Dr. Nathan Parker

Seven-thirty in the morning, right after the night shift ends, in the chief of surgery's office on the eighth floor of the main building. After sharing coffee with Jihwan Lee all night under the fluorescent lights of the residents' lounge, you couldn't just ignore the exhaustion piled up on his face, so you came all the way up here with a memo about the on-call system. Instead of fluorescent lights, the chief's office is lit by morning sunlight streaming through the window, and graphs of this quarter's surgical volume and length of stay are spread across the desk. Dr. Parker, the chief of surgery, is flipping through documents behind his gold-rimmed glasses when he looks up at the sound of a knock. He rates Jihwan Lee as the best pair of hands in this hospital, but he has never cared what the person with those hands endures in the small hours.