Love Sick and based of a true story. I own nothing. Britney P.O.V

Now, that I look back now some 60 years later, it's was funny. But it was anything but funny when it happened, though. I met Rachel Berry when I was a junior in medical school. I was just about to make my first attempt at drawing blood from a live patient. Miss Berry accompanied me to the bedside with a small tray holding a rubber tourniquet, a syringe with a No. 18 needle, an alcohol-soaked cotton sponge, and two capped vials to receive the blood.

All business she was. She knew it was my first bloodletting. She set the tray on the bedside table, handed me the tourniquet, then the syringe and sponge. I drew blood without incident. Miss Berry whisked the patient away and headed for the nurses station. I called out,

"Thank you Miss-er-."

"Berry," she called back.

A few moments later, I sat at a small desk and wrote up the lab slips. I glanced up and saw Miss Berry in profile as she made her own notes on the patient's chart. What a beautiful woman, I thought. Pretty features, somewhat big nose, glossy brown hair topped with a starched white cap. And a trim figure in a starched white uniform. I walked over to the nurses station on the pretext of leaving the lab slips but actually to get a look at her name tag.

"Miss Rachel Berry"

I also tool a look at her left hand. No ring. OK! She would probably be living in the nurses home across the street from the medical school. I called her that night. Yes, she, would love to go to the movies with me Friday night. So we went. And fell in love –or at least I did. But it wasn't long before I had serious doubts about her affection for me.

We dated every Friday night for the next three months. I remember sitting on a drafty Chicago red rattler headed downtown to loop to see a movie when the thought hit me like a sledgehammer:

This is the woman I'm going to marry.

So I proposed to her that night, she said yes, and we lived happily ever after? Sorry- not on your tintype, as my grandma used to say. A few weeks later, I called the nurses home and ask to speak with Miss Berry.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Ma'am. She's gone".

"OK, will you ask her to call me when she get in? She know my Number."

"No, Ma'am. I mean she's really gone. She moved out this afternoon. She didn't tell me where she was going, but you probably find out from her roommate. You know her?"

"Sure. Mercedes Jones."

I hung up the phone, stunned. She had left her job, her home away from home, and me, for parts unknown! And she didn't tell me that she was leaving? I cried that night more then, I thought humanly possible. And how can I not, I felt betray and rejected. All those months of dates and fraternity parties and smooching in the frat living room with the lights out meant nothing to her? She was the woman I was going to marry! Or was she?

I called Mercedes. Rachel had taken a job as a nurse at a Girl Scout camp in New Mexico. And, no, Mercedes didn't have an address. School let out for the summer a few week later. I got a job as a biller with a trucking company and started dating other woman, all the while wondering what happened. Something I'd said or done? Or just not enough interest in me to bother calling?

I want back to school around the first October to begin my senior year. My first clerkship was on the orthopedic surgery ward at the University of Illinois Research and Educational Hospital adjacent to the school. After the 8 o'clock lecture, I reported to the surgery ward with several other students. And there she was Miss Rachel Berry. She took a quick look around for the head nurse, no doubt and the rushed up to me and took both my hands in hers.

"Brittany, why didn't you call ?"

"Called? How could I? I didn't have a clue to where you were!" Unfeigned dismay crossed her face and said sadly,

"But I left you a note."

We finally sorted it out. She had gotten a call from friend who was spending her summer vacation as a counselor at the Girl Scout camp near Albuquerque. The camp nurse hired for the summer had turned out to be totally unsuited for the job. Could Rachel come down, preferably today or, at latest, tomorrow? Certainly. It sounded like fun. Rachel quickly packed and called my house, but no was home. She thought of leaving a note at my house, but it was half mile away. She was afraid that she would miss her plane if she took that much time. Then she wrote me a note giving me her new number and imploring me to call. She practically ran back to her ward, where she knew there was several patients I had to see everyday. She had picked an otherwise healthy young man with a Mohawk who had a broken leg, and she left the note with him to give to me the next day.

I remembered that man, I had scrubbed in on his surgery and had seen him every day for couple of weeks. But when I want to see him the day after Rachel disappeared he was gone. The head nurse said he developed severe psychiatric problems and had been transferred to another ward during the night. I had thought nothing else of it. And what happened to the note, we never found out. Now we had to break up our reunion, as is not very professional to stand in the hospital ward gazing into each other's eyes.

But we made a date for the night and made up for lost time. I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. We were married for 52 years. She's gone now, really gone, and not to New Mexico. To her heavenly home, where someday, in the not too distant future, she'll take my hands in hers and say,

"Britney!"