Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
G enesis…
“Jesus Christ, the only thing worse than lookin’ at it is the smell.” I didn’t see who made the complaint. I was too busy shining a light into the barbecued druggie’s eyes on the gurney.
“There’s more coming in,” ReJeanne called to me from the door.
Shit.
I took a deep breath through my mask, which only barely cut down on the smell of fricasseed human, which honestly smelled entirely too much like cooking pork for my liking.
The only saving grace from it smelling too much like actual barbecue was the chemical burning plastic and hair odor that accompanied her.
She was gone, but there were still more out there to save, and I was getting really damn close to the end of my shift. I double-checked the clock and, yeah, nope, my shift ended almost four hours ago. It was just one of those nights.
I moved from trauma bay to trauma bay and was wondering what the fuck?
“Just how many people were in that house?” I demanded when I got through with the fourth burn victim in a row.
“Houses,” Miguel corrected me. He was one of our best nurses.
“What, like a row of them?” I asked.
“No, from three different parts of the city,” he shot back, and I checked our unconscious patient. She had full-thickness burns on her legs and one arm, but she was out, and it didn’t look good.
“Trap house?” I asked, going through the rest of the motions on her workup.
“Yeah, three of ‘em, and a meth lab,” someone called back.
“Okay, I think we’re not only looking at burns, but we have an overdose happening here,” I called out.
“Let’s get a unit of Narcan going and do what we can to get a nerve block going.
” I sighed and stood up and felt for her, I really did.
Narcan was going to cut off any sort of opioid pain relief, along with whatever she’d taken.
The trap houses around here, it could be anything between meth and heroin.
Usually, when they got too wired on the uppers, they turned to downers to come down.
It was a dangerous cocktail and an even more dangerous cycle.
We saw it a lot in this city.
Substance abuse was at an all-time high.
I sighed again, this time with relief, once she was stable and we moved on to our next customer. My relief was here, but the ER was running as though we’d had a mass-casualty event. Sure, it wasn’t one event but four – but all roads led to Mass General in the end, around here.