I (38F) work twelve-hour shifts at Memorial, and on my days off I go to the Riverside branch library to decompress. It’s the one place I can sit with a coffee and not have someone need something from me. I’ve been doing this for six years. It’s mine.
There’s been a woman coming in lately – mid-fifties, I’d guess, layers of clothes even in June, a rolling cart she parks by the periodicals. She doesn’t bother anyone. She reads. Medical journals, mostly, which I thought was weird but didn’t think much about. Some days she falls asleep at the table by the window and the librarian, Deb, just lets her.
Last Tuesday she was at my table. The one I always use, in the back corner by the outlets. I know it’s not actually my table. I know that. But I’d had a brutal weekend – lost a patient Friday, worked short-staffed Saturday and Sunday – and I sat down across from her and said, very politely, that I usually sit here.
She looked up from her book and said, “There’s no reservation system.”
Which, fine. Fair. But something in me just snapped.
I went to the desk and told Deb that the woman had been monopolizing the outlet tables and that she smelled and it was affecting other patrons. Both of those things were technically true. I knew why I was doing it, though, and it wasn’t either of those things.
Deb looked at me for a second before she said anything. Then she said, “That’s Dr. Patrice Odom. She did her residency at Memorial, actually. Cardiology.”
My stomach went cold.
“She’s been coming here since she lost her apartment in February. We try to make sure she has a place to sit.”
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there.
Deb slid a piece of paper across the desk – a printout, looked like a staff note or an incident form – and said, “Since you came to report something, I need you to put it in writing.”
I looked at the form. Then I looked back at the table where Patrice was still reading, completely unaware.
My hands wouldn’t move.
The Form
I stood at that desk for a long time.
The form was one page. Standard library incident report, the kind they use when someone’s being disruptive or threatening. There was a box at the top for “Nature of Complaint” and a bigger box below for “Description.” Deb had already written the date in the corner. Her handwriting was very neat.
I looked at the “Nature of Complaint” box and tried to think of what I would actually write. Woman sitting at table. Smells. That was it. That was the whole thing. Dressed up in whatever language I might have used, that was what it came down to.
Deb wasn’t watching me. She’d gone back to whatever she was doing before I walked up, stamping returns or updating holds, something quiet and routine. She wasn’t making it weird. She was just waiting.
I pushed the form back across the desk.
“I don’t need to file anything,” I said.
Deb looked up. “Okay.”
That was it. Just okay. No absolution, no I thought so, nothing to let me off the hook or put me back on it. Just okay, and she went back to her stamps.
I walked back to the reading area. Patrice was still at the corner table. She’d switched from whatever journal she’d been in to something thicker, a textbook maybe, and she had a yellow legal pad next to it with handwritten notes in a small, precise script. She wasn’t looking at me. She had no idea I’d just tried to have her removed.
I sat down at the nearest open table, which was in the middle of the room under the fluorescents, not my corner, not by any outlet. My coffee had gone lukewarm. I drank it anyway.
What I Know About Memorial’s Cardiology Department
I’m a nurse. Floor nurse, not cardiology, I work the surgical step-down unit. But Memorial isn’t a huge hospital. You know people. You know names.
I started going through my mental files on the walk home, the way you do when you’re trying to place a face. Odom. Patrice Odom. Cardiology.
It took me until I was two blocks from my building.
There was a Dr. Odom in cardiology. I’d never worked directly with her but I knew who she was the way you know anyone who’s been somewhere long enough to become part of the furniture. Attending, not a resident, though she’d done her residency there too according to Deb. That would make her a Memorial lifer, twenty-some years maybe. I remembered her being pointed out to me once in the cafeteria, years ago, by one of the older nurses. That’s Odom. She’s the one who pushed for the cardiac fast-track protocol. Said with a kind of reverence that I’d stored somewhere and apparently never deleted.
She’d been gone a while. I’d noticed the absence the way you notice when a piece of furniture gets moved, that vague sense of rearrangement, but I hadn’t asked about it. People leave hospitals all the time. Retirement, other positions, burnout. You stop seeing someone and assume the best.
February, Deb had said. Lost her apartment in February.
I did the math on that. It was June. Four months sleeping where, exactly? The library opened at nine and closed at eight. That’s eleven hours accounted for. The other thirteen I didn’t want to think about too carefully.
The Thing About Cardiology
Here’s what I know about cardiology, from the outside looking in.
It eats people. All specialties do, but cardiology has a specific way of doing it. The hours are brutal, the liability is brutal, the emotional weight of what you’re doing, holding someone’s heart in your hands, sometimes literally, that’s not something a person just shakes off at the end of a shift. I’ve watched surgical attendings age a decade in two years. I’ve seen people who were sharp and present and funny become something hollowed out, still functioning, still excellent at the work, but running on fumes and stubbornness.
And then there’s everything else. The system stuff. Insurance battles and hospital politics and the way medicine has been reorganized around billing codes and metrics until sometimes it barely resembles the thing people went to school for. I hear attendings talk about it in the break room, the ones who are still willing to talk. The ones who aren’t have usually already left, one way or another.
I don’t know what happened to Patrice Odom specifically. I don’t know if it was the work or the system or something personal or all three at once, the way it usually is. I just know that a woman who spent twenty years keeping people’s hearts beating was sitting in a library in June in three layers of clothes, taking notes on a legal pad, and I had just tried to take her chair.
What I Did on Thursday
I went back to Riverside on Thursday. My next day off.
I got there at nine-fifteen, when the doors opened. The corner table was empty. I sat somewhere else.
Patrice came in around ten. Rolling cart, layers, a paper cup of coffee from somewhere that she set carefully on the table before she pulled out her books. She got settled the way you do when you’re making a space work, adjusting the cart, positioning the legal pad, a small ritual of arrangement. Then she opened her book and started reading.
I watched her for longer than I should have. Not staring, just aware of her. The way she held a pen while she read, not writing, just holding it, ready. The way she turned pages. She read fast.
I thought about saying something. I rehearsed a few versions of it. I’m sorry about Tuesday. I work at Memorial. I know who you are. All of them sounded wrong. The first one was an apology for something she didn’t know had happened. The second two were worse, some kind of bid for connection that would’ve been more for me than for her. I recognize you. Does that help? It doesn’t help.
I didn’t say anything.
Around eleven-thirty Deb came by with a cart of re-shelving and stopped near Patrice’s table. They talked for a minute, quiet enough that I couldn’t hear. Patrice smiled at something Deb said. It changed her face completely, the smile, like a window opening in a wall you’d thought was solid.
Deb moved on with her cart. Patrice went back to her book.
What I’m Actually Asking
I know I’m not a terrible person. I know that the way you know things about yourself that you’ve tested enough times to be reasonably sure. I’ve held hands during bad news. I’ve stayed late when I didn’t have to. I’ve been kind more often than not.
But I’m also the person who walked up to that desk on Tuesday. Who used the word smelled as a weapon, dressed up as a concern. Who knew exactly what she was doing and did it anyway because she was tired and her table was taken and something in her just snapped.
Both of those people are me. I don’t get to subtract Tuesday because of the other days.
What I keep coming back to isn’t the form I didn’t fill out, or the apology I didn’t give, or even the question of whether Patrice Odom is okay, which she may or may not be, and which is not actually mine to fix. What I keep coming back to is how fast it happened. The snap. The walk to the desk. The complaint, dressed up in language that made it sound legitimate. It took maybe ninety seconds. Six years of sitting in that library, six years of watching Deb let people be, and it took ninety seconds to walk up there and try to weaponize all of it.
I’ve been a nurse for fourteen years. I know what compassion fatigue looks like in other people. I’m apparently not great at recognizing it in myself.
Thursday, 11:47 AM
I packed up my stuff a little before noon. Patrice was still reading. She’d filled most of the legal pad by then, small neat handwriting, and she’d moved to a second journal, something with a green cover.
I stopped at the desk on my way out. Deb looked up.
“I’m sorry about Tuesday,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come up here.”
Deb looked at me for a second. “Okay,” she said. Same word as before. Same flat delivery. Still no absolution, no it’s fine, nothing that let me set it down.
I walked out into the June heat and stood on the sidewalk for a minute.
Then I went home.
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If this sat with you, pass it along to someone who might need to read it.
For more intense stories of moral dilemmas, check out I Made My Daughter Repeat It in Front of Everyone. I’m Not Sure I Should Have., The Badge at the Bottom of Her Bag, and My Grandson Grabbed My Arm Every Morning. I Finally Found Out Why..
