she could do well enough, and on some other day she would have found it soothing to move her hands in repetitive, well-practiced ways, but on that day all she saw and heard was the fear. In retrospect it wasn't an exceptional day in the pit, no catastrophes, no big cases bursting through the doors. On that day it was the normal cacophony of cries and groans and yells, impatient faces wanting her attention all at once, a hurried shuffle to the staff's steps. Three days into her new job as an intern it was chaos, and she smelled the sallow lemons and it settled deep down into her gut so that she had to fix one woman's stitches four times for four different reasons.

She had become accustomed to the pressures and demands of the job, but she still felt a shade of dread come over her whenever she walked in that door. Meredith wasn't sure if the weight in her chest was that old, comfortable feeling that existed in her relationship with that place, or if it was that she knew what she would find in Trauma Room Two.

A cry vibrated in the little room in front of Meredith and through the shaded windows, piercing through the crosshatch of wires in the safety glass. Meredith stopped cold, her feet planted just beyond the door, her breath stuck in her throat. She knew what it meant, knew what was coming like a passenger in a car that sees the guard rail growing ever closer in the windshield. She had always been one who did the right thing at the right time, but in that moment she wanted to scream. She wanted to be the one crying out, the deep fear inside her let loose, an acknowledgment of the blunt force she was destined to collide with. She didn't want to live the life she was about to begin.