She had just arrived home when she got the call. Literally, she walked in the door, set down her keys, and was taking off her jacket when the phone rang. "Hello?"
"Hey Sara, this is Brad Bellick. Look, I know you're off work and all, but do you think you could come in? One of the inmates has gotten pretty severely burned, and the nurse thinks you should take a look at him". He sounded pretty casual about it, but what made Sara worry was that he didn't make any sarcastic remarks, or try to tell her that there was really no need. Normally he made it pretty clear that he didn't think that inmates required medical attention.
"Yes, of course. I'll be there right away". She grabbed her keys and rushed out the door. As she left, she reflected on what he had told her. An inmate was burned. How had that even happened? And how badly were they burned for Brad to be willing to call her in? And, for that matter, who was it? He hadn't said which inmate had been burned.
She made it to Fox River in about twenty minutes. Grabbing her ID from the car she hurried in. "Sara!" Katie was there to meet her. "It's pretty bad. And you need to get in there fast because none of us are authorized administer anaesthesia". Katie's face was white.
Anaesthesia? How bad was this? "Ok, get whatever you think we'll need, while I go see how severe it is. Who is it anyway?" Sara's voice was brisk and all business. When she asked who it was, Katie's face, if possible, got even paler.
"It's…it's Scofield". Sara's hear sank. Michael. Of course it was Michael. She'd had to patch him up more times than she could count, and he hadn't been here that long. She didn't know who he had crossed or who kept hurting him, but sooner or later they were going to kill him, and there was nothing she could do about it because he refused to tell her who it was.
Wrestling her emotions under control, she nodded and rushed away from Katie towards the infirmary. If she'd fully had her wits about her she probably would have paused for a moment to brace herself, but she didn't. She opened the door and rushed in…and stopped cold in her tracks.
He was lying on the table they used for operations when needed. They had removed his shirt, so that she could see the burn. It was the worst she had ever seen. The flesh was red and black, completely deadened from whatever it had been exposed to. He was shaking uncontrollably. His eyes were half open, but they were glazed over with pain and she could tell that he wasn't really aware of what was happening around him.
Ignoring the way that her stomach churned every time she looked at his shoulder, she approached the table, pulling on her white coat as she did. While waiting for Katie to get there with the medication, she measured his heart rate and examined the burn. His heart was racing, which was to be expected with a burn this severe. Looking at the burn, she couldn't help but feel a combination of repulsion, sympathy, and rage at whoever had done this to him. She was going to have to remove most of the burned flesh; there was no way that it would heal properly otherwise. Katie was right, in order to do that, he was going to have to be put under anesthesia.
Katie was probably only a minute or two behind her, but it felt like an eternity as Sara examined him, and could see the amount of pain that he was enduring. The procedure itself should be relatively simple, she wasn't going to need to get specialists or surgeons to come in, but it was going to be incredibly painful for him after she was done. When Katie arrived, Sara quickly got to work. She wanted Michael put under as quickly as possible, so that she could get to work right away, and also so that he wouldn't be able to feel it anymore as the prepped him.
As soon as he was under, she quickly got to work, getting all the materials she would need and putting a mask on so that her breath wouldn't infect it more than it already had. It was kind of eerie, sitting there in the middle of the night with him lying on the table and the small light on overhead. She worked quickly and silently, only making sound when asking Katie to hand her something.
It took her a little over an hour to remove all of the blackened flesh. At one point, she pulled away something dark that turned out not to be skin, but a small piece of melted fabric. Almost without thinking about it, she put it in a small container and promptly forgot about it, so focused was she on the task ahead of her. She would worry about what it was later.
Finally, she was done. What was left was an angry red and pink open wound, but a wound that would heal with minimal scarring, as opposed to what it had been an hour before. She applied antibiotics to it and wrapped it in a bandage. For the first time she thought about his tattoo. The part over his shoulder would be ruined now. Sara didn't have any particular feelings towards tattoos in general, but she knew that someone would never go through the amount of time, money, and pain he must have to get it done without it meaning something important. It was a shame that it was going to be incomplete now. But, she reflected, he could always get it redone when he got out, if it was important enough to him.
She looked at her watch. There was still time for her to go home and come back in the morning, but just barely and she would get more sleep if she stayed here. And, if she was completely honest with herself, she wanted to be here so that she could check on him, just to make sure that he was alright. Besides, she had a lot of paperwork to do. There would have to be an incident report filled out about this. Speaking of which…
She'd forgotten about the melted piece of fabric that she'd pulled from Michael's burn, but now she actually took a look at it. Her initial conclusion that it had come from the clothes that he was wearing, but as she looked at it she realized it hadn't come from a prison uniform. It was too dark, and it had melted the way…the way a guard'suniform would.
She turned in horror to look at Michael, who was now peacefully sleeping on his stomach. Had a guard attacked him?