Work Text:
Mel scanned the triage note as she nudged the curtain aside.
“Hi,” she offered as she pumped sanitiser onto her hands. “I’m Dr. Melissa King, I’ll be overseeing your treatment today.”
“Hi,” The patient returned the greeting with a pained smile, looking more uncomfortable than anxious, one hand pressed against the right side of their abdomen.
Mel pulled on some blue latex gloves with a light snap and sat down on the stool, already running through the differentials in her mind as she wheeled closer.
“So, abdominal pain. Tell me what’s been going on.”
The history unfolded the way hundreds had before. Pain since yesterday afternoon, nausea but no vomiting, appetite gone, no urinary symptoms, no fever at home, though triage had caught a low-grade temperature.
She listened, asked clarifying questioned and began the physical exam, palpating carefully. The patient hissed when her fingers reached the lower right quadrant and Mel eased up on the pressure.
“Sorry,” she murmured tight-lipped, finishing the examination, standing straight, and stepping over to the computer.
“Localised tenderness at the McBurney’s point and rebound tenderness in the lower right quadrant,” Mel recited, meant more for herself than the patient as she input the info.
“Meaning?” The patient asked hesitantly.
“Oh, they are symptoms of potential appendicitis. We won’t know anything for certain until we get some bloodwork, though.” She replied quickly over her shoulder once she realised she had spoken out loud
The patient nodded in understanding with a grim face.
“Just a few more routine questions, if you don’t mind?” She asked, glancing back at the patient and then back to the computer once the patient nodded.
“When was your last menstrual period?”
“About three weeks ago.”
“Any chance you could be pregnant?”
“No.”
Mel clicked the box automatically, “when was the last time you were sexually active?”
The patient paused, which caused Mel to glance back again.
“I’ve never been sexually active.”
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. It wasn’t unheard of, just uncommon, “never?”
The patient shook their head, “no.”
“Okay.”
Mel nodded once and turned back to the chart but hesitated before inputting anything else. Patients lied all the time. Not maliciously, usually out of embarrassment, fear, or complicated family dynamics. It’s not that she doubted her patient or even wanted to, but she needed to be certain.
Turning back to her patient, her expression changed, forehead creasing with concern as she softened her voice, “just so you know, I’m asking because it changes what tests we need to do. Nothing you tell me leaves this room.”
“I know.”
The answer came with such certainty that Mel cocked her head, wringing her fingers like she had done something wrong.
“I really have never had sex.”
“No partners?”
“No sexual partners.”
Mel considered the specific wording, “so… You’ve just never been interested?”
The patient’s expression shifted into something almost fond, like they had heard the question dozens of times before, “I’m asexual.”
Mel blinked, “…Okay.”
“And aromantic.”
She knew the words vaguely. Enough to define them in broad strokes, even from the etymology alone, but not enough to have ever really thought about them. She nodded professionally.
“Thank’s for telling me.”
The patient shrugged, fiddling with the gurney blanket, “it usually comes up eventually.”
Mel couldn’t help her tiny, apologetic smile, “I imagine it does.”
“It mostly comes up because people think I’m lying.”
The comment landed more heavily than the patient seemed to intend, and Mel felt a flicker of guilt at their words. Had she looked skeptical? Probably. But something in the way the patient had told her, had confided in her, had Mel thinking that they wouldn’t mind sharing more, and now she was curious. She sat back down on the stool and cleared her throat.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking…”
The patient tilted their head, giving Mel a knowing look, “Go ahead.”
“When you say asexual…” Mel searched for careful wording. “…does that mean no attraction at all?”
“No sexual attraction,” they nodded.
“And aromantic means…” Mel coaxed them to continue.
“No romantic attraction.”
Mel frowned thoughtfully, all her differentials forgotten now she was on a specific path of inquiry.
“So, you’ve never had a crush?” She tilted her head as she asked, narrowing her eyes in curiosity.
“No.”
“Ever?”
“Nope.”
“…Not even as a teenager?” Mel asked, the inflection of her voice suggesting she did already understand that the answer would remain the same.
The patient snorted, “I picked one.”
Mel’s eyebrows drew together and she squinted at them, as if that would make her understand their answer easier, “you picked one?”
“Yep, all the girls in my grade were obsessed with One Direction. My friends kept asking who my crush was, so eventually I just picked a band member and said I liked him because it made the questioning stop. Easier to give them a fake answer than for them to accept that I just… did not like anyone. Apparently.”
Mel smiled despite herself, “that sounds like it would have been frustrating.”
“It was, but I thought everyone was doing that,” the patient made a contemplative face, like they weren’t exactly sure how to feel about that now they were reminiscing on it.
Something about that sentence made Mel pause too, her brain doing a little internal double take, but the patient continued before she could dwell on it.
“I genuinely thought crushes were mostly… social.” The patient made vague quotation marks with their fingers. “Like everyone agreed on someone attractive and just sort of played along.”
“And then?”
“And then I got older. They all got boyfriends and it turns out they weren’t pretending.” The silence settled for a moment as the shrugged sadly.
At the back of her mind Mel knew she should continue with actual medical treatment, but she found herself with more questions, asking before she could second guess, “so, you can still tell when someone’s attractive?”
“Oh, absolutely,” the patient gestured toward Mel, an almost sly look on their face, “I can tell that you’re attractive.”
Mel felt her ears heat up as she looked down bashfully, “that’s not-”
“Sorry, I don’t mean it weirdly.”
Mel huffed before looking back up, “I know.”
“It’s like…” They searched for the right comparison. “You know when you walk into an art gallery and see a painting that’s just beautiful?”
Mel nodded earnestly.
“It’s kinda like that. You appreciate it, it’s a nice painting to look at, but you don’t want to own the painting,” the patient grinned, “or kiss the painting.”
Mel smiled open-mouthed, shaking her head, “I suppose that would get you kicked out of the gallery.”
“I believe it would.”
For a second they were simply two people sharing a bit of humour in an overworked emergency department. Then Mel looked back at the chart.
“Well,” she said, settling back into her usual briskness now that she had reminded herself of why her patient was really here, “kissing paintings aside, I still think your appendix is trying to ruin your week. I’ll order up some bloodwork and a CT scan, and grab you some pain relief while you’re waiting.”
She stood up to input the orders, then moved to draw the curtain aside.
“Thank you, Dr. King,” the patient called before she could leave.
“It’s what I’m here for,” she replied, turning back to them.
“No, for believing me. And for being curious, not judgemental”
The words caught her off guard, but she offered a small, reassuring smile, “I know I asked a lot of questions, I didn’t mean to be invasive if I came off that way; I just get a one-track mind when a topic piques my interest.”
Her shoulders dropped, posture relaxing as she made sure to take in her patient in their entirety one final time before meeting their eyes, “you don’t have to convince me of who you are.”
The patient smiled back kindly, “Not every doctor says that.”
~
Mel left the room thinking only about appendicitis, antibiotics, imaging, and surgical consults, but the conversation lingered in the back of her mind. Not because she had questioned the patient’s identity.
Because for reasons she could not quite name, the comparison to the painting refused to leave. It followed her out of the consult room, down the corridor, through the ER for the rest of her shift, and resurfaced unexpectedly on her walk home as she caught herself admiring a colourful mural.
Beautiful, she thought.