I couldn’t breathe. John Doe’s remaining eye, clear and bright blue, fixed on mine as if he were totally alert.

It had to be a trick of the light. No one could endure this kind of trauma and remain conscious. No one could survive injuries of this magnitude. He didn’t cry out or writhe in pain. His body was limp and completely void of any reaction as the attending staff made an incision in his windpipe to intubate him.

He never looked away.

How can he be alive? my mind screamed. The concept destroyed the carefully constructed logic I’d built over three years of medical school. People did not live through something like this. It wasn’t in the textbooks. Yet, there he was, staring at me calmly, focused on me despite the flurry of action around us.

For a sickening moment, I thought I heard my name from the mangled hole of his mouth. Then I realized it was Dr. Fuller’s frantic voice cutting through the haze of my paralyzed revulsion.

“Carrie, I need you to wake up and join us! Come on, now, we’re losing this guy!”

I could continue to stare at John Doe or turn my face to Dr. Fuller, to see him silently lose his faith in me. I don’t know what would have been more distressing, but I didn’t get to make a decision.

I mumbled a feeble apology, turned swiftly and ran. I had barely escaped the grisly scene before I noticed the sticky splotches on the floor that stained the pristine tile a deep, glossy red. I was going to be sick. I fell to my knees in the congealing blood and closed my eyes as the bile rose in my throat. I rocked back and forth on my knees, my vomit mixing with the blood on the tiles.

A sudden hush came from the cubicle behind me, followed by the insistent whine of the heart monitor protesting the cessation of pulse.

“All right, he’s gone. Pack him up and get him to the morgue,” I heard Dr. Fuller say. His cool, Texan confidence crept back into his voice, though it was tainted with weariness and resignation.

I scrambled to my feet and ran to the staff locker room, unable to face my failure.

I was still in the locker room an hour later. Fresh from a shower, dressed in clean scrubs from central processing, I stood before the mirror and tried to smooth my wet, blond hair into something resembling a ponytail. My mascara had run in the shower and I wiped at it with my sleeve. It only served to darken the circles under my eyes. My bone-pale skin stretched sharply over my cheekbones, my blue eyes were cold and hollow. I’d never seen myself look so defeated.

When did I become so pathetic? So cowardly? Cruelly, I taunted myself with memories I couldn’t push aside. The way I’d snickered with the other students when the skinny foreign guy had tossed his cookies on the first day of Gross Anatomy. Or the time I’d chased Amy Anderson, the queen bee of the eighth grade, from the bus stop by sticking earthworms in her hair.