Chapter 3 Hayley
HAYLEY
Hayley sat down in the chair next to the hospital bed and took her patient’s hand. “I want you to promise me something, Ernest.”
Ernest Simpson grinned at her, the crow’s feet around his brown eyes crinkling up. “Anything you want, cutie patootie.”
She sighed. “Amendment. Two things. When you transfer to the cardiac floor, please call the nurses by their names.”
“Aw, it’s hard for me to remember,” Ernest protested.
Hayley picked up the badge that dangled at the end of her baby blue lanyard. “We all wear these. My name could not be in bigger print, Ernest.”
Now it was his turn to sigh. “All right, Nurse Hayley.”
“Thank you. And the flirting is too much.” She dropped the badge. “You’re such a nice guy. And we’re here to keep you alive. Why do you antagonize the people keeping you alive?”
He had the good grace to look sheepish. “I didn’t think about that.”
“Well, you better.” She stood up, dusting off her behind.
“The cardiac nurses are way, way meaner than us in ICU. I’m actually telling you to behave much more for your sake than theirs.
” Leaning down, she cupped a hand around his ear.
“They know how to kill you and make it look natural. Just saying.”
“Oh.” Ernest was so shocked that for once, he didn’t have a reply. She straightened up and backed away, satisfied.
“Cardiac will be down in a couple of hours to get you, Ernest. Remember,” she backed towards the door, pointing a finger from her eyes to his. “Behave.”
Back at the central desk, she sat down with her tablet to finish off her handover notes for Ernest. He’d been in the ICU for a month now after a routine cardiac stent operation had gone badly wrong.
And as cheerful and robust as he was generally, the process of getting him stabilized enough to go up to the cardiac floor had been fraught and riddled with setbacks all month.
Enduring his constant remarks wasn’t something Hayley would have put up with normally, but he was a nice fellow, and he was having such a tough time with his recovery.
As she worked on wrapping up her notes, her stomach growled. The nurse next to her, Mirenda, looked up from her own tablet. “Damn, boss. You eat anything today?”
“I…” Hayley paused and looked up towards the ceiling, trying to remember. “I’m not sure, actually. Wait, I had a cherry fruit leather that I stole from Peds?”
Mirenda rolled her large brown eyes. “Girl, that is not a meal. That’s not even a whole snack.
” In addition to her RN, Mirenda was a registered dietitian.
She was always making sure the other nurses were fueling themselves adequately, and she always had food in her scrub pockets.
In this very moment, she pulled out a plastic wrapped turkey jerky and Colby Jack cheese stick combo and handed it to Hayley.
“Eat this, drink your water, and then go down to the cafeteria and get yourself a good hot meal.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hayley saluted with the jerky stick and got to peeling the wrapper open. As soon as the smell of the cheese and meat hit her nose, her stomach growled even more loudly and before she knew it, she had wolfed both sticks down.
Mirenda paused in the act of pulling a stylus out of the large bun of microbraids swirled atop her head. “Good lord, Hayley.”
Hayley let out a dainty burp. “Excuse me. Sorry. Wow. Okay. I think I’m just gonna…”
“Yeah, you get going.” Mirenda pointed a slender brown finger at the ICU doors. “I’ll page you if there’s an issue.”
“Thanks.” She got to her feet and bolted out the doors, making a beeline for the cafeteria.
She was happy to find that it was spaghetti day in the cafeteria. Loading her tray up with a big plate of pure noodly carb goodness, she spotted Paige across the cafeteria with her own plate of spaghetti and garlic bread and made her way over. “Hey!”
“Heya, Hay!” Paige smiled and patted the chair next to her. “It’s been days. Busy in the ICU?”
“Yeah, full house. Although we’re sending a few patients up to floors today, so that’s nice.” Hayley picked up a big forkful of pasta and sauce and twirled it around. “Just in time for the next wave!”
“And so it goes.” Paige nibbled on a slab of buttery garlic bread. “We’ve had a wave of food poisonings from that all-you-can-eat seafood buffet… again.”
“How have they not closed that place down yet?” Hayley wondered. “And why do people keep going there? It doesn’t even look clean?”
“Hell if I know. I keep reporting to the Health Department, I swear.” Paige shrugged. “It’s all I can do. Well, maybe I should also buy stock in freakin’ Zofran; I’ve prescribed so much of it lately for these poor puking people.”
“Would that not be insider trading?” Hayley wondered as she dug further into her pasta mountain. “In some weird roundabout way?”
“I don’t think so, but what do I know, I went to medical school, not business school.” Paige shrugged. “Maybe I should have done business; I wouldn’t owe so much in student loans still.”
They ate in companionable silence for several minutes while the cafeteria buzzed around them. Everyone at Oakridge loved spaghetti day, patients and staff alike, so it was busier than usual.
Literally everyone. Paige looked up past Hayley and her eyes got wide. “Oop.”
“What, oop?” Hayley put down her fork and turned around. And promptly groaned.
Deborah Morales.
She hadn’t seen the ER chief for several days. It was almost like the woman was actively avoiding her… an impressive feat considering how closely their departments had to work together regularly.
True to her unwillingly given word, Dr. Morales had indeed caused no trouble with any transfers from the ER to the ICU.
Things had gone back to running smoothly.
Hayley was relieved by that, because she had been worried she’d antagonized the doctor a little too hard during the whole scene, and that it would cause problems for patients again.
But seemingly, everything was fine. Except that even when Hayley walked over to the ER for anything, Deborah was either not in sight at all or she slipped away as soon as they made eye contact.
Looking at Deborah now, standing frozen in the middle of the cafeteria, halfway to their table with a tray of pasta and garlic bread in her hand, Hayley could see that the woman would flee the room if she could.
She found Deborah Morales’ reactions to her to be interesting.
She could run Hayley over in a corridor and be a breezy bitch and a half about it, but if Hayley stood up to her in any way, she turned as red as the tomato sauce on their pasta and seemed to lose the ability to speak.
Which seemed very out of character for a reckless, cocky departmental chief with a superiority complex. And yet…
Deborah visibly shook herself and came over to the table. “Doctor Bellows. Nurse Milton.”
“Hi, Chief.” Paige grinned and glanced between Hayley and her boss. “Having a good day?”
“Good enough.” For just a second, she looked like she’d actually sit down with them. Hayley held her breath.
Nope. With a curt nod to Hayley, and not one more word, Oakridge’s chief of Emergency Medicine turned on her heel and walked out of the cafeteria, tray and all. Hayley chuckled. “I don’t think we’re supposed to take the cafeteria dishes with us, are we?”
Paige propped her chin on her hand. “I’ve known Deb for a long time, Hayley. What the hell did you say to her the other day? You got deep under her skin.”
Hayley looked down at her plate and fiddled with her pasta in a show of faux modesty. “Aw, shucks. I didn’t do nothin’. Just told her to check her ego at the door when it came to patients.”
“Tame, for you. The results are undeniable, though.” Paige shook her head. “Crazy stuff. Are you sure the two of you aren’t secretly flirting?”
“Jesus. Did they spike your pasta with magic mushrooms?” Hayley felt herself getting wound up at the very idea of flirting with Deborah Morales.
But before she could say anything more, the pager at her hip went off, and she grabbed it. 911, it said, and that was all it said. Not good.
“Paige, I have to get back to the unit, can you—”
“No problem, I’ll take care of your tray, go on, go.” Paige waved her off.
Hayley booked it back to the ICU, where the previously quiet unit was now a frantic pod of activity. Doctors and nurses were gathered around one room at the end of the corridor.
Ernest’s room. Hayley’s blood ran cold and her feet felt nailed to the floor.
It took what felt like an eternity for her to get moving and head towards the room she’d been in less than an hour ago.
She’d left a cheerful lecher there in his bed, and now she was walking into a maelstrom of chaos centered around a body in a bed, a body too still, too pale, too unmoving while doctors and nurses worked on it.
A body not responding at all to the alarms blaring out of the machines around it.
She stood in the doorway, cold with shock, able only to watch as the ICU team fought heroically… and couldn’t save Ernest.
Mirenda approached her cautiously. “Boss lady?”
“He was fine,” Hayley whispered. “He was supposed to go up to Cardiac…”
“Hayley, you know his health was touch and go all month,” Mirenda said gently, taking Hayley’s cold hand in her warm one. “You know people in our care, anything can happen, even if they’re fully stabilized.”
She couldn’t think. There was a roaring in her ears. Tearing her hand out of Mirenda’s, Hayley turned and raced out of the ICU.
Wanting to be far from where Ernest’s body was lying lifeless in an ICU bed, Hayley ran towards the other end of the hospital, towards the Dermatology wing.
It was a newer part of the hospital, renovated just a couple of years ago, and the staff lounge there had features others didn’t, like individual pods for “reflection,” whatever that meant.
For Hayley, it meant there was a guaranteed place she could go and enjoy relative privacy while she dissolved into tears.