FOUR JORDIE
FOUR
JORDIE
Post Anesthetic Care Unit? More like, Post Anesthetic Clusterfuck Unit.
PACU is chaos. Alarms blaring, monitors flashing like some kind of medical-themed hellscape. The shift coordinator—bless her well-meaning heart—has clearly never coordinated anything beyond her week-long meal prep. She is drowning. And the whole unit is going under with her.
One-to-one care? Anesthetic guidelines say yes. Reality says: haha. Twenty-five bays. Twenty-five disasters waiting to happen. No one is in charge. It’s whack-a-mole, but the moles are patients and the stakes are very real.
I try to focus on my patient, but the dysfunction everywhere is impossible to ignore.
Bed 1: Vomiting nonstop for the past hour. Maxed out on antiemetics. Dry as a raisin. Sliding straight into metabolic alkalosis. Radio silence from the team.
Bed 9: Discharge-ready three hours ago. Still here. Surgeon’s elbow-deep in a bowel resection and can’t be bothered to write post-op orders. His nurse is stuck making awkward small talk. There’s only so much you can ask about someone’s grandkids before it starts feeling like an interrogation.
Bed 18: Screaming in pain. Heart rate climbing. Already maxed out on oxycodone. The doctor’s tied up with an intubation in Theater 2, so this poor guy’s stuck white-knuckling it.
Bed 23: Junior doc is treating shallow breathing and a bit of residual sedation like every post-op desaturation is automatically a lung collapse.
Except this one’s a wet cough. Coarse as hell, oxygen saturations sliding low, sounding bad enough to make me want to set fire to the phrase, “just needs a bit more oxygen.” I’ve said, “Possible aspiration pneumonitis?” three times now.
No bites. Apparently, we’re all committed to the lie.
And that’s just the tip of the list.
I want to take charge. Fix it. But I’m casual staff. Here to float, not to lead. And floating means watching the ship sink, one avoidable crisis at a time.
When I can’t take it anymore, I tighten the knot of my scrub cap and approach the shift coordinator.
“Hey, have you called for backup?” I ask.
She barely looks up, hands buried in paperwork, three phones ringing. “Manager is in a bed-crisis meeting, and the duty anesthetist is busy.”
“Who’s on duty?”
“Dr. Han.”
Of course. Han.
Han, who somehow manages to be both obnoxiously competent and competently obnoxious. Han, who—as of two weeks ago—swiped my book right out from under me like some kind of literary magpie.
“Tell me. How can I help you?” I ask, trying to sound calm and not like my soul is fraying at the edges.
“Please,” she looks at me, wide-eyed, on the edge of tears. “Just get someone.”
I spin on my heel, shoes squeaking with the kind of drama that only pure, white-hot, bureaucracy-induced rage can summon.
And I find Han. There. Parked by the theater board, surrounded by doctors, nurses, and the theater coordinator while he speaks. He stands there, effortless, polished, and straight-backed. That picture of composure that says, “I’ve got this.”
Except he doesn’t. Because PACU is on fire. Actual fire. (Okay, metaphorical fire. But if one more patient codes, I will start lighting things.)
And what’s Callum Han doing? Holding court.
“Dr. Han, a word?” I keep my tone professional.
Callum turns with maddening slowness. Annoyance flickers in his eyes—there and gone again—replaced by that insufferable, unreadable calm he probably practices in the mirror.
“I’m in the middle of something,” he dismisses, glancing back at the board. “I’ll be down in a bit.”
My hands curl into fists. “This is urgent.”
He sighs long, unhurried, theatrical. As if I’m the most exhausting part of his day.
“Excuse me,” he mutters to his little entourage of clipboard disciples, then follows me into the hallway.
For a second, I think he’s going to snap “What?!”
Instead, he folds all six-foot-something of himself into that maddeningly composed stance, flashes me a brittle, customer-service smile and says, “How can I be of assistance?”
I have to tip my chin up to glare at him, which only worsens my mood.
“I need you to do something about PACU instead of pontificating . . .”
“Pontificating?” he echoes, eyebrows shooting up.
“PACU is bed-blocked.” I cross my arms, keeping my tone firm. “You need to hold off theaters. We can’t take any more post-ops until we’ve discharged patients. Bed 1’s been vomiting non-stop and—”
“Mitchell, every patient has their own consultant,” he cuts in, voice clipped.
“I can’t micromanage other doctors’ care, and I definitely can’t cancel surgeries.
That’s up to the Directors of Anesthetics, Surgery, and Nursing.
” He ticks them off on his fingers with the cadence of someone explaining road-safety to a distracted five-year-old.
“Well, none of them are here. But you are.”
“There’s a chain of command—”
“I don’t give a flying fu—” I clamp my mouth shut so fast my teeth click, forcing myself to inhale. One. Two. Three. I fix him with a glare. “Dr. Han, I don’t care about the chain of command. I care about patients.”
He studies my face, something shifting behind that perfectly smooth expression, as if he’s actually seeing me for the first time. Like, maybe I’m not being dramatic. Maybe PACU is in flames.
“Alright,” he says, steady. “I’ll handle it. Let’s go.”
Relief hits me so hard, I feel the knot between my shoulder blades loosening.
We head to PACU, and I shepherd Callum straight into the madness, parading out each disaster like I’m giving him a guided tour of the apocalypse.
Callum doesn’t hesitate.
Bed 1: “Her pressure’s trending down. At this point, the vomiting’s going to become a volume issue.” His voice sharpens, fast and surgical. “Bolus a liter of Hartmann’s. IV droperidol for the nausea. Got it?”
“Yes, doctor.” The nurse moves without hesitation.
Bed 9: Callum barely glances up from the chart before a voice cuts through the room.
“I’ve been waiting hours for some damn paperwork! I just want to go home!”
He doesn’t flinch. Just grabs his phone, dials Theater 5.
“Tell the surgeon I needed post-op orders yesterday,” he says.
Pause. “Yes, I know he’s mid-hemicolectomy.
He should’ve completed his charting before cutting into someone else.
” Another pause. “Fix it. Now.” His tone stays level.
Calm. Lethal. “And while you’re at it? Let him know: no post-op orders, no transfer.
In fact, disseminate that to all theaters. Not negotiable.”
He hangs up and turns back to the patient with a casual smile, “Sorted, mate. You’ll be out of here soon.”
The patient grumbles but visibly deflates.
Callum shuts the chart with the kind of finality that says thou shalt not screw with PACU again.
Bed 18: The patient’s drenched in sweat, writhing. Heart rate sky-high.
“Hit him with ketamine,” Callum says, already scribbling. “Follow with morphine protocol. We need to shut down the wind-up phenomenon.”
Bed 23: Callum is halfway through another review when a wet, horrible cough cuts across the bay, followed by the monitor alarming over the patient’s oxygen level.
He looks up, clocks the frothy secretions in the suction canister, and is moving before anyone else seems to understand the problem. Three long strides, stethoscope on chest, expression gone flint-hard.
“Did he aspirate on extubation?”
The junior doctors hesitate. “We thought it was just—”
“This should’ve been picked up earlier,” Callum cuts in, voice clipped. “Switch to high-flow oxygen. Order a chest x-ray STAT. ICU review if no improvement in thirty-minutes.”
They nod, chastised.
He drags a hand down his face and mutters, “Unbelievable.”
Then, finally, he glances at me. His mouth quirks, eyes gleaming.
“Next time I’m pontificating,” he says, “I’ll include a crash course on aspiration pneumonitis.”
I arch a brow, biting back a smile. “Might save you the headache next time.”
Callum hums. “How’d you pick it up so fast?”
“Experience,” I say, shrugging like I didn’t just casually out-diagnose a small cluster of junior doctors.
Callum narrows his eyes—sharp, annoyingly perceptive and observant, which likely means he’s clocking something. And for one horrible second, my brain goes into full DEFCON panic mode as I brace for follow-up questions.
He doesn’t.
Thank fuck. Because there is no way I’m unpacking the med school dropout story today. Or ever.
Finally, I exhale, not realizing I’ve been holding my breath as I watch him move through the next patient with infuriating ease.
This is the Callum Han I’ve heard about. The one who steps into chaos and bends it to his will. The hotshot anesthetist primed as the youngest Director in Sydney before he detoured to Townsville. The one who sees problems before they’re problems and solves them before anyone else has caught up.
He moves through PACU like he’s playing chess and everyone else is still learning checkers. Eight elective surgeries—canceled. Nurses—redirected to plug the worst of the staffing holes.
Just swift, clean decisions.
And the worst part? It’s kind of . . . impressive.
Okay. Really impressive.
Callum strides past me, his movements as controlled and precise as the rest of him. He’s still frustrating. Still arrogant. Still the human embodiment of a smug podcast. But fuck, he’s good.
“Not bad, Hotshot,” I mutter.
He slows, just enough to catch the comment, a hint of amusement sparking in his eyes. “Told you I’d handle it, Goblin Queen.”
“Next time, maybe handle it before I have to play your drill sergeant.”
He turns just enough to flash me a grin so cocky it borders on charming.
And I hate that I register it. That somewhere, deep in my traitorous lizard brain, there’s an infinitesimal part of me that thinks, oh, that’s dangerous.
“Next time,” he says smoothly, “I’ll let you pretend you don’t secretly love bossing me around.”
I scoff, but my lips betray me with the faintest twitch. Because for all his doctor-knows-best posturing and spreadsheet-for-a-soul energy, Callum Han showed up. Fixed what needed fixing. No excuses. Just action.
I still don’t like Callum Han. But I can admit that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong about him.
“Wasn’t that much fun.” I want to say it flat, sharp, dismissively. But somehow, when it leaves my mouth, it comes out . . . softer.
“Whatever you say, Mitchell,” Callum chuckles. “Whatever you say.”