My mind was still reeling from the fact that my life had completely turned upside down, but I pushed the thoughts to the recesses of my mind.
That ability is crucial in a hospital.
I had a bus full of dying children to think about. I needed to be confident in the abilities of Dr. Vivian Scritt.
I didn’t know whether that confidence came from the outside world, or if I generated it myself and put out for all to see. I was pretty sure that both opposing ideas were true at the same time, and that simply believing made the idea real enough to have faith in it.
My head spun. I shouted at the surgical team.
“We don’t have enough operating rooms in the pediatric surgical unit, these kids don’t have enough doctors for everyone to get a surgeon, and I don’t have enough patience to put up with any donkey shit. I’m Dr. Scritt, and you work for me now. Dr. Matthews, how many surgeons do we have ready to go?”
His head jerked to attention like it was caught on a fishing line, and I felt a surge of strength at the fear I could feel radiating from him. “Nine, uh, and ten if you take a patient yourself, Ms. – uh, Dr. Scritt.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve got four nurses scrambling to make calls, but it’s not looking good. Most of the streets are completely flooded, and everyone who’s attempted to drive here has gotten stranded. We tried contacting everyone we can – but the storm knocked the landline phones out, and it’s crippling our cell reception. We’re admittedly caught off-guard, it’s really a freak storm for August.”
“Well I don’t–” I stopped short. “What’s the date?” I whispered to him.
“It’s the Thursday – I mean, August 25th.”
Vertigo hit me so hard that it felt like my asshole was turning inside out. “Excuse me.”
I dashed out of the room and headed down the hallway. Before I could make it back into my own office, I dove into a familiar janitor’s closet.
I wanted to cry, but I was shaking too much. I looked down at my watch.
My childhood home was going to burn down in an hour.
My brother was still alive.
Thoughts flitted independently across my brain like fifteen border collies on crack. They need me now. Timmy needs me now. The landlines are out. I’m needed in surgery. Someone is going to die. It is going to be my fault.
You have five seconds to keep shaking and feeling sorry for yourself before you go out the door and decide whose life changes forever.
I didn’t think I could do it.
Then I opened the door and walked outside.
“Dr. Matthews. It seems we’re at least two surgeons short. How can you help me out?”
He looked at me steadily, but still with that hint of fear.
I fed on it.
“Well, it’s not ideal, but I think that we’ll have to put some… interns on solo procedures.” He winced.
My stomach turned to clay. “Who do you have in mind?”
“Doctors uh, Yangston and Branying have been doing very well.”
I closed my eyes. “Who else do you have?”
He wouldn’t speak until I looked straight at him. “Dr. Scritt, I don’t know how they do things where – where you come from, but it’s not customary for first-year interns to-”
“Desperate, shitty times call for desperate, shitty measures, doctor. Who else do you have?”
His face grew ashen. “No one that I could, in good conscience, trust with the life of a child.”
I was about to cry. There was no stopping it.
Then the doors burst open, and everything changed.
“Game time.” Orders fired from my mouth before thought could form.
Everyone followed what I told them to do.
“Get me a phone!” I shouted to one nurse.
I looked down seconds later to find that I had been given one.
“Doctor Scritt, there are three more patients awaiting an O. R.!”
I grabbed Dr. Matthews’s arm. “What are the simplest procedures that these kids need right now?”
He swallowed. “It looks like a deep leg laceration on a male, ten years old, and an abdominal lacerations on a female, also ten, no signs of damage to any major organs.”
“I’m going to take one of those patients, pair Tweedledee and Tweedledum with the other and keep them close enough to-”
“Doctor Scritt! Three other children are in cardiac arrest, are you really going to-”
“I need to make a phone call!”
“You’re needed in surgery!”
“I’m the fucking chief of medicine!”
“Because you’re the one who’s supposed to make the hardest decisions!”
I froze.
The tears were waiting, but there simply wasn’t time to cry.
It’s amazing what happens to ‘impossible’ when there just isn’t space for it.
“Get Yangston and Branying on the easy cases,” I commanded, “and prep a third patient for me in an operating room with them! I want an eye on as many surgeries as possible!” I turned around to face a nurse at the desk, then scribbled a phone number on a sheet of paper. “Call this house, tell them to get everyone out to safety!”
She physically drew back in fear. “All of our landlines are down, Doctor.”
“Well since I’m fresh out of carrier pigeons, use a cell phone!”
She fought back tears. God damn, it was annoying me. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I gave you mine. I’m sorry.”
My eyes bulged. “Well? Does no one else at the desk have one? What is this, 2006?”
She winced. “Not yet. I’m sorry.”
Oh, yeah.
Not wanting to look stupid, I stared her down like this was her fault.
Then I raced into surgery.
*
“Does anyone have a cell phone that gets reception?” I snapped at Dr. Matthews as we both ran down the hall.
“No,” he gasped as he fell behind me. “It looks like the storm has completely cut off all cell reception.”
*
I didn’t have time to ponder whether a satellite phone existent anywhere in this God-forsaken hospital. I was stitching up some kid’s abdomen, staring at my watch and glancing across the O. R. at Branying and Yangston.
Compartmentalize.
“I’m finished here. Nurse, take this kid to recovery, I have to make a phone-”
“Patient’s coding!” The voice came from the far end of the room. Surprisingly, it was neither Branying nor Yangston, but a young resident that I knew would not endure into my original timeline.
I raced across the O. R. to find that the doctor was frozen in place. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled through his surgical mask, “I saw something in the closet… my mind isn’t-”
“Able to realize that you left forceps inside of the patient’s arm?” I shouted.
When he didn’t move, I dove in.
Though it had been difficult at the time, I’d faced the same hospital ghosts this man couldn’t handle. Nothing in front of him was impossible, but he had chosen to believe that as an excuse to himself.
This is why I have no patience with people.
But even when she had stabilized, the patient’s temperature was abnormally high. I also noticed how swollen her abdomen appeared.
This is why I’m such a good doctor.
Seconds later, I was doing a damn good job of removing the girl’s burst appendix, able to glance up at Branying and Yangston but unable to do anything to help them.
“Those numbers are fine for an adult. Is this your first time working on a child?” a nurse snapped at Yangston. “We performed the hemogram test, did you even check the results-”
Yangston’s face turned bright red against the white surgical mask. “You need to get the hell out of my O. R., Nurse-”
“Your patient’s coding!”
“NOW.”
Fuck. It was happening.
My own patient’s appendix was in a bad state, but I had nearly finished.
“What – what happened?” Branying’s panicked voice came from across the room.
The scalpel shook in my hands. I could see the crash cart from the corner of my eye, recognizing an ID number of 8251913 as I knew I would.
“You cut his splenic artery, Doctor,” a nurse responded flatly.
“I’m sorry!” Branying wailed. “My hands were shaking, I’m so sorry-”
“I hate church,” I whined, flopping myself onto the couch. “How do we even know that God is real?”
My father ran his fingers through his thinning hair. His nails were dirty. They were always dirty. “Going to church makes your pregnant mother stop nagging me for a whole hour each week, and that’s all the proof of the divine I need,” he sighed as he plopped on the couch next to me.
I didn’t understand what he meant, so I kept the scowl etched deeply into my face. I flinched when he tried to hug me.
Daddy cleared his throat. “I didn’t go to college like your mom did, so I never learned the best ways to convince people that they’re wrong.” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know if adults understand church any more than six-year-olds like you do, Ellie, but many adults are old enough and wise enough to know when we should stop thinking and just go along with things.”
I kept my head turned away to show that he wasn’t winning me over.
I could hear him scratching his scalp in frustration.
“Okay,” he continued, exasperated. “I’ll give you my best answer about church, and then you have to put your shoes on and just go out the door with me, because that’s the best you’re getting. Do you understand?”
I huffed.
“I don’t – it’s impossible for me to give a reason why we should believe in God, Ellie. It seems like so many things in life are unfair. But here’s the thing.” He put a great arm around me and pulled me close. “You and I are here, aren’t we? Well, what guarantee did we have of that? Where was the proof that my spirit and your spirit would be together, or even exist at all? Yet it happened, somehow. God believed in us before we *were us, and two souls existed where there was nothing at all before. So I don’t think it’s about us believing in God, not at first. God believed in us, and we’re responding to that with everything in our lives.”*
I didn’t understand his reasoning, but I felt his vulnerability, and I relaxed into his hug.
“Your mom says that every action has a reaction. But I think it’s backward, at least with church stuff. Every reaction leads to an action. Did you know there’s a prayer about it?”
I shook my head, pigtails bouncing.
“The prayer says that ‘in giving, we receive; in pardoning, we are pardoned; and in dying, we are born.’”
I finally turned around to look at him. “How can we be born by dying? Isn’t dying the end of all things?”
His face moved around in funny ways that I did not understand. “I don’t think dying is the end. Did you know that every single person you’ve ever met is changed because of you? And everyone they meet is different because of them. The entire world exists in just this way, at this moment, because of everyone who ever lived and died. Remember what I told you about the trees in west Texas? You don’t stop affecting people after death, Ellie.”
I squirmed. “So all dead people are ghosts that stay with us for the rest of our lives?”
“My little Ellie-bean, I don’t see any other explanation.”
I stared up at him with the kind of awe that only a child can have for their parent. “So who taught us to talk backwards to God? Where did that prayer come from?”
He furrowed his eyebrows and scratched his chin. “I believe, Ellie, that it’s called the ‘Prayer of St. Francis.’”
I could feel my mind breaking when my patient started coding. She was the only one that Time hadn’t promised to take from me, and apparently that hope existed just to string me along.
I breathed deeply, stopped trying to understand Time itself, and focused on what was causing this girl’s heart to fail.
She was losing more blood than made sense for an appendectomy. What was wrong?
The forceps. The damn resident must have damaged her arm during his panicked procedure, and now she was hemorrhaging, possibly from her brachial artery.
She was bleeding from two places at once, and it would take a miracle to manage both issues at the same time.
Since I didn’t believe in miracles, though, I’d have to rely on myself.
And I’m a damn good doctor.
I was stitching her up just in time to settle back into the outside world.
Dr. Yangston was staring in frozen shock at the dead child below him, while a nurse held Dr. Branying steady as he sobbed over his own failure.
Below me, the girl’s heart monitor beat steadily.
*
“You have to give yourself room for forgiveness, Dr. Branying. Tell me that you hear me!”
He rolled his red-rimmed eyes all over the hallway, looking at everything but me.
“Tell me that you hear me! It’s a simple request mastered by children who have yet to figure out the fine art of toilet usage. Dr. Branying!”
He slowly focused on me. “I think I need to go be alone,” he muttered distractedly.
I knew how this story ended. “I know that you’re in a bad place, but I cannot monitor you every second. You need to take responsibility for self-care first, Dr. Branying. You need to avoid being alone for the next day!”
He finally found my eyes. “You’re right, Dr. Scritt. I’m responsible for myself. It’s all on me. All of it.” He deflated. “You can’t hold me back forever. Please let me go.”
I wanted to shake him, scream at him, tell him that I knew what he was about to do.
Most of all, I wanted to smack the shit out of him.
But he was right.
I couldn’t hold him back forever.
I checked his pockets for illicit pills, but found none.
What more could I do?
I had a phone call to make.
“Dr. Branying, I want you to remember something,” I commanded with a note of finality.
He looked at me forlornly.
“If you insist on being so damn melancholy over the things you can’t change, then step up and take responsibility for the things that you can.”
Then I turned and ran.
I pulled out the cell phone and attempted to dial while moving at top speed.
The call went through.
And no one picked up.
“You’ve reached the Afelis home, but we’re gone-”
I screeched to a halt in front of a familiar-looking janitor emerging from a well-used closet. He held up a gentle hand with dirty fingernails, indicating that I needed to stop.
I obeyed.
He smiled sadly. “If you’d run to Huntington Bank across the street, you could have used their phone in time.” He sighed. “But I’m sorry, it’s too late. You house has burned to the ground.”
Submitted December 03, 2019 at 03:24PM by ByfelsDisciple https://ift.tt/2OIGJDW
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