Kyle was taking a shift at the metro hospital where he was interning. As a Psych MD, he had to do a year of rounding.
This evening had had the usual stupid wounds, fight victims and a couple of car crashes.
Then they brought her in. She was gorgeous, but he saw that her whole face had been burned as had her hands. All that skin would be coming off.
Within a day, no one would ever recognize her.
Compresses, ice, medicine. Nothing changed the basic facts.
Over the next two days repeated operations with skin grafts changed the architecture of her face.
Worse, she had injured her lower spine. She had feeling in her legs, but her quadrucep and hamstring muscles wouldn't respond. Her calves and foot muscles worked fine though. Now this was an interesting case.
Having seen her as she came in, he didn't pay attention to the scarred distorted visage he saw each day. It was just a mask over her beauty to him.
An attorney came by from the city. The restaurant had had many fire violations and the city was suing the owner on her behalf. Two months later a deal was struck. Her health care was covered for life and she received $2.8 million to live off of. Kyle was there to give her the news, even though he wasn't on call. He liked to bring her flowers or semi-sweet chocolate chips, which he could feed two by two between her stiff rigid lips.
Her name was Halle, but that was it...no other family, and she could remember nothing. "Good morning Halle. Let's sit you up. I'm going to assist and read you a story and feed you today." His genuine smile flashed.