On discharge day, I folded my hospital gown and placed it on the bed. A ruptured appendix followed by severe peritonitis had cost me thirteen pounds. From my seventeenth-floor room at Metropolitan General Hospital in Chicago, I watched autumn rain cover the streets while a nurse went through my discharge instructions.
“Are you sure no one is coming to drive you home, Clara?” she asked softly, glancing at my chart. “Dr. Marcus Hayes works here, doesn’t he?”
I managed a polite smile. “He’s in a procedure.”
Marcus was one of Metropolitan General’s most respected cardiovascular surgeons, working only five floors below me. During the first twenty days of my hospitalization, he participated in a prestigious international organ transplant initiative under strict quarantine.
For three weeks, I defended him to my mother, friends, and nurses.
“He can’t leave the unit,” I had repeated like a script. “He’s saving lives.”
Then came the final ten days.
The isolation restrictions ended.
