Free Within Arm's Reach by Ann Napolitano

night, which means we have to spend the night at the hospital. The students are supposed to sleep on the rickety bunk beds tucked into various corners of the hospital, but no one ever actually sleeps. We make rounds with our assigned attending doctor, seeing every patient that comes into the hospital who isn’t clearly a surgical or neurological case. As part of a medical team, we assess each patient, take a history, diagnose, and give a prognosis.
    This rotation is a lot of hours, but that’s not what bothers me. I don’t mind missing sleep. I like seeing how far I can push my body and mind. After three days of little rest, my personal worries go away, and there is nothing but the work at hand. But what does bother me, and what I do mind, are the people.
    The hospital is teeming with them. Everywhere you turn there are doctors, medical students, nurses, nurses’ aides, nurse practitioners, anesthesiologists, specialists. Everyone has their specific job and they get in one another’s way despite the rigid hierarchy that has to be followed. The hospital system is based on education and seniority, so that even if you have the skills and the knowledge, you can’t apply either until you’ve spent a few years following some middle-aged attending around kissing butt. You have to say the right things, and act deferential to the right people. You can’t even find peace with the nurses, who think they know much more than the lowly medical students, and who, when the workload slows, want to chat and bond and talk about their lives and my life until I want to throw myself out of the nearest window.
    The patients I can tolerate, because with them at least I can use my mind. I check their symptoms against what I have memorized. I consider the possible illness, the possible treatments, the possible complications. But still, there is no purity in the work because I am not allowed to do much, and because far too often the doctor sends me out of the sickroom to speak to the patient’s family. This is the worst possible assignment, because with few exceptions the families are a mess. It doesn’t matter if they are in the hospital because their ten-year-old is having his tonsils out or because their father is having an emergency triple bypass. The hysteria is always there. I see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. People know that while they are at the hospital someone in the rooms around them is bound to die, and they seem to believe that if they speak loudly and often and shed tears, there will be a better chance of their loved one being spared.
    I suppose I always knew on some level that I wasn’t crazy about people. I never had many friends, and I avoided crowded situations like bars and parties. I chose to live in student housing among people who didn’t like me because I was left alone. But still, I never consciously thought about the idea that I might be a misanthrope. It’s not the kind of personality trait one wants to attribute to oneself. And I had never come face-to-face with that possibility until forty hours after my fight with Gracie, when I had spent two straight days in the hospital without ever having one moment alone.
    I am on my way to the bathroom, mostly so I can lock the door to the stall and sit down on the toilet and close my eyes. But someone follows me. It is a woman I have just spent twenty minutes calming down, whose son suffered a concussion and broke his leg skateboarding.
    “Miss,” the mother says. “He doesn’t recognize me. He’s not talking. Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”
    “Your son is asleep,” I say. “He doesn’t recognize you and he’s not talking because he’s asleep. We gave him pain medication and it made him drowsy, as I told you before. Can you understand that?” I speak slowly, because I want her to hear me this time. She seems a little slow.
    “He just doesn’t seem right,” she says.
    I am at the door to the bathroom. I have to get rid of this