The Queen of Hearts(9)
“He can’t find Bertie.”
“Yes, I see,” said Dr. X. “Well, let me help you out a bit.” He disengaged my neck from the elderly gentleman’s death grip and gently led him down the hall to an empty nurses’ station, handing him a pack of crackers and a small generic lime soda before tucking him into a swivel chair. “There you are, sir,” said Dr. X, extending his hand for a shake. He leaned in as the man said something, and laughed in delight.
“What was that about?” I asked as Dr. X returned.
“Can’t tell you,” he replied, smirking. “Male-bonding thing.”
“Who’s Bertie?” I asked.
Dr. X frowned. “Bertie was his wife,” he said. He slowed and glanced at me, his attention apparently caught by the photo on my hospital-issued badge, which featured a goofy image of me smiling in midblink. Deftly, I turned the badge around.
Everyone—nurses, patients, hospital administrators—called him Dr. X. I wasn’t sure if this was because he was mysterious, or if it was part of his unpronounceable name, or possibly a reference to the TV show X-Files. He had a reputation around the hospital for being a man’s man: profane, cocky, decisive; but I decided I liked him. Just as you’d expect from a surgeon, he had authoritative hands and arms. And he was tall; he peered down at me now, trying to remind himself of the embroidered last name on my white coat.
“Sadie . . . Fletcher.” He grinned. “Well, not much of a chance for us to chat today, so I’m glad we’ve got a little unexpected free time. Welcome to trauma call.”
I smiled, running my fingers through my hair, which had responded to its release from the ER cap by springing out in all directions in a belligerent pale brown explosion. “Thanks for letting me do the chest tube.”
“My pleasure, Sadie,” he said.
Again, I considered correcting him on my name. But his pager chirped, and he glanced at it with a slight grimace. “I think you’re going to be more useful than our intern this month, actually,” he said, “not that there’s a big hurdle there. Clancy is a pestilential twit. You’re a better surgeon than him already”—his grin returned—“and you’re definitely better looking.”
Hmm. Although scrubs seem designed to render the wearer as rectangular as possible, I knew that my figure still came across as feminine. I was lucky: I was curvy but slender, even though I ate like a starving carnivorous beast.
Dr. X took a step toward me. He had dark blond eyebrows that reminded me of Jack Nicholson or the Grinch, perching with attractive malevolence above a face with deep linear dimples. “Let’s grab a coffee and get acquainted,” he offered. “The chance of sleeping is minimal. Trust me.”
I was mildly surprised. Was this normal, or was this some kind of ambiguous flirtation? I mean, who wants to get acquainted in the middle of the night? Like every other industry, the hospital was awash in sexual harassment prohibitions crafted by committees who might look askance at a chief resident—who wielded considerable power in the training program—hitting on a lowly medical student. And we barely knew each other; how presumptuous of him to assume that I wouldn’t be offended, whether it was, um, true or not.
Before I could answer, my pager went off. It had been only one day, but already I was beginning to loathe this device. Dr. X’s pager blared too: something awry in the ICU. He’d been on the verge of saying something else, but now he bowed to the inevitable and stopped midword to silence the beeping at his hip. He brushed his hair back with his thumb and said, “Well, damn, Sadie.”
—
The Trauma Intensive Care Unit was laid out in a rectangle, with a workstation full of nurses in the middle and robust orange walls probably deemed invigorating by some institutional decorator. Invigoration was sorely needed in here. The patients were, to a man, all unconscious. They lay, misshapen and inflated by edema, some swollen to three or four times their usual size from resuscitation fluid and overtaxed kidneys, hooked to ventilators and infusions. The current composition of my team’s patients tilted toward the young: there were two teenage boys, both of whom were unbelted car crash victims with brain injuries; one drug-addled fool who had blundered onto an interstate; a fireworks-gone-wrong case; a guy in his thirties who had sawed down an oak tree, which promptly crushed him; and my guy, Silver. Looking at his huge foamy hospital bed, I struggled to suppress an irrational, selfish burst of envy: yes, Silver was shattered and comatose, but at least he was resting on something soft.
Across the room, I could see Emma, her pale blond hair gleaming with nuclear intensity under the fluorescent lights of the TICU, filling in her chief on the status of Team B’s patients. I returned my attention to the bed closest to us, which held the ill-fated lumberjack. This guy had more tubes than the London Underground. There were tubes in his bladder, his groin, his chest, his neck, his radial artery, his nose, his abdomen, and even one ghastly line going straight into his brain. There was a breathing tube in his trachea, which was connected to a scary bedside ventilator that had as many dials as a cockpit in a DC-10. I stared in horror.
“What’s up?” Dr. X said to the charge nurse, a fit woman named Val. She adjusted a delicate pair of glasses on her nose and began spewing numbers on Lumberjack, none of which I understood. Dr. X nodded. “Book the OR,” he said.
Before she could reply, Dr. X’s gaze sharpened. Across the long room, a cluster of nurses surrounded Silver’s bed, their raised voices competing with the jarring sounds of alarms. I followed Dr. X, edging my way into a space at the middle of the bed, uncertain of the cause of the commotion. I looked at the monitor: Silver’s heart rate was thirty-two.