Chapter Seventeen
Sommer
Monday
They were prepped for what was heading their way.
The call had come in. All hands on deck.
Everyone who could be spared from other wings now hovered in the hallway, waiting for the first ambulances to arrive.
It had started with a bar fight.
It had turned into shots fired.
The people fled to their cars, tried to race out of the way of the bullets, and crashed into each other.
It was the dictionary definition of a shit show.
Emergency response coordinators spread the casualties out among the area hospitals.
Sommer worked at a level-one trauma center like Marna did, only on the other side of the city.
At both hospitals, there were helicopter pads on the roofs where, normally, the most life-threatening cases would land.
The dedicated teams would rush the patients from the roof down to the surgical center, having practiced their military-precise transport, cutting off a second here, another one there, so that from touchdown to scalpel, the time was mere minutes.
They all prayed to the Golden Hour—the time in which hope was brightest.
Here, at Sommer’s hospital, the helipad was under repair after damage sustained in the last big storm.
They would get those who had a little more time for transportation, assessment, and care—broken limbs, some stab wounds, the concussed, the battered, the walking wounded that needed to be cleaned up, stitched up, and sent on their way.
Bar scenes complicated the medical interventions because blood-alcohol and recreational drugs had to be considered.
Pain management took on a heightened risk.
And there were always the inevitable pools of vomit, and sometimes even puddles of urine, that made the life-saving dashes that much riskier.
Sommer stood with an isolation gown covering up her blue scrubs, gloves on her hands, hands in the air to avoid germs. She was ready for anything from wound compression to CPR.
“Hey, you remember that young guy that came through after he had seizures?” Her teammate asked. “Young guy with the sweet smile?”
“We sent him up for an MRI?” Sommer twisted his way. “The one with big plans for getting married to his high school sweetheart when she finishes her nursing degree?”
“Yeah.”
Sommer’s brows came together. “Oh, that’s not a good-sounding yeah. What is it?”
“What was it? Prion disease.”
Sommer wished she didn’t know. In her mind, there was some easy intervention, and the guy went off to lead an amazing life.
“He said his family was all big hunters. Do you remember the pictures of the stag in his pickup truck?” Sommer asked.
“I wonder if the prion was from butchering his own meat? Nicking the spinal column maybe?”
“Scary that there isn’t a single thing that can be done to save someone. The proteins fold and fold, and that’s that.”
And Sommer wished she hadn’t said that; now Sommer had an earworm: “Just fold and fold, and that’s that.” Unhelpful.
The sirens screamed as the emergency vehicles raced up the ramp, exiting the highway. They cut off once they hit the main street, protecting the hospital from some of the high-decibel impact.
Sommer shuffled her foot in and out of her rubber clog. “That’s miserable that happened. Did the health department have the family tested to see if it affected anyone else?”
“Eating the same game? I don’t know if they followed through or not. You’d think it would make the paper if it wiped out a whole family.”
Sommer took a breath and deliberately set those images aside. No more earworms, she scolded her brain. Focus.
Nights like tonight didn’t happen that often, but every time it did, Sommer watched the unfolding drama and violent impact on people’s lives with a heavy heart.
The first ambulance arrived with a cop escort.
The EMT flung the door open, and Sommer stepped forward, ready to listen to the medical summary and help move the patient into the hospital.
This first patient barely fit on the gurney both in length and width. He was a bear of a man, feet shackled, each wrist cuffed to the rails, covered in blood—so much blood. The paramedic was using his full body weight to compress a wound on the man’s chest.
“Knife wound. We packed it tight, but it’s not doing a lot of good. He wrestled around until something gave. They might have nicked an artery.”
“Surgery,” the doctor said and looked at Sommer.
Sommer’s hand went up in the air. “Surgery!” Then she jumped out of the way as that team jogged forward. They made the transfer from gurney to rolling bed in the hallway. One of the nurses climbed onto the man’s legs to maintain pressure on the wound as they raced for the elevators.
The policeman held his duty belt in place on his hips as he jogged after them.
“The ringleader, you reckon?” Sommer’s colleague asked.
“Something. That officer’s not letting that guy out of his sight.”
The ambulance pulled out of the way as the second ambulance backed into place.
This time, when they opened the doors, there was a police officer on the gurney, one EMT bagging, the second one on compressions.
One of the doctors stepped forward to listen to the history. Looked at the gunshot wound. Then, he pulled back the officer’s eyelid and touched his pupil. With no reflex, he called the time of death.
The first responders were exhausted, and that call hit them hard.
After signaling the driver to pull out, they walked the gurney inside to transfer the body and retrieve their equipment.
Sommer wondered if the man in the elevator heading for surgery had anything to do with the officer’s death and if that was why the policeman was only a step away.
A pickup pulled up, its bed filled with people, and slow-rolled to a stop.
Sommer could imagine that some kind person drove by, gathered as many fleeing wounded as he could, and followed the ambulance.
The doctor signaled for wheelchairs as he accepted two patients with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds.
The others weren’t at risk of life or limb, so he asked the driver to take them to another hospital that was already prepping to take overflow.
Luckily, he really was a good guy and didn’t give the doctor a hassle; he just waited patiently as the two triaged patients were assisted out, then he drove away calmly.
And so it went.
Patient after patient.
Doctors would run in, look through the chart, list the diagnostics to be performed, and stitch the wound, direct them to MRI, order blood and antibiotics.
If the patient was stable, they were sent to the waiting room because they could sit with their bruises and splinted, broken limbs while the staff needed the space for others to be resuscitated, triaged, and moved to the next step.
Among the wounded bodies, the police were everywhere.
Sommer had to politely usher officers out of the path of staff running toward a code.
She got that these patients were in police custody. But those patients were double-handcuffed to their beds. Where were they going that the officers needed to hover?
Frankly, they were obstacles to the staff doing their job.
Sometimes she was glad they were standing right there when she was treating a particularly angry patient.
Anger really was the emotion that boiled in the emergency department. In the mix were people who were in the dispute, one group with the other, the ones who had started the fight, the ones who shot the bullets, the innocent ones caught on the scene
Typically, when possible, the police would keep one group in one hospital and another group in another so there wouldn’t be this cross-hall screaming from bed to bed.
The scene was too big; the number of wounded didn’t lend itself to that kind of diplomacy.
It was hard to work on a patient when they were clattering around with their wrists in handcuffs, not to say Sommer wasn’t grateful for the safety it afforded her.
It was still frightening.
Add in the normal full moon full house of heart attacks, strokes, and household mishaps, and it was non-stop.
The pace had been too quick to worry about hunger or thirst or needing a pee break.
When Sommer graduated from nursing school and applied to work in emergency medicine, she knew that this hospital, in a major metropolitan area, wasn’t just possible, but probable.
She wanted to be there for the people in their darkest moments; she wanted to give them support and steadiness, but after hours and hours, Sommer found her hands shaking, and she’d almost made a terrible mistake.
With her adrenaline pumping from the near miss with the medications, Sommer took herself out of the game to reset.
Peeling off her gloves and dumping them in the nearest biohazard bin, Sommer went by the head nurse's station. “I’m taking a minute.”
In the women’s locker room, she rested her hands on the cool, slick surface of the ceramic sink and looked in the mirror.
Her hair was wild from sweat.
Blood smudged her face.
Her clogs would need to be cleaned and dried before she went back to the patients.
But for now, she was going to lean over and splash cold water on her face until she felt some relief from the pressure of the night.
Sommer felt time ticking as she pulled the pins and elastic from her hair and combed everything back in place. It might give the patients more confidence in her care if she didn’t look like a bog witch.
She worked quickly, knowing that every minute she was in the bathroom, her fellow nurses took on more duties. Quickly peeing, she cleaned off her clogs, dragged on a fresh set of scrubs, thoroughly washed her hands, then gave herself a shake before heading back into the fray.
As she passed by the nurse’s station to let them know she was on the floor, a man stumbled through the ambulance bay without any assistance—no police, no paramedic, just a man gripping a large wad of something against his stomach.
For a moment, Sommer’s brain stuttered as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. At first, she thought he was holding a towel to his stomach, and it was covered in blood.