This is my new story that I've actually had finished for a little while now. This chapter is really all about Derek, and as you'll see, he's a third-year medical student.
I don't own Grey's Anatomy, or the characters, they belong to Shonda Rimes and ABC, and I don't own the plot, which comes from The Christmas Blessing by Donna VanLiere.
I suppose, that's it. Here's my new story...
Chapter 1
Late October 2000
I hastily backed out of my parking space outside of the apartment complex, watching as a young mother shot me a dirty look while she pulled her daughter close to her. I looked down at my watch, the second hand dragging slowly, before moving on. I tapped the watch's face, and glanced at the clock on my dashboard. The rotation starts in five minutes. I'll never make it, I thought, as my tires squealed while I pulled onto the main road. I got my second angry look from the gardener at the complex entrance, as I flew over the speed bumps.
I was shaken—I was never late. I had noticed that my watch had been becoming a little sluggish in the past few days, so I had started to use a second clock in my bathroom to make sure that I made it to work on time. Today, however, as I was shaving, I must have accidentally pulled the cord just enough to turn off the clock. Just my luck—a new rotation and a new doctor to make a first impression on—and I was late.
I calculated that if I made every light through town, I could get to the hospital in fifteen minutes. However, as I turned into a parking space in the hospital I saw that it had only taken me fourteen minutes—a personal record. I jumped out of the car and ran to the entrance, praying that the rotation hadn't started yet. But, I knew better. Dr. Webber never failed to start on time, so I just had to run faster.
As part of the program's third-year medical rotations, the university had Dr. Richard Webber—the best cardiologist in the hospital—instructing us throughout the rotation. Normally, most med school programs don't include cardiology, but the program felt that a cardiology rotation would only enhance each student's study. So, I was stuck for the next month with Dr. Webber. He was a Stanford and Yale man, chief of cardiology, father of three, grandfather of four, and a pain in my ass. His specialty happened to pediatric cardiology, but with the hospital only seeing a handful of kids a year, as chief, Dr. Webber oversaw the treatment of the adults, too.
Every rotation consisted of an attending, three or four students, and a resident. Miranda Bailey was the resident on Dr. Webber's team. I was the last one to pick up my clipboard hanging at the nurse's station with the day's rounds—the other students and Dr. Bailey were already following Dr. Webber from room to room. Luckily for me, they were only on the first patient, so I snuck in behind Mark Sloan, an old friend and fellow student. Dr. Webber was sitting on the bed with the patient—a forty-five-year-old man recovering from open-heart surgery.
"She's beating like a thirty-year-old's heart," said Dr. Webber, smiling.
"Does that translate to the rest of his body?" asked the man's wife, causing Dr. Webber to laugh. He always seemed to have a relaxed, effortless way with his patients and their families; a trait that didn't always carry over to his students.
"So everything feels normal?" asked Dr. Webber, clapping his hand onto the patient's shoulder.
"He's grouchy again," said his wife, stopping and looking up from her knitting.
"Is that good, or bad?" asked Dr. Webber, smiling at the man.
"I don't know if it's good or bad, but for him it's normal," his wife answered, before turning back to her knitting. The patient bowed his head and looked uncomfortable. Poor guy, I thought, no wonder he needed the heart surgery. His wife is relentless.
"All right, Frank, you're ready to go home." Said Dr. Webber, smiling. The man, Frank, shook Dr. Webber's hand, his eyes filling with tears. He opened his mouth as if he was about to speak, before abruptly closing it. He didn't want to get emotional in front of a room of medical students. He shook Dr. Webber's hand one more time, and Dr. Webber clapped his shoulder again, before motioning for us to leave the room with him.
Once in the hall, we could hear Frank's wife get a head start on heart attack number two.
"What do you mean you won't wear the piece? Just because the doctor fixed your ticker doesn't mean you're hair's going to grow back. Put this on! Put this on, Frank, or I'm not walking out these doors with you. I mean it, Frank! I will not walk out these doors."
For the sake of Frank's fixed heart, I hoped that his head would shine as he walked through the door of the hospital.
"Who's our next patient, Shepherd?" asked Dr. Webber, noting something on Frank's chart. I wrung my hands, and looked down at the chart.
"The patient in room 2201." I said, quietly. He looked at me, and began talking as though he were giving a speech to a large crowd.
"Mr. Shepherd, just as you were not given a number at birth, but a name, you will find that your patients entered the world in the exact same fashion. Learn who they are, not where they're located."
I could feel my forehead break out in sweat—I had never meant to demean the patient—and before I could open my mouth again, Dr. Webber already knew the name of the patient, and had the parade moving through the hall. I felt my chest tighten as Dr. Webber once again singled me out.
"And Dr. Shepherd, as a reminder, your rotation begins at six A.M., not six eighteen." I should have known Dr. Webber would pick up on the fact that I was late.
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I withdrew to the lounge as soon as I had a break during rounds, and sank down into the sofa. I rested my head on the wall, rubbing my temples. Had I known that I'd meet someone like Dr. Webber in my future, I would have never signed up for medical school in the first place. I looked down at my watch, and saw that it had again stopped running. Even after I had tapped the face, the second hand wouldn't move, so I resorted to taking the watch off and tapping the battery casing. I smiled as I ran my finger over the inscription: All the love in the world, Dad.
My father died around a year after he stood with me on a hill overlooking the valley. Maybe he knew that he'd never get to see me grow up, or perhaps he was preparing me for the long valley I'd have to forge through without him, or maybe it was all to prepare him for death.
I remember my mother coming into my room on the early morning hours of that Christmas. She said that my father had stepped into heaven. My younger sisters, Kathleen and Anna stayed asleep—they were far too young to understand what had happened. I ran to the living room where my grandmother sat with my older sisters, Margaret and Nancy, holding them close to her, sobbing. I watched the three of them for the longest time, hoping that they'd stop and tell me that it was all a joke, but I knew they never would. He was thirty-six years old.
Wilson's Department Store was about to close on that Christmas Eve as I ran from one department to the next looking for the perfect gift until the tie caught my eyes on a sale rack. I pulled out a crumpled wad of bills and coins from my pocket as I set the tie on the front register. The clerk told me that I didn't have enough money—I was heartbroken, because I just had to buy that tie. I turned to a man behind me, and before I could say anything, he paid for the tie, and I carried it home as I ran. When I helped my mother wrap the tie, my heart swelled as I thought of my father wearing the tie. We buried my father in that tie. I started leaving ties on his tombstone again when I was sixteen. The owner of Wilson's somehow found me a similar tie every single year and ordered it for me.
Throughout my entire childhood, my father wrote a series of letters to my sisters, and me. In one addressed to me he wrote:
Dear Derek,
I have had many joys in life, but none have compared to you, and the girls. A always want you to know that I fell more in love with you every day. I want you to always look for the miracles in life. It may be hard to see them, but they will always be there.
He finished the letter and signed it the same way he always did: All the love in the world, Dad.
I was helping my father string Christmas lights on the bushes outside our house the winter before he died when he first told me about the miracles of Christmas. "Jesus was born at Christmas, he left heaven to live here." He said, wrapping a long strand around a holly bush. He bent back over the bush, and tugged at the lights stuck on a low branch. I helped him pull them, and together we continued the job. "That's kind of like us becoming a worm and living in the dirt. Love came down at Christmas, Derek. That's the greatest miracle of all," he said, wiping his nose, "That's the true blessing of Christmas and why it will always be the season for miracles." We stood back and admired our work, and frowned at the tangled mess we had created. "If you get too busy, you won't see the miracles right in front of you." Said my father, fixing a blown light bulb.
Years before he'd died, my father bought special gifts for my sisters and I, which he and my mother had planned to give us on our sixteenth birthdays. My mother stuck to that plan after my father's death. My sisters got gold lockets, and I got my watch—a flat, gold-faced Timex with a simple black band. The inscription was a reminder of something I always asked him.
"Is your love for me as big as Texas?"
"Bigger," he'd say, smiling.
"As big as America?"
"Bigger."
"As big as the whole world?"
"It's even bigger than the world, but if you combined all the love in the whole world, it might come close to how much I love you," my father told me.
I'd worn that watch every day since my mother gave it to me, as promised, on my sixteenth birthday.
Soon after my father's death I told my mother and my grandmother that I wanted to be a doctor. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them that I wanted to be a doctor so that I could help people just like my father.
Before I knew it, I was done with college, and into medical school. I felt the pressure mounting, people were counting on me to become a physician, and my father's memory depended on it. But three months of rotations and watching people suffer and die, and a now a week with Dr. Webber, and I questioned whether I'd made the right decision. I was emotionally drained, and found myself mourning my father whenever someone passed away. I always felt as if I didn't measure up—that I wasn't cut out for medicine. I opened my eyes, and realized that I had to go back to rounds.
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Outside a patient's room, our team was gathered, and Preston, another third-year med student on our team, began reciting the patient's vitals. Preston was the "gunner" in our group—a med student's jargon to describe a fellow student who was always the first to answer, the first to volunteer for a procedure, the first to give stats on someone else's patient, and the first to get on everyone else's nerves. The term had been around since before we had even applied to med school. Mark and I shot each other glances as Preston handed out Xeroxed copies of an article on angioplasty from our textbooks, one of twelve so far this rotation, all filed in the same place—the nearest garbage can. Mark and I suffered in silence; it was all we could do, there was a gunner on every rotation.
Mary Copeland was the next patient on our rounds. She was a fifty-two-year-old woman complaining of chest pain who had a history of cervical disc disease. I had done Mary's workup when she was admitted to the hospital the previous afternoon. I went over her progress notes with the team, before entering her room. It was customary that the attending took over once the group entered the patient's room—it was our time to stand back and learn—but I felt that it was important to greet my patient's first.
"Good morning, Mary," I said, standing at her side.
"I see that your daughter was able to bring you your knitting. I hope you're not so bored now." Dr. Webber glanced to me.
"What are you making?" I asked, smiling.
"It's a baby blanket for my next grandchild…number three. I've made a blanket for all of them. She's due in the next week or so." Said Mary. I picked up the blanket in my hands, feeling the softness.
"You've even stitched her name in here!" I said, sensing that Dr. Webber was waiting for me to finish.
"Let's go ahead and take a listen to your heart this morning." I said, as I listened to her heart, and felt her pulse. I could tell that I was taking up far too much time.
"Dr. Webber would like to listen to your heart today as well." I said, as Dr. Webber took my place and examined her. As he did, he asked about her grandchildren, where they lived, how long she'd been married, and if she'd make him a pair of slippers. She laughed, and I watched as Dr. Webber won over another patient. Before leaving, I squeezed Mary's shoulder and told her I'd be by later to check on her.
