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000. Tabled Aspirations ▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃
THERE WAS AN IRONY that came with being the youngest doctor in the world.
Brynleigh Hamilton was a spectacle, a circus animal.
People loved to watch her, but far fewer wanted to lie on a table in front of her, saying they'd rather have a 'real' doctor do it.
Quite cruel if you asked her.
Now, she had to sit in the gallery and watch a man twice her age perform a surgery she could have done in half the time. It wasn't as if Leigh didn't see where they were coming from, but if a person with an IQ of 183 offered to remove her gastric tumor, Leigh would freak.
In a good way, of course.
"That should have been me," she muttered, staring down at Gary Wheeler's massive stomach. It was the size of a freaking watermelon. A watermelon!
Dr. Wells exiled her to watch — because Wheeler was too much of a wuss to let her save him — then replaced her with Dr. Abbot of all people, and, in a few days, she'd be called into the Chief's office to justify her low OR hours.
Times were so bad, she dreamed of surgeries. When she peacefully lay in bed, the picture of a buzzing Operation Room haunted her. Leigh missed the particular adrenaline rush of saving somebody's life, a high that you only reached in that room, in front of a patient, surrounded by nurses and doctors, clad in blue.
She really, really needed to cut into somebody's chest.
A second later, her pager chirped, carrying a wave of hope with it.
Maybe she would have a surgery today after all.
When Leigh glanced at the pager and found that it came from the Chief of Surgery, suspicion, alongside a pinch of hope, gnawed at her.
This could mean many things.
She calculated an 80% chance that this was PR related, perhaps a new interview or an honorary award. Then there was a 10% chance that the cafeteria guy filed a formal complaint against her. She hated that guy. But the 5% meaning there's some top-secret, big news kind of surgery spiked her interest. The other 5% were something entirely else, but she chose to ignore that.
After all, this was Johns Hopkins.
They did clinical trials and experimental surgeries all the time.
Leigh swore she felt the endorphins release inside her body.
Maybe her CJD pitch actually went through.
As she wandered over to Sharma's office, she pictured throwing herself at him after he delivered the good news, promising her that she'd truly be the future of medicine. That together with one of the best neurosurgeons in the country, she'd cure a disease that was deemed incurable. That all those reporters weren't wrong about her, and that she really, actually was a wunderkind.
