So I set my tablet on her desk and showed her the protocol, the timeline, and the empty dispensation log.
I wasn’t after revenge.
We had no children, and I proposed a clean fifty-fifty split of the equity in our Lincoln Park brownstone.
Everything else, we would each keep.
I went home, packed my clothes, my degrees, and my books into two suitcases, and set the platinum Tiffany band Marcus had slipped on my finger seven years earlier on top of my discharge summary.
Then I walked out.
I moved into a furnished apartment in the Gold Coast, changed my number, and told everyone to go through Sarah.
Two weeks later, at a catered reception on the hospital’s twelfth floor, a process server walked in.
“Dr. Marcus Hayes? Personal service.”
With colleagues and residents all around him, Marcus slid out the papers.
Within three seconds, his triumphant smile vanished.
Inside was a petition for dissolution of marriage.
And he still had no idea that losing his wife would be only the first thing he lost.
Chapter 2: The Audit Trail
The apartment in the Gold Coast was on the twenty-third floor, with a view of Lake Michigan that turned black at six o’clock.
The radiator ticked.
The refrigerator hummed.
I had bought chamomile tea and bread, and eaten neither.
On my first night out of the hospital, I sat on a rented couch in a blanket with my tablet on my knees, and I opened the tab I had been avoiding.
Audit Trail — Chart 4471-H.
Every electronic medical record in the state of Illinois keeps one.
It records who opened the chart, from which computer, at what minute, and what they changed.
Patients have the right to request it.
I had made the request from my hospital bed on day twenty-six, in the polite, boring language of a form, and it had arrived by secure message that morning.
I have read thousands of audit trails.
I have never read one that was mine.
I started at the beginning.
Admission, 2:14 a.m., the day the pain became unbearable.
Triage note, by the emergency nurse: Right lower quadrant pain, rebound tenderness, temp 101.8. Suspect acute appendicitis. CT abdomen STAT. Surg*cal consult.
It was exactly right.
It was a textbook note.
The next entry was seventeen minutes later.
2:31 a.m. Phone annotation, entered by the emergency attending, Dr. Ian Castellano.
Spouse (Dr. M. Hayes, Cardiothoracic Surg*ry) states pt has long history of anxiety and functional abdominal pain. Requests CT and surg*cal consult be deferred until morning. Will observe.
