Page 90 of RomeAntically Challenged
It was exactly what her dad needed as well.
Paisley pulled back and frowned. She reached up and gently touched his head. “What happened? Are you okay? Oh my God, Dad, that looks serious.”
“How about after we spend some time just being, you and I have a talk?”
Paisley buried her face back into Emmitt’s chest and mumbled, “Okay.”
Emmitt looked at her over Paisley’s head and mouthed, “Thank you.”
She just smiled, but her heart was beating double-time. She had completely misjudged him, and now that she saw who he really was, Annie knew she was in trouble.
The kind of trouble that could cost her her heart.
Chapter 22
Annie took pride in her ability to navigate a difficult situation with effortless grace. After working her first two years in a mental facility and the last four alongside herIt’s not you, it’s meex-fiancé, there wasn’t much that shocked her.
Not that she was completely shocked. Annie had heard stories about the great and generous Dr. Widdle, from his renowned methods in the ER to his willingness to mentor younger practitioners. She had secretly hoped for a chance to work alongside the admired doctor ever since taking the job at Rome General. So when he asked her—out of all the amazing and talented practitioners working the ER that day—to consult on a difficult case he felt she was best equipped for, Annie could barely contain her excitement.
She’d worked hard her entire career for the chance to work under doctors such as Widdle—to learn from them. It was another reason why she embraced the idea of being a traveling PA. The only way to grow as a practitioner—and a woman—was to leave her comfort zone behind for the challenging experiences that came with working under exemplary figures in her field.
With a bright and ready smile, Annie strode through the ER toward exam room six to find her patient.
Annie pushed back the curtain and froze—her bright smile dimming a tad—when she saw an elderly woman embracing a feverish and fussy toddler. The child was tugging at his ear and wailing to the gods; the woman was babbling on and on. But when she saw Annie, she went silent, as if she, too, understood Annie would be no help.
The woman looked at Dr. Widdle and back to Annie, her expression one of contemplation—as if she was thinking about shoving the child in Annie’s direction and making a run for the nearest exit. Considering the volume and deafening dog-whistle pitch of the poor kid’s screams, Annie withheld judgment.
“Thank God you’re here,” the great and generous Dr. Widdle said, looking expectantly at Annie. Had he really asked her to consult on what any first-year nursing student could tell was a standard ear infection?
“How can I help?” she asked, holding tight to her smile, even though her cheeks were giving under the strain.
“I need to know what medications Jun is allergic to,” Dr. Widdle asked.
“Do you want me to check his file?” Annie prayed her assumption was wrong and Dr. Widdle was just one of those elitist doctors who was “too busy” to pull his own patient files.
“He’s visiting his grandmother, so we don’t have a file, which is part of the problem.”
“The other part?”
“He’s allergic to some kind of antibiotics.” He shrugged. “That’s all I was able to understand, so I called you.”
Annie considered asking the good doctor to giveheran ear exam to prove that she’d simplymisunderstood. Otherwise, no amount of hard work or hope was going to help Annie navigate this awkward moment gracefully.
“And you called me because?” She wanted to hear him say it.
“You speak Chinese, right?”
Right.
Shock wasn’t quite the correct term. Disillusionment and anger were more accurate descriptions of what it felt like to know that a colleague, one she admired, considered her a translator instead of a talented practitioner.
Annie had endured situations like this before, so it shouldn’t have thrown her off-balance the way it did. But being stereotyped in her place of work pissed her off.
Dr. Widdle had been too busy cataloguing her features to see her outstanding credentials. If his decision had been swayed by a nurse’s breast size the way it had by Annie’s Asian features, he’d be fired. Sexual harassment was illegal in all fifty states, but racial profiling was harder to prove.
“Chinese isn’t a language, it’s an ethnicity,” Annie said in her most professional tone. “Your patient is speaking Mandarin. It wasn’t offered at my high school, so I took Spanish because I heard it was easier than French. Even then, I was so bad, I had to retake Spanish 1 twice before I scraped by with a C minus. Man, was my mom ever PO’d. Grounded me for half the summer.” With a look of faux embarrassment, she gave a little shrug of the shoulders. “Google Translate would be more helpful than me.”
There was nothing fake about Dr. Widdle’s mortified expression. Annie let him stew in it for a moment or three, then placed the file back in its holder. “Is there anything else?”
