22. Kate
Kate walked down the ICU corridor at twenty-eight minutes past midnight, officially “the next day” now. She was on her fourth shift since they started weaning the propofol.
Tessa had finished the last one, and finally agreed to go home because Dusty called and said Olive was having a time.
Eli was here now, and the two of them agreed to leave after this shift, at one.
Vivien, Peter, Meredith, and Dusty had all lined up for the overnight so Eli and Kate could sleep for a few hours.
Maggie would come in the morning, and by then… maybe Mom would be awake. And…normal.
The scheduling gave her peace. The waiting gave her a splitting headache.
She glanced down at the sweatpants and T-shirt she’d changed into…sometime earlier this evening. She’d zipped home for an hour, took a shower, ate half a granola bar, and came back. She’d passed exhaustion hours ago. Now, she felt like glass—fragile and transparent.
She smiled at the night nurse at the station—not Marlene tonight, but Talia, a younger woman with a very businesslike attitude.
The nurse nodded back. “She’s been steady. We dropped the propofol another step at midnight. Vitals holding. We’re keeping an eye on her.” She gestured toward a bank of monitors but none of them showed Mom’s face. Just a series of medical graphs that each measured something important.
Thanking her, Kate went into the room she now knew by heart—from the stain in the ceiling to the pattern in the tile floor. She knew the feel of the pleather chair, the sound of the ventilator, the wonky wheel on the rolling tray, and the antiseptic smell that permeated everything.
The monitors murmured and beeped, and Kate glanced up at them. She’d made a point of learning every single one during her shifts. She Googled what she didn’t know and figured out what the graphs meant, committing the numbers to heart.
Pulse-ox on the screen reading ninety-seven. Heart rate reading seventy-four. The ICP holding in the goal range. Good. They were behaving.
Settling on her chair, Kate let herself take a good long look at Mom. She maybe appeared slightly less sedated than she had earlier this evening. Was that a faint flicker of movement under the closed eyelids? Yes, it was.
Her hand on top of the blanket had twitched earlier, and it definitely looked like that pink-tipped index finger had moved.
Was her body starting to regain consciousness? Starting to become Jo Ellen Wylie again? Holding that thought, she took her mother’s hand.
“I don’t feel like talking,” she said softly. “I know everyone else is, but maybe you just want silence so you can do the work to break out of the fog and come back to us.”
She thumbed her mother’s slightly knotted knuckles and stared at a face she’d seen most every day of the last fifty years.
She sat very still for five minutes, thinking about the highlights of those fifty years—the long talks, the laughter, dinners around the table with Dad and Tess, the simple exchanges, the sad calls this past year when she knew Mom was sitting in Dad’s recliner, crying.
“Don’t you dare use this as an excuse to see him,” Kate whispered, and not for the first time.
They were all thinking it—this was her opportunity to reunite with the man she loved and missed. No, she couldn’t. She had to fight for her life, but she’d have to want to fight.
Kate looked up at the infinitesimal change in a beeping pattern, scanning the possible sources and landing on the cardiac monitor.
Wait. That had changed.
The electronic pulse that had been steady at seventy-four, the small tick-tick-tick that she’d memorized during the last shift, had slowed. Tick…tick…tick. The intervals lengthened long enough for Kate to lean back and stare at the monitor.
Heart rate: fifty-eight.
Then, in the time it took her to read the number: fifty-two.
Then forty-four.
She stood, sucking in a breath just as an alarm went off, a low but loud noise from the pulse-ox monitor.
Sat dropping. Ninety-two. Eighty-eight. The screen blinked red. The vent’s high-pressure alarm started shrieking and Kate looked down at the very moment her mother’s arms started doing a small, terrible jerking thing that she instinctively knew was not voluntary or the first signs of waking up.
“A seizure.” She breathed the words just as the door flew open.
Talia moved like a machine, with lightning speed and laser focus. A nurse Kate had not seen before rushed in, hitting the room at a full run as they called commands and questions to each other.
Oh, God. Oh, God.
Kate felt herself melt into the corner, the farthest point away from the bed, riveted, terrified, paralyzed with fear. They worked like they had no idea she was there.
All the while, the numbers dropped.
With one hand on Jo Ellen, Talia lifted the comm device around her neck. “ICU four is bradycardic and desatting and seizing, carotid pulse present. Need rapid response. Code blue. Repeat, code blue.”
Code blue? The words didn’t process in Kate’s addled, blood-pounding brain. Not until she heard them repeated on an intercom.
Code team to ICU four, code team to ICU four.
Was that real? Was this a dream? What was happening?
“Lorazepam,” Talia called. “Two milligrams IV push!”
Moving to fulfill the order, the other nurse threw a quick look at Kate, who braced for the command to leave.
“Back against the wall, ma’am, stay there. Do not move.”
Determined to obey, Kate pressed harder against the corner of the wall and a counter, watching her mother convulse and seize. Every monitor in the room screamed while a third person came in.
A tall Black man in scrubs, pushing a crash cart, the wheels loud on the floor.
“Heart rate thirty-four,” Talia called.
Thirty-four? Kate’s knees literally trembled.
The second nurse yelled more numbers in fast succession and told her microphone that respiratory therapy was here—that must be the new guy.
“Marcus, bag her, please,” Talia ordered.
Bag her? What did that mean?
Marcus disconnected the vent and attached a football-shaped bag to her breathing tube, squeezing it in steady pulses. Kate stared at his hand, watching long, strong, fingers work like he’d done this a million times.
“Denise! Carotid!”
The second nurse, Denise, moved to the head of the bed, pressing two fingers against the side of Jo Ellen’s neck.
The actions drew Kate’s eyes to a place she’d steadfastly avoided during all this—her mother’s face. Jo Ellen’s skin had gone the color of a cold, gray sky, her eyes closed, her body…finally no longer spasming but…still. So, so still.
The color. The stillness. The monitors.
She’s dying.
The thought slammed against Kate’s consciousness like a brick to the head. She knew this like she knew her name and the periodic table. She knew it because she’d watched her dad die—less dramatic, less unexpected, but the same color. The same stillness.
Kate was trying to register the orders and the movements, but nothing was getting through to her brain.
More calls for a code team. More numbers that just got lower and lower and lower. More frantic attempts to stop what had started.
She knew, deep down, that this whole thing had taken less than two minutes. It felt like an eternity. It felt like…the end.
Pain welled up in her chest like a living thing, biting her, twisting her heart.
“Mom,” she sobbed silently.
But Jo Ellen might already be gone.
“No,” she mouthed, determined to be quiet so they didn’t make her leave. She couldn’t leave. She had to see her. She had to watch. She had to…pray.
The order came from somewhere inside her. Like a voice she didn’t recognize and couldn’t really describe. But there it was…
Pray.
She had no idea how.
Kneel? Scream? Arms up? Hands together?
She pressed harder to the unforgiving wall and stared at her mother’s face.
“Please,” she breathed the word so the nurses didn’t hear her.
But maybe someone did. Something. Some…God.
“Please, please save her.” The words came out like air, from deep inside.
“Please don’t take my mother yet. Please give her more time.
Please. I will do anything. You probably don’t make deals, but I will believe anything you want me to believe.
Just give her back. Take it from me. Take anything you want from me.
Take my career. Take my mind. Take my hands.
Take my doubts and unbelief. I don’t care.
Just give her back. Please. Please. Please. Give her back to me.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, turning the scene into a watery blur. The beeps and ticks and monitors got quieter and quieter. The nurses moved with precision and caution. The ventilator sounded slower.
“Please,” she added once more, aware she was pressing a hand over her chest because it hurt so much.
“Forty!” Denise called out. “Keep pumping, Marcus!”
Forty what? The cardiac monitor? Kate looked up at it, blinking through tears as the slow ticks sped up.
“Forty-six. Fifty-two.” Denise called out the number like a quarterback, while Kate’s eyes found the number on the screen and read along.
“Sixty-one. Sixty-seven. Seizure is complete.”
Oh, God.
Kate watched the numbers reverse on the screen, making a small sound in the back of her throat.
The sat alarm slowed from the shriek to a steady tone to nothing. Oxygen saturation rising to eighty-eight. Ninety-one. Ninety-four. Heart rate climbed to sixty-eight, seventy-two, held.
Talia exhaled audibly. She lifted her hand from Jo Ellen’s chest and glanced at Denise—the two of them had a wordless one-second conversation. If she had to guess, it was something like…that was a close call.
Dr. Halpern shot into the room just then, next to the bed in two long strides, taking in the scene, the monitors, and the patient in a sweeping look.
Talia launched into a report, a cacophony of numbers and medical terminology, but all Kate heard is, “Patient is stable now.”
Stable? Did she say…stable?