Disclaimer: Ahh okay I don't own the characters of ER. Those belong to the lovely creators of ER. I just borrow them for fun. Nothing is going to be made off this story, I'm just a starving pre-med student with some free time every now and then.
A/N: This story takes place 4 years from now. Please R&R, it's greatly appreciated cause if no one review I have no idea if I need to keep going with it or put it in the bin of what I thought was a good idea but really sucked.
In a strangers eyes
Chapter one: The beginning of it all, Chicago fears
What was I to do? This was not how I pictured my life after all this time. Alone, scared, lost, and sick to my stomach, those where the feelings that I was feeling right now. Here I was standing outside the hospital where I was to start my new rotations as a medical student. I had put six years into my training so far. Honestly I was terrified, I didn't know if I could cut it now as I was about to begin the clinical aspects of my training. People's lives were about to be put into my hands, and it was going to be up to me to save them. The book part had been easy. I was good at that, I could study and memorize stuff with the best of them, yet hard work was not something that I was afraid of. One would have thought by now that I would be use to being all alone. I wasn't, that was the one that I could not conquer. I laughed it was all that I could do to keep my emotions from letting me throw up as I looked at those double doors leading inside.
So who was I and what was I doing standing in front of the doors of Cook County General Hospital now in 2008? Well that was a good question. The answer to that question would take a little bit of explaining. I had gotten married in Kentucky to what I thought was a sweet boy right out of high school. That was my downfall, to young to know what I was doing, to naive to be able to see the crappy future that was in front of me.
We some how managed to survived until I got my acceptance letter to Northwestern University in Chicago. That was one of the last nails in my marriages coffin. Not that it was the only problem that we had. He had grown up the son of a preacher's daughter. All he knew about his dad was that he wasn't ever there, which had made him in some ways bitter. It wasn't until shortly after we got married that his mother thought that he was old enough to know who his father was. The only information that she was able to give him was a name and that she knew he had practiced medicine in Chicago for a little while, but had willingly lost touch with him. That he was nothing but a womanizer with severe commitment issues. The only part that I couldn't understand of all of this, was that if he was such a terrible man, why did she feel the need to give her son his last name and not hers, they were never married, but then Dana had, the entire time I knew her been a little mentally off. So basically I knew the name of my soon to be ex-husband's father and I knew that he had gone to the same university that I was going to graduate from in 2 years. I think that was part of what drove my husband to the brink that he was at. Afraid that once I had finished my schooling that I wouldn't need him anymore. That I was going to abandon him. Well, unfortunately for us, he had made the decision himself. He knew that I would not tolerate any form of cheating, none, I was not the kind of person who could forgive something like that.
His mother coming clean about his father didn't fix anything in his life, shortly after that he stopped talking to his mother, and he stopped talking to me. He started to drink and I about lost it when I found him in the arms of a younger blonde woman. The first of what turned out to be many, and when I got accepted to Northwestern, I left, cutting what strings I had left with him and Kentucky. I was not going to be going back. I had no family there, other than him. I had lost my parents many years ago, cancer took my father when I was 12 and my mother died in a car accident 5 years ago. I had fought long and hard to get to where I was now and there was nothing stopping me but my fear. So who was this man who had walked away from my husband and helped to ruin what sham of a marriage that I had going, it was a man by the name of Doug Ross. Well I knew more about him than that. A little bit of research at the school had provided me with a picture of him, that he had been a resident, fellow, and then a Pediatric Attending physician at the ER there.
It had done little to calm my fears when I found out that several years ago, he had left Chicago to practice in Seattle after some sort of incident at the hospital. I really did not want to meet the man anyway. What would I say to him if I had the chance? Well it would not have been pretty, but then I didn't know both sides of the story. I only knew Dana's side. Maybe it was best that he wasn't there anymore. I pulled at the short lab coat that I was wearing. I wouldn't get to wear the long one until after I graduated, which I was looking forward to. It had been a long dream of mine to become a doctor. To know that I could cut it with the best of them, to be Erica Ross MD.