Chapter 7 Taylor
Taylor
The following day, Taylor works a four-hour afternoon shift at the hospital. Her head throbs—next time she should pass on Sam’s whiskey—but she didn’t want to call out sick. The first chance she gets, she asks a colleague to cover for her. Then she bolts upstairs to the ICU.
To Vivian.
Outside Vivian’s door there’s a group of doctors in discussion, and Taylor strains to hear.
Serial CT scans, subdural hematoma, minor distal radial fracture, rib fractures.
No new information, then.
She feels the outline of the key in her scrub pockets; she has come to check on Vivian, but she’s also there to return the key. Her embarrassment over having kept it has only grown by the light of day.
The doctors finally move like a flock of birds down the hall, and once the room is empty, Taylor slips inside.
Vivian is lying in the bed, her beautiful head partly shaven where the ICP monitor—the probe measuring brain pressure—attaches like an alien’s antennae.
Her chest rises with air that the ventilator pushes through a tube into her lungs, and then it recoils.
A cocktail of medications infuses through spaghetti lines to keep her sedated and treat the brain swelling.
Her fractured wrist is secured in a splint.
Taylor almost wants to cry, seeing Vivian this way.
When she arrived, she seemed so alive, like she’d transported through a portal from the world outside—the world where people lived, where life hummed and the earth rotated on its axis—to their hospital world, where people become part machine, less human.
Tethered with tubing and on beds that slowly rotate to prevent bed sores. Bruised, edematous.
But even though Vivian now belongs to that all-too-familiar world of sickness, there are still glimpses of her beneath it.
A lingering waft of Chanel N°5. A tiny clump of black mascara on her eyelash, still present. Shadows of her expertly smudged eyeliner. The wine-colored nail polish, now chipped on several fingers.
“T.J.” Her Aunt Gigi startles her; she is standing outside the door, holding a paper cup of coffee in one hand and a nursing census sheet in the other. “You came to check on your patient?”
“Hi, Aunt Gigi. Yeah.”
“She’s stable, for now.”
“That’s good.” Taylor does a visual sweep of the room, looking at Vivian’s machines and monitors, and then the surrounding walls.
She notices an “About Me” poster hanging on the wall, empty.
Usually, these posters are filled out by loved ones in detail and plastered with photos.
Taylor frowns. “Doesn’t she have family? Have any visitors been in?”
“No family yet that we’ve located,” Aunt Gigi replies, and then adds, “You know, you did good with her yesterday, T.J. You should feel proud. It was not an easy situation, but you handed it well. You acted quickly.”
“Thanks,” Taylor says, with an authenticity she does not feel.
An overhead speaker rings out: “Code Blue, room 614. Code Blue, room 614.”
“Gotta run,” Aunt Gigi calls out over her shoulder as she hurries down the hall.
Taylor sighs and pulls up a seat alongside Vivian. Studies her. Underneath the swelling, her face is lax, slightly pink. Even smoother than the day before, if that’s possible.
How is Vivian alone? Why is no one with her? How is someone so beautiful not surrounded by others? There should be at least one handsome man by her bedside. Perhaps even a few boyfriends who aren’t aware of one another’s existence.
A little crust has formed overnight on Vivian’s eyelashes.
Her nurse is clearly busy with the code down the hall, so Taylor takes a washcloth and wets it, applies it gently to remove the debris.
Then she moves the cloth to Vivian’s arm to softly scrub off the tape residue from what looks like a previous IV attempt.
Taylor rinses the cloth and then continues to sponge-bathe Vivian, careful not to provide too much stimulation as to increase her intracranial pressure.
The most important thing in a traumatic brain injury is to simply allow the brain to heal.
Though healing isn’t always guaranteed, even with time.
Head injuries are tricky; the skull is a closed space, jam-packed with brain, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid.
When the brain swells, it simply has nowhere to go.
The resident enters the room, pulling Taylor out of her thoughts.
“I put in some new orders,” he says.
“Oh, I’m not her nurse. I work in the ER; I admitted her. I, uh, I just came to check on her.”
“Oh, okay. Do you know who her nurse is?”
Taylor shrugs. “Sorry. There’s that code in 614, so maybe she’s helping in there.”
The resident starts to leave but then stops. “You said you admitted her?”
“Yeah. Why?”
The resident shakes his head. He’s young, with a round, boyish face that makes him look even younger than he probably is. “I’m just trying to understand. The paramedics said she was at a party, drinking, right?”
“Yeah, apparently she had a few and took a tumble down the stairs.” Taylor pauses, then adds, “She was even talking about champagne before she crashed.”
The resident scratches his head. “Okay.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, it’s just that her blood alcohol level was normal. She wasn’t drinking at all, or if she was, she already sobered up by the time she fell.”