d6 . ophelia hurst

I’m almost 99% sure, well, probably 100% sure that when we were young mum got us mixed up. At some point, I’m sure my name was Freya, but then at other times, I’m positive I was Ophelia. Sometimes I think mum still can’t tell the difference between us. It’s really not that hard. I’m the smarter one.

Freya says she’s the smarter one as well. One of us is lying, and mum always said Freya was the liar.

Honestly, at this point, it doesn’t really matter. We both graduated at the top of the class, we both became doctors and now we work side-by-side together every day. I just can’t seem to get away from her. It’s like we’re glued together, and sometimes I’m sure she can actually read my mind. With the way she just knows what I’m going to say and responds with a well-thought-out response before the words have even left my lips! It’s magic.

One top I chopped off all my hair and for the few months, it was gone mum remembered that my name was Ophelia. Freya hated it, she said I looked like the old lady she had killed by accident during her first surgery. I kind of agreed, I had grown used to running a hand through my hair when I was stressed, it was one of the better ways to get Rowan’s attention. Rowan hadn’t been impressed when I’d rocked up to work with no hair, he’d said it’d scare the patients, and if I wanted to be a clown I could go join the circus. I told him to fuck off and then we had sex in the storage closet.

Apparently fuck off means fuck me.

You wouldn’t believe that they let me cut into people’s heads, but here I was, slicing and dicing like their skulls were butter. They’re not, though, there’s a lot that makes up a person, but playing with their brains is what can break them. A slip of the scalpel or a twitch of my hand and suddenly a person can’t speak anymore, suddenly they’re haemorrhaging and I can’t control the blood and then there’s the cry of the flat tone and they’re gone. There’s a switch, I tell Freya, in my head, and I flick it when I go into surgery or enter a trauma room.

You’ve got to be able to joke and not take yourself too seriously when you hold a person’s life in your hands. I’ve seen too many doctors believe that they were Gods. That ain’t reality, and living in illusions is what gets people killed. I’ve killed my fair share of patients, through accidents and mistakes and every one of them is a strike against your soul. Freya says that you have to be careful, not let it get to your head. She says it’s like playing with fire and if you get too close it’ll burn you.

She’s not wrong, I’ve seen people get burnt. When it becomes too much they drown themselves in alcohol or bury their lives in a mountain of white. I think they forget that all they can do is try and that we are every bit as much human as the people we try to save. There’s a line, it’s a blurry, messy line that’s hard to see, and when you cross that point you can’t drag a person back. The only way they survive once they reach that point is if they fight to come back across that line. There’s a lot of doctors who believe that they can be the ones to make that choice for their patients, so they blame themselves when they can’t.

Rowan says that even though I know that there is a line, I don’t always practice what I preach. Just last week he found me crying in the night room, legs curled up against my chest because I’d lost Matilda on the table. Sometimes it hurts you a little more, he says I have too much empathy and maybe if I cared a little less before the surgery it wouldn’t make it so hard. It’s hard not to, Matilda didn’t have any other family and it didn’t seem right that she has no one to talk to.

“Pull it together,” he’d say, wrapping an arm around me and running a hand through my dark brown hair. We had the same dark skin and gentle brown eyes. He liked to think he was being smart, but I knew he was just like me, a little broken on the inside. Freya would agree with me, she knows that this job wears at you, taking a little bit more of your heart and soul every day. Sometimes she tells me she’s not sure why we keep doing it -fighting a battle that has no end in sight.

I tell her that it’s because someone has to do it, and even though it hurts us, the people that we help are hurting more.