New Orleans was a city that lived up to its name for Dr. Stephanie Stewart. She was thinking about the excitement of walking down Bourbon Street just last night. She was free. Away from the black cloud of what haunted her soul. The dark secret. She smiled beneath her mask. Dark secret. It was just a fluke, nothing more. A moment when the stress of her chosen profession got the best of her and she succumbed to a deviant adventure. That's all. Humans, the lot of them, had their darkness, she was no different.
The steady beep of the cardiac monitor assured her that all was well. It was a simple thoracotomy, an emergent surgery to relieve the build up of fluid and blood in the chest cavity of a coronary artery bypass graft patient. Three days post op from their initial surgery, it sometimes happened. As she placed the chest tube and began closing the wound, she let her mind go back to the thrill of being in a new city again.
Had this been a more serious surgery, there would have been no time to consider anything but her next incision, her next move in trying to save a life. Thoracotomies were routine these days, at least in the field of cardiothoracic surgery.
Thirty minutes later she was in the locker room pulling on her sandals, running a brush through her hair and ready to explore her new digs. Nabbing her lab coat she shoved her arms into it and made her way to the post anesthesia care unit.
Typing in the orders for the patient, she made a few electronic sticky notes for the nursing staff, specifics to watch out for, for this particular gentleman. He'd had a rough go of it since he opted to have open heart surgery. This latest was just one more. He needed a little TLC, and after having met the nurses on the heart and vascular floors of St. Francis hospital, she knew them to be capable, efficient professionals who would take her words and put them into action.
Once out in the Louisiana sunshine, the lab coat was tossed into the backseat of her Hum V, and she was behind the wheel.
"Home to dig in the dirt and plant flowers, or another drive through the city?" She realized talking to herself was probably a sign of being alone too long, and for too many hours, but she liked herself enough that she was okay with that.
"The city it is!" Pulling out of the parking lot, small hands gripped the steering wheel in anticipation. It was the best part of moving. The confusing chaos of exploring new surroundings. First stop. Lunch. Then? The world was her oyster.
