Chapter 5 Sloane
Sloane
“Ten CCS of Epinephrine. Call ahead to the or, Let them know we’re coming up.”
“Yeah, I… I got it.”
I look up and the skinny intern with the bad haircut is still standing there, staring at the guy bleeding out on the gurney in front of him. The guy I’m buried wrist-deep inside. “What are you waiting for? RUN!”
The fresh intake of interns is always a nightmare.
They’re so green they’re absolutely no use to anyone, and yet in between the severed limbs, and the gunshot victims, and the world falling down around our heads, we are supposed to teach them how to fix people.
I’m supposed to teach them, which is insane because I’ve only just learned how to do all of this myself.
“He’s crashing, Dr. Romera. Adrenaline?” the nurse asks.
Adrenaline is the last thing this guy needs.
His heart is already near spent as it is.
What he needs is the gaping hole in his stomach to be repaired.
God knows how many of his internal organs are shredded in there.
I’m not going to know until I can open him up properly and clear out all of the blood.
Right now, I can’t tell a damn thing other than the fact that this guy is going to die unless we do something. And soon.
“Let’s just get him in the elevator,” I tell the nurse.
She nods, unlocks the gurney wheels, and is barking orders at her team without even blinking.
Grace is a pro. She’d probably be able to save this guy all on her own if she had to.
Half the nurses in this hospital probably could if push came to shove.
They’re all massively undervalued, underpaid, overworked.
Bodies hustle as we guide the gurney to the elevator, my hands still lodged inside the patient.
I bounce on the balls of my feet while we watch the numbers count down.
I’m not fazed by elevators anymore. Too many trips like this have desensitized me to the cramped space.
The hospital’s only four stories high, and yet it seems to take an eternity for the damn doors to slide open.
Eventually they part and then we’re racing against time again.
“Inside, inside! Move!” The intern I sent to warn the OR, Mikey, I think he’s called, makes it just in time to catch the doors. “They know we’re coming?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s coding, Dr. Romera.” Grace says this as the heart rate and BP monitors start screaming. I pull my hands out of the guy and grab Mikey, shoving him toward the patient.
“Hold him together.”
Mikey looks like a rabbit in the headlights when I gesture to the patient’s wound. “Wh-what do you mean?”
I take both his hands and place them where I need them. “I mean hold this guy’s fucking intestines inside his body!”
Mikey may or may not obey the command. I don’t waste any more time. I lean as far as I can over the patient and start compressing his chest.
One, two, three, four, five…
The powers that be decided a while back that you don’t need to give an arresting patient any breaths. Keeping the heart pumping is the number one priority here. Grace is on it, anyway. She starts bagging him, forcing regular gusts of oxygen into his lungs, and I grunt over my work.
The doors open again.
“Okay, let’s move.” I can’t compress and run at the same time, so I hop up onto the foot rail at the bottom of the gurney and hitch a ride to the OR.
I used to see doctors do this back when I was as green as Mikey, and I could never picture myself composed enough to be that person.
A lot’s changed over the past four years, though.
Lex’s disappearance, trying to find her, has changed me so dramatically that I’m not the same person I was back then.
I’m the kind of person I need to be to excel at this instead.
Cold. Calculating. I don’t buckle under pressure.
I get things done. It all started back in that hotel room.
I traded a part of myself that night. Extinguished the part of myself that would have prevented me from doing what had to be done.
The very first surgery I performed was on myself. I carved out my weakness with a rusty scalpel and reveled in the glorious void that remained afterward.
The nursing team is already waiting by the time we reach OR three.
I’ve been keeping our as-yet-unidentified patient alive for two hundred fifteen seconds.
Time is running out. Dr. Massey is scrubbed and ready to go when we reach the sterile anteroom between the corridor and the OR.
Massey’s good, a gun with trauma. I almost grin with relief when I see his face.
“No ID, MVA, unknown internal injuries. BP tanked between ground floor and level two.” Massey nods, face obscured behind his mask, but his eyes are steady. They say he’s got this.
“Go scrub, then get your ass in here. This looks like a job for two pairs of hands.” The OR nurses take charge of the gurney and disappear through the double doors with my patient. My patient. When you’ve had your hands inside a person, whether they live or die, they become your responsibility.
“Hot damn.” Mikey stands next to me, blood mottling his nitrile gloves, soaking his scrubs. It looks like he just went on a killing spree. “That was intense.”
“That was sloppy,” I correct him. “You can’t freeze like that, Mikey.
You hesitate, you cost someone their life.
” I feel like I’ve just kicked a puppy. Mikey’s probably only three years younger than me, but in our reality, three years’ worth of experience is a lifetime.
Him giving me the sad-eye treatment isn’t going to earn him an easy ride with me, though.
We aren’t allowed feelings like remorse.
Remorse means we did something wrong, or we didn’t do enough.
There’s no room for wrong or not enough in this hospital.
“Are you going to save him?” Mikey asks.
Can I do it? Can I do for this patient what I couldn’t do for my own sister? I tell Mikey the same thing I tell myself each morning before I even set foot inside the hospital.
“I’m gonna try. I’m gonna do my best.”