She had saved a child, risking her own happiness, hadn’t slept all night, operated at the limit of her strength, and now she was being accused of greed, of supposedly seeking a wealthy patron. “The hospital has already pulled the documents,” Maxim Yuryevich continued, finally looking at her with sympathy. “The surgical log, the boy’s medical history, the surveillance camera recordings. Everything confirms your version, there’s nothing to nitpick. But a complaint is a complaint, there will be an internal investigation, nothing can be done.” The commission meeting was attended by the head doctor in thick glasses, representatives from the trade union committee, the hospital’s lawyer with a folder of documents, and Stanislav Ilyich Boyko from the groom’s family.
He sat in the corner, avoiding Taisiya’s gaze, mumbling something incoherent about family honor and couldn’t provide any evidence of negligence, no documents, no witnesses, other than his own words. Taisiya calmly recounted the chronology of events from the call at five in the morning until the moment she left the operating room and mentioned that the patient’s father, Gordey Alexandrovich Bondar, could confirm her words as a witness. At the mention of this name, Stanislav lowered his head and did not say another word for the rest of the meeting. The commission’s decision was unanimous: Dr. Vishnevskaya’s actions were fully in line with her professional duty, the complaint was deemed unfounded and not subject to satisfaction.
Leaving the head doctor’s office, Taisiya felt her legs tremble, not from joy, but from accumulated fatigue and nervous tension. It was an unnecessary battle she had been forced to fight, a war she had not started. Gordey Alexandrovich was waiting at the hospital entrance, leaning against his car. “All sorted out?” he asked briefly, seeing her face. “Sorted out, the complaint was dismissed.” “Good, let’s go eat. You need real food, not the hospital cafeteria with their last-century cutlets.” She laughed, for the first time in weeks, genuinely, from the heart. “You are a very practical man, Gordey Alexandrovich, everything is simple with you, let’s go eat, and that’s that.”
Two weeks later, as life began to return to its usual routine of shifts and surgeries, Arkady ambushed her at the hospital’s staff entrance. Thinner, haggard, with dark circles under his eyes, in a wrinkled jacket he would never have worn in public before because his mother wouldn’t approve. “My mother’s heart gave out,” he began hurriedly, stepping towards her. “She’s in cardiology on Rybinskaya Street, crying all the time. Inna went to Ternopil to her relatives, she couldn’t take it all. We withdrew the application from the registry office, canceled everything.” “I choose you, Tasya. Now I choose you.”
Taisiya looked at him, at the man she once loved, with whom she had planned to spend her whole life, and felt nothing but a strange emptiness, no anger, no pain, not even pity. “You’re not choosing me, Arkady, and I’m not a backup option. You’re choosing peace because everything fell apart. When your mother pressured you, you chose your mother. When you just needed to come to the hospital and be there, you stayed home. Now that Inna is gone and your mother is sick, you’re coming back. This isn’t a choice, it’s desperation.” “Give me a chance to change, to become stronger, I’ll learn.” She shook her head, looking at him without anger, without reproach, simply stating a fact.
“There are things that can be changed, Arkady. But there are moments that, once missed, can never be brought back. That moment was on the morning of our wedding day.” “Are you seeing someone?” he asked with desperation in his voice. She didn’t lie, nor did she explain. It was no longer his business. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” Taisiya turned and walked towards the hospital gates, not looking back, feeling his gaze on her back, and with every step, she felt lighter. Two weeks after that conversation at the hospital gates, Varvara Rodionovna was taken by ambulance with a hypertensive crisis.
Her blood pressure shot up so high she could barely speak, and Taisiya spent the night by her bedside in the internal medicine department, holding her hand and listening to every breath. She didn’t call anyone, not wanting to bother them, but in the morning, Gordey Alexandrovich appeared in the ward with a thermos of homemade chicken broth and a bag of fruit. A nurse from the department had apparently mentioned it to him during a chance meeting in the hallway. “How did you find out?” Taisiya asked, getting up from the hospital chair where she had spent the entire night. “It doesn’t matter, how is she?” “They’ve stabilized her blood pressure, but it was a big scare…”
Comments are closed.