The Queen of Hearts(17)
“Okay, guys.” Dr. X clapped his hands and surveyed the rapidly wilting remains of Team A. “Another day dawns bright for us to rage against the motherfucking Grim Reaper. Let’s go save lives and stamp out disease. Or . . . let’s at least get breakfast. Bring your lists and we’ll divvy this shit up.”
The five of us—Dr. X, Dr. Kalena, Dr. Clancy, Ethan, and me—adjourned to the bustling cafeteria. Graced with floor-to-ceiling windows, the enormous room brightened my mood a little. If I couldn’t be in nature, at least I could see nature. Well, at least I could see a parking lot ringed by a few trees.
We grabbed coffee and sat down in a corner to run the list. This produced a depressing amount of stuff to be done. I inhaled caffeine.
Dr. X assigned me the easiest but most repugnant of these tasks. As soon as we left the cafeteria, I met Emma, who had also been given a checklist for her team’s patients. I considered telling her about the possible flirtation with Dr. X; unlike some of my friends, Emma had a filter and could be sworn to secrecy. But everyone knows evil genies will curse you if you actually state your most embarrassing hopes out loud. I decided to keep this one to myself.
Emma stood against the nurses’ station, her long flaxen hair piled into a loose bun. She wore scrubs, but a hint of gray camisole and her bony clavicle peeked out at the top. The intensity of trauma surgery suited Emma, although she tended to be baffled by the patients themselves since so many of them had been injured because of their insistence on stupid behavior. “So this guy”—she motioned to one of the TICU beds behind us—“you remember what he did? He put a lit firecracker in his mouth.”
“Remind me why?”
Emma riffled through the chart. “His friend said he was imitating Bugs Bunny.”
Across the room, one of the respiratory techs—a red-faced, portly guy in his late twenties—leered in our direction. I frowned at him, and he blew me an exaggerated kiss. I made my frown meaner, but it didn’t work: he pantomimed a dagger to the heart and cartwheeled dramatically out of sight behind the nurses’ desk. I grinned in spite of myself.
“Well, I guess I’d better go drain some pus out of this guy’s face,” Emma announced with inappropriate relish.
“Right.” I steeled myself. “I guess I gotta remove some scabbed-up sutures.”
—
By afternoon, I was struggling through chin-deep murky water. I had gotten up at four o’clock in the morning—yesterday, not today—and had maybe an hour or two of sleep in the thirty-six hours since I’d been at the hospital. I began to sink into helpless micro-sleeps whenever I stopped moving. The rest of the team seemed more functional than I thought they should be, especially considering they’d been doing this every third day for years.
Dr. X was reviewing discharge instructions. “Return to the hospital for fever, bloody urine, severe pain, blah, blah, all the usual things; give him a scrip for some Vicodin for a couple days, tell him no sex for six weeks, and have him come back to the clinic in a week.”
“Um, I can’t actually write prescriptions,” I reminded him.
“I’ll cosign it. Do you know how to write it?”
I nodded. “Yes. Mostly. Well, sort of.” I hesitated. “Okay, not really.”
“Right, Zadie, I’ll show you, then.”
I had a quick little flush of pleasure that he’d noticed my actual name.
“Here we go.” X handed me a prescription pad. Behind him, I noticed our coffeepot had a giant hole scorched in it. A resultant flood of foul coffee oozed across the counter and down to the cabinets below. So much for recaffeinating.
Clancy blearily raised his head. “Does anyone know when Hollister is showing up?”
With controlled emotion, Dr. Kalena said, “He’s in a BMI 45 horrendoplasty over at Norton Hospital. His case got bumped, so he’s just starting.”
The rest of the team responded with uncontrolled emotion, namely dejection. Dr. Hollister was a general surgeon who agreed to act as trauma attending for a brief stint each year, but his primary concern involved patients at another hospital. Depending on what kind of case he was beginning, it could be hours before he arrived, and therefore, hours before we could leave. Tentatively I asked, “What’s a BMI 45 horrendoplasty?”
Allison regarded me kindly. “He’s starting a very long case on a very large patient,” she said.
Miserable groaning from Clancy, on the couch. Mentally, I joined in, wondering if I could physically make it another couple hours.
“Okay, I’m going to page Ken and get the B Team over here for sign-outs so we can get that out of the way,” Dr. X decided. “Then everybody can hit the deck until Hollister shows.”
We met up with Team B as instructed and we filled them in on our new patients, in case intervention was needed during the night. Suddenly, I was incapable of speech. Knowing I had to return to the hospital in less than seven hours, I staggered over to the couch, wedging in between Clancy and Ethan. My vision blurred.
Someone shook me gently. I blinked and noticed Dr. X’s face looming next to mine, wearing an indulgent smile. “Wake up, ray of sunshine,” he said. “He’s here.” I looked at my watch.
It was nine p.m.
—
Limping out to the parking lot an hour later, I began to question my sanity. I drove a piece-of-crap Dodge Colt that might or might not survive the night, let alone another two years until I began to earn any money at all, and here I was, leaving the hospital at ten o’clock after a marathon forty-two hours since I’d last been home. And I had to return before five a.m. How had I become such a masochist?