6. Marcus
6
MARCUS
T here was something very similar and routine about my work, even though no two hospitals were ever quite the same, no two populations and incoming patient cases the same. But the work itself—assessing patients, setting bones, stitching stitches—never seemed to change.
There was something… oh, what’s the word I was looking for? Not homey or comforting, but yeah, there was almost a sense of comfort in the familiarity of routine.
There was almost a comfort and familiarity in the injuries, in similar injuries. The same broken ankles, the same appendicitis pain, which sounded like a crass and horrible thing to say, because I didn’t find comfort in other people’s pain. The comfort came from my ability to ease their pain. The familiarity came from the fact that I knew what I was doing without a doubt.
The comfort came from not having to endure constant uncertainty and wondering whether what I was doing would make a difference. But there was… and I knew I was making a difference every day in people’s lives. I had to deal with a level of uncertainty and discomfort because after I left the military, I focused on the general population. These were not soldiers. These were not tough, hardened individuals who had training and who knew they were going into a dangerous situation when they walked out their door in the morning.
The patients I cared for were somebody’s children. And because I chose to specialize in juvenile cases, I was working on somebody’s kid. That’s where the uncertainty came back into my life.
I never wanted to hold some guy’s life in my hands, telling him everything would be okay when I was covered in more blood than he had pumping through his body. That was not the trauma I chose to expose myself to anymore.
It didn’t make sense, and somehow along the way, I convinced myself that it made this job easier. But that goddamned flatline, monotonal beep, combined with the emergency repetitive pinging of a system crashing, didn’t care if I was trying to convince myself that my choice to be here working on this child was an easy job.
“Goddamn it,” I growled as the nurse started the heart compressions.
“I have to tie this off, keep?—”
“But, Doctor, no?—”
“I refuse,” I said. I continued stitching in the cramped quarters because the nurse had to lean halfway over me. “Get a goddamn heartbeat back!” I barked.
The monotonous, tonal sound hiccupped.
I paused, sutures and hemostats in hand, and stared hard at the back of the nurse who blocked my view of the telemetry on our patient. Another hiccup, another beep.
She eased away as the kid’s heart took over, and I let out a long, heavy breath. Yeah, this job was so much easier.
I wrapped up surgery, my patient finally stable, and got the kid transferred to recovery. I headed back to the locker room to clean up.
I needed to wash away the reminders—not of that child’s precious life, but of all the lives that had almost slipped through my fingers and the lives that had slipped so successfully, against my every effort.
I peeled off the surgical scrubs and tossed them into the hazmat bin before wiping off my head cover and pulling off the bootie covers on my shoes. I let out another long, weary sigh and grabbed the back of my neck, rotating my shoulders. I needed to get the tension out.
This had been a hard case, but I reminded myself how much easier my job was now. I figured if I lied enough to myself, I’d believe it.
The door pushed open, and Dr. Chen—Emma—walked in with a groan.
“You too, huh?” I asked.
She peeled off her surgical scrubs, and I averted my eyes. She had a bad habit of just pulling her bloody top off. She also had a bad habit of not wearing additional protective gear when in the thick of an emergency.
I didn’t glance over to her until she sat with a thud onto the bench next to me. She had a new clean blue scrub top on.
“Those kids were entirely too young,” she said.
“I know the gangs recruit them younger.”
“How is your vic—your patient, the stabbing victim?”
“Oh, yeah, right,” I said. “So, you had the perp?” I guessed.
She nodded. “Apparently, I did.”
“My kid’s gonna be fine. It was touch and go, but he came through. The kid came through. And yours?”
She shrugged. “I stitched him up. He’ll be right as rain for when they send him to juvenile. How do you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Stay objective. Keep a clear head, separated from what it is we do.”
I chuckled low. “I was just convincing myself of how much easier all of this was than my previous life.”
“Military?” she asked.
I nodded.
“But kids… they’re innocent.”
“Well, at least they’re, you know, supposed to be. Unless someone convinces them to take their grandmother’s kitchen knife and plunge it into the neighbor, right?”
“Definitely not so innocent.”
I reached over and patted her on the knee. “Don’t think like that. That kid is still, in a sense, a victim of manipulation and grooming and circumstances. His wounds are just different. They’re going to be psychological.”
She started. “His wounds are going to turn him into a killer someday. There won’t be a neighbor who finds him plunging a knife into another kid because he’s got to kill someone to get into his little club. He’s going to make it, and somebody is going to die. It’s hard to see him as a victim when that’s what we’re dealing with, you know?”
I nodded. “I know. Inner city life isn’t easy. It’s just a different kind of battlefield, I guess,” I admitted.
“And when they’re out cold and sedated?” she began. “They just look so sweet, and it’s so hard to look at that angelic little face that’s splattered with blood.”
I squeezed her knee. “Don’t let it break you. Do not let that one kid prevent you from doing what you do. You’re out here saving lives, making a difference.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” I saw her wiping tears from her eyes in my peripheral vision.
“That’s what I’m telling you. My inner voice is messed up sometimes. I don’t necessarily know how well I trust listening to my own advice, but my outside voice—this one, the words I’m giving you, I’ve thought these through. These are logical. These are sound. These come from years of experience. When you’re in the thick of things, just remember you’re doing your best. And when they take your patient off to recovery, it’s recovery, and you know you’ve done a good job.”
“I guess… I guess I just never really expected that I would be working on potential murderers and sewing them back together.”
“Is that why you specialized in kids? So you didn’t have to work on the bad guys?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I did my residency at an inner-city hospital in Baltimore. That was hard. That was intense. Maybe I thought… maybe I thought kids’ trauma wouldn’t be as burdensome—little bodies, little bones that heal easily.”
“Just because the child is small doesn’t mean their damage isn’t large,” I said.
She wiped her cheeks again and leaned against my shoulder. My chest tightened, and warmth spread through my body at the contact. She was comfortable enough to relax against me, if even for a moment, to let her guard down.
“Well,” she said, “I should get back out there. What about you?”
“I’m almost done with my shift,” I said. “I should probably go make sure I get all my notes written down so I can do my reports in the morning.”
“They let you do your reports in the morning?” she asked, a slight lilt of laughter in her voice.
“They don’t let me,” I admitted. “But they don’t have a choice. I’ve got to get home.”
“Oh, you’ve got a family?” She sat up nervously and inched away from me.
“I’ve got kids. Just me and the kids.” I emphasized the ‘just me’. I didn’t want her to think that I was some creep. “No wife, just kids.”
The stab of guilt and grief over Blair caught me off guard, and I hoped I didn’t flinch too noticeably at mentioning her to Emma.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said as she stood up and walked over to the sinks. She splashed water on her face and scrubbed her arms up past the elbows.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said as she ran a towel over her face before dropping it into the laundry bin.
“I hope you have a quieter evening,” I said. “Not adventurous. I hope it is a little less high-energy.”
“Hey, don’t curse me like that,” Emma said with a light chuckle on her face.
“You’re right. You’re right,” I said, holding my hands up, uncertain what to say.
“Thank you,” she said. “I hope so too. No more exciting cases today.”
I stayed on the bench, my hands gripping hard on the edge.
This job wasn’t easy. Maybe that’s why I told myself it was. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who had problems with children stabbing children.
Hopefully, tomorrow would be less intense.