7. Chapter 7
Chapter 7
Morgan
I t turns out that the reports of black ice and worsening weather weren’t wrong. Over a few hours, the temperature dipped to around twenty degrees, and all of the water that melted this afternoon is now frozen again.
Did the city put salt on the roads? Absolutely not. Because that would require preparation, and if there’s one thing Atlanta is good at, it’s pretending that winter weather doesn’t exist.
Even though my Infiniti QX50 has something called snow mode, I still skid to a stop on the street in front of my rental house. While most of Atlanta is hilly due to its location at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, my street is relatively flat. Which is great news, because if it wasn’t, I would definitely roll backward on the slick road because I still have no idea how to work the parking brake. And yes, I have had my car for over a year, but automotive care is none of my business.
I nearly slip as I hop out of the driver’s seat, and I have to crawl on all fours to make it the remainder of the way to my front door. While that isn’t ideal, it beats the hell out of turning back around because of a broken wrist.
My rental was slightly out of my budget, but the second I saw the blue guest house, I knew I had to have it. The space used to be a garage the owner converted, so the ceiling is tall and held up with beautiful wood beams which make the five hundred square feet seem much larger. Sure, it has issues, but the unique style makes up for it one thousand percent.
Unlocking the front door from my knees, I feel the delicious warmth of my apartment wash over me. I love air conditioning and keep my apartment at a brisk sixty-six degrees in the summer, but the thermostat stays locked at seventy in the winter.
What can I say? I’m a southern girl through and through, even though I technically spent the first six months of my life in Connecticut, a fact my little brother loves to remind me of whenever he’s in the mood to piss me off. The number of times I’ve had to yell at him for calling me a Yankee is honestly egregious at this point—we shouldn’t fault people for things they have no control over.
Dropping my keys on the hook by the front door, I kick off my Hokas, and make a beeline for the kitchen. I barely had time to eat anything all shift other than a slice of old pizza in the break room, and I feel like I’m on the verge of passing out. While I would love to sit and read my current mafia romance, what I need right now is to shove some mac and cheese into my mouth, take a long shower, and then flop down on my freshly made bed.
Today officially goes down in history as the most draining one of my career, and somehow, I have to get up tomorrow and do it all over again, like none of the emotional trauma ever happened.
I love being a nurse most of the time, but there’s nothing that can erase some of the things we witness. We just have to keep going, soldiering on like trauma doesn’t fundamentally change us to our core. We don’t have time to process our feelings because we force ourselves to keep working until, eventually, everything piles up and explodes after years of ignoring our emotions.
That’s the one part of the job that doesn’t get easier as time wears on—the death. You just keep adding the names of patients to your subconscious list of losses, thinking of them whenever you can. Sometimes, you even think of them when you don’t want to. A song, a specific food, or a familiar scent will trigger a memory, and suddenly, it’s like you’re face-to-face with a ghost. I recognize that probably doesn’t sound healthy, but it’s the truth—death sticks with you no matter what.
I spent my first few years in the ER writing in journals to work through my emotions. But at the end of the day, I still felt the losses deep in my core. Nothing could erase them, and I eventually got tired of trying so I constructed a wall of impenetrability around myself.
And that wall has worked for the most part. It worked through the horrors of COVID and the helplessness that came with fighting a virus that nobody knew anything about. It worked through the frustrations of short staffing and feeling like we were failed by our healthcare system. It worked for pretty much everything I’ve experienced as a nurse over the past several years.
But for some reason, my steel barricade of protection was completely obliterated in a few hours this afternoon. I don’t know if it’s because I saw so much of my own father in this patient and started feeling guilty because I haven’t called him in a while, or if it’s because I finally hit the limit on the number of deaths I could experience without allowing myself to process them, but I’m on the verge of a serious breakdown. I can feel the pain swirling in my chest, begging for some sort of release that I’m not quite sure how to let loose.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I mutter under my breath as I turn on the kitchen faucet and no water comes out.
I blink back tears of frustration now that mac and cheese is out of the question, opening the refrigerator to search for something to eat. Unfortunately, I usually order takeout or buy shitty cafeteria food at work, so my options are somewhat limited. I try to always keep milk for cereal in situations like this, but I’ve been working so much overtime that all I see is a pile of Chick-fil-A sauce, six cases of Dr. Pepper Zero, and a bundle of smelly broccoli that needs to be tossed in the garbage.
A responsible adult would keep pizza in the freezer for emergencies, but I only find a half-empty bottle of Tito’s. Apparently I’m only here for a good time, not a long time.
At least I won’t have a puffy face when I starve to death though, because my ice roller is primed and ready to go. I pull it out and slide the cold stone along my cheekbone as I cross the kitchen.
My final option, the pantry, is more promising, and I discover a few homemade oatmeal raisin cookies from Claire’s recent batch. Score. That’s two food groups in one—carbs from the oats, and fruit from the raisins. If anything, it’s more nutritious than eating the stash of Nerd Clusters I always keep handy.
I decide to warm the cookies in the microwave to trick my body into thinking that it’s getting a real meal. Shoving one in my mouth, I slink to the floor of the kitchen and lean my head against the white-washed cabinet.
I have no idea what to do about the water. I feel disgusting and dejected after everything I witnessed at the hospital, and I desperately need to cleanse my body of the day—both physically and mentally. But there’s no way in hell that my shower is going to work if my sink doesn’t.
In any other situation, I could drive to Claire’s condo since it’s less than ten minutes from my house. But the ice on the road is horrible, and there’s no way I can get there safely. I might be careless with a number of things, including what I put in my body, but my life isn’t one of them.
As I’m running through the list of people I know who could possibly live nearby, I remember something Cass told me when we got dinner the other night. It turns out there actually is someone . . . the problem is that I’m not sure reaching out to him is any less dangerous than going back out on the roads.