4. Vivianna #2
“Bloody hell, ya cunt, I still have to get to school. If I miss another day, I’ll get suspended,” Tim snapped at me.
I could handle a lot from patients, but when they stepped over the line, I let them know. As nicely as possible, of course.
“Listen up, you little prat, I’m the doctor here, not you.
If you would like to continue going to school for the next few years and not drop dead from a brain bleed, then smarten up.
When the nurse comes to get you, I don’t want to hear a peep from you, or I’ll call your mum and the school and let them know just how you came to be here.
You feel me?” I said slowly, calmly holding his gaze as I talked, making sure he understood just how bad he’d fucked up by calling me a cunt.
“Yes, ma’am,” Tim said, trying his best to disappear into the bed.
“Wonderful. We’ll talk again once I get your test results back,” I said, giving him a cheerful smile and leaving the room.
When I walked out, Mary, an A apparently she’d overheard me. Everyone in the department knew that I wasn’t to be messed with, so they purposely gave me the patients they hated so I could put them in their place.
“You let me know if our little stunt devil causes you any trouble,” I said, handing over the chart.
“Of course, doctor. I’ll make sure to page you right away,” Mary said, giving me a wink as she pulled back the curtain to take Tim to his first round of tests.
“BECK! I need you in trauma room two—stat!” Bridget hollered across the room to me.
I spun on my heel and dashed down the hall. A nurse was outside the door with a blood splatter cover and gloves for me. Oh boy, this was going to be a messy one if they needed me to help. I backed into the room, making sure that my newly gloved hands didn’t touch anything.
“What happened?” I asked, taking in the chaos around me.
“Looks like there was a bar fight or something last night. Someone found this guy bleeding out in the street. He’s in pretty bad shape, but we can’t seem to get him stable,” Beth said as she directed the nurses and other staff to get what we needed.
“We need whatever juju you do in cases like this.”
In med school, when we decided what we wanted to specialize in, I picked emergency medicine.
Being who I am, I decided to add on a second specialty in trauma and disaster training.
I had a particular skill in rooting out the worst cases and getting them stabilized for the next person to take over, making me the go-to person at St. Thomas for tough cases like this.
I walked over to the patient and looked him over, first assessing only what I could see. The other staff knew better than to tell me anything. I always wanted to start without opinions.
I was surprised to see that this man had wounds that looked similar to those on the guy I saved last night.
This didn’t look like the normal bar fight where someone pulled a knife in a fistfight.
The man had what I guessed was a dog bite on his neck, near his carotid artery.
That was a move that animals only made when they fought to kill versus just defending themselves.
I palpated around the wounds and didn’t see any damage to the artery itself, though it was a nasty attempt.
I moved farther down the chest, seeing more claw marks like the ones I’d stitched up, but this man had many more, albeit shallower, as if the attacker was trying to get this man off him.
This looks just like a dog fight, only with humans.
I’ve never seen anything like this before, and we see all kinds of strange shit here.
Then as I worked down the torso, I found it; the next savage bite had been in the abdomen.
It looked like whatever bit him was trying to gut him.
That would also be very common in animal attacks…
but they said this was a bar fight. There is no way another human would have been able to do this.
It just doesn’t make sense. I closed my eyes and listened while I felt around the wound.
Then I heard it, a slight change in the blood flow.
“There is a tear in his common iliac, we need to get that bleeding under control. He should stabilize enough to get to surgery,” I said, holding out my hand for a clamp.
“Also, make sure to let the surgeons know that this was not a knife fight. They need to proceed like they would with an animal attack. Infection can seep into the bloodstream easily with how shredded he is.”
While I worked to find the bleed, the nurses kept the field clear, suctioning out the blood and packing the wound with gauze.
Then I saw it. The artery was almost cut in half.
If the surgeons could mend that, then he might have a chance to live.
As I worked on sealing off the bleed, the patient’s heart rate started to even out, and his blood pressure stopped falling.
It didn’t improve, but not getting worse was just fine with me.
My job was to keep the guy alive long enough to get him to surgery.
“Done! Now get him covered and upstairs now. If he has any hope of surviving this, we need to act fast,” I said, backing away from the body while a nurse came to help me get my bloody covering off.
“Nicely done as always, Beck,” Bridget said, nodding at me in approval before addressing the rest of the team. “You lot heard her, let's get this guy going! Someone call up and let them know we have a critical patient and their electives are just going to have to wait.”
I watched as the staff took the patient out of the trauma room and up to surgery.
In the back of my mind, I kept going over how similar this was to an animal attack.
I also couldn’t help thinking that maybe the man from last night might have been in the same fight as this guy—I’d just found him sooner.
The rest of my day passed uneventfully. The skateboard kid was fine, but he’d have a killer headache for the next few days.
I’d had a few more patients, but nothing too interesting—a dehydrated kid with the flu, a guy with a broken arm from falling off scaffolding at work, and a mountain of paperwork that I had to go over.
I loved everything about my job, but it’s not like the TV shows, where it’s all blood and guts and dying people.
Sure, those things happened, but we saw everything under the sun here at the A&E.
Just as my shift was finishing, I heard a knock on the office door that all the doctors shared. I looked up to find the Chief of our department standing in the doorway with a scowl on his face.
“Chief, what can I do for you?” I asked, standing up with a smile and offering him the only decent chair in the room.
“I would like to know why you’re here. I had a lovely chat with your father, and he made it quite clear that you were not to be working here anymore,” Chief Mitchell said, sitting down.
“I can’t say that I’ve ever been offered a donation of such magnitude for getting someone to stop working at our hospital. Normally it’s the other way around.”
Yes, George Mitchell was sixty-eight years old, but not much got past him.
He had the pulse of the A&E department under his finger and always knew what was going on.
I had done my residency here before I graduated and gotten to know him well.
We’d come to a strange relationship where I was able to break some rules after doing so led to me saving his grandchild’s life.
I only had to let him know I was going to do it so he could prepare for the aftereffects.
“I’m sorry that you and the hospital got pulled into my family issues. As you know, my father has never approved of me working in emergency medicine. He wanted me to be some posh cardiac or brain surgeon. I would rather stab myself in the eye with a scalpel,” I said with a grin.
I’d warned him when he hired me who my father was and what he might do when he found out that I took the job here. Chief Mitchell was more than capable of handling my father, as he worked with bigwigs all the time.
“I didn’t say that I took the money, Beck. What I asked is why you’re here at this hospital doing this job when you could be anywhere doing anything?”
“You asked me that same question when I took the job and told you about my father. I still don’t know why you told him off that time, and I shouldn’t have ever doubted your willingness to keep me here,” I said, seeing the glint of mischief in his eyes.
“Because, Beck, you’re one hell of a doctor. As much as I would like to have a wing of the hospital named after me, saving lives is more important. Now answer my questions so we can see if it’s still the same or not. I could change my mind,” Chief Mitchell said, winking at me.
“All I’ve wanted to do is help people in their suffering.
I love being the one who can swoop in and handle a situation that others might be afraid of.
I haven’t really had many people in my corner to fight for me, and here I’m able to do that for my patients.
I also picked this hospital because it has the largest and busiest A&E department in London,” I answered.
“Excellent. Well, finish up your paperwork and get out of here. I’m not going to pay you overtime just for scut work,” Chief Mitchell said, slapping his thighs with his hands before standing up and leaving.
“What an odd day this has been,” I muttered to myself, turning back to my charts.