Your Regrets Fleeting as the Wind

Charlene Everett wasted no time dismissing my hurt feelings.

“You really want a divorce, Isaac? We have a one-month cooling-off period before we can confirm it; you may change your mind after calming down a little bit. You’re just helping Zachary avoid the bad press he can’t afford to take, unlike you. Everyone in the hospital knows the actual truth. Why can’t that be enough for you?”

We were walking out of the courthouse after applying for a divorce, but she kept acting unbothered.

“You’re a department head at this hospital and a professor in your own right. How can you stand as one of the pillars of this hospital if you can’t handle a few rumors?”

She simply ignored the fatigue I was under after getting dragged into a medical malpractice lawsuit. Worse than that, she cared not for my broken heart.

“I won’t change my mind, don’t worry,” I said as I held onto the newly signed divorce papers. “We won’t be seeing each other again once this cooling-off period is over.”

Saying these words somehow made me feel more relaxed.

Charlene frowned. For a moment, she looked like she had more to say to me, but then, her phone suddenly rang.

It was, of course, none other than Zachary Wordsworth, and he was sounding very tense.

“Help me, Charlie! I think I gave my patient the wrong dose of medication. His family is here now. Will they do to me what they did to Isaac?”

Charlene immediately reassured him, “Don’t worry, Zach. Let me handle this. Just say that you put in the dose Isaac told you to.”

“Isaac already took the fall for me last time. Won’t he hate me if he has to do it again?”

Charlene looked over at me. Whatever softness her expression held vanished in a second.

“He’s older, so he should give newbies like you the space to make mistakes and learn from them. After what happened last time, he’s also gotten more experience on how to deal with such things.”

I grabbed Charlene’s hand and forced out with difficulty, “Charlene, you’re allowing Zachary to mishandle lives just so he can have a nicer-looking resume. Doctors are supposed to be benevolent and kind, but you seem to have lost all heart and sense!”

On the other end of the line, Zachary started crying piteously. His self-deprecating apologies proved to be gratingly annoying in my ears.

Charlene spoke to him in a very soft voice before turning back to me with a glare.

“That was just an accident! Zach needs opportunities to learn. You’ve been through all of this before. Can’t you be a bit more sympathetic?”

“I’m not sympathetic?”

That was quite the laughable idea. It had taken me more than a decade to go from a trainee resident to one of the top attending physicians in my department! It took time and sweat to build my reputation! The papers used to call me a medical genius. My name was sullied now, stuck to the huge mistake that another man had made during a minor surgery.

Ever since Zachary had started working at the hospital, he had been prescribing patients the wrong medication and other things like that. However, Charlene put my name as the doctor in charge and blamed me for not double-checking his work.

Whenever Zachary overslept and missed out on doing rounds, Charlene would tell the others that I had forced him to take my overnight shifts, causing him to oversleep in the first place.

No matter what Zachary did wrong, Charlene would defend him and push all the blame on me.

“I’ve taken the blame for him once and had to go through a medical malpractice suit for him. I won’t do it again.”

Charlene only scoffed before calling the nurse manning the nurses’ station.

“Yes, put my husband’s name in as the prescribing doctor. His reputation’s shot anyway. The hospital won’t think twice about getting rid of him.”

Charlene did not give me a chance to speak out and swiftly hung up.

“You’d better clean up your act, Isaac. No one else at the hospital will defend you but me. I know you’ll be crawling back to me in a month, so you’d better not wear away whatever patience I still have for you now.”

After leaving Charlene, I went and called a familiar number.

“I’ve gotten a divorce. You told me I could further my studies overseas. Is that offer still on the table?”

A pleased, feminine voice came through the line. “Of course! As long as you’re willing to travel, I can put in your application! You need to clear things up at the hospital first, though.”