Chapter 8: E.R blues and woes

"The first 24 hours after surgery are critical. Every breath you take, every fluid you make, is meticulously reported and analyzed. Celebrated or mourned. But what about the next 24 hours? What happens with that first day turns to two and weeks turn into months? What happens when the immediate danger has passed, when the machines are disconnected and the teams of doctors and nurses are gone? Surgery is when you get saved, but post-op, after surgery, is when you heal. But, what if you don't?"

Dr. Meredith Gray - Season 7 episode 10

Time holds no meaning when you are leaning over an open chest surgery unclogging veins of a dying heart. Tweezers, tubes, scalpels and scissors all being passed from one hand to the other, cotton and rags drying blood and flood coming out of here and there, while a team works in practiced harmony softly asking for this or that tool, nurses taking samples for analysis or changing meds in the hanging IVs bags.

It's a mess.

A beautiful mess.

Jimmy felt in a daze as he was pushed into the doctor's lounge, washed and examined by an intern and found nothing worse than a scratch. As more trauma victims arrived, the intern grabbed clean scrubs from one of the several available in a shelf and ordered Jimmy to dress up and go back to the fight.

Once clean, Jimmy simply went to the first nurse who was passing by and asked what help she needed. She pointed a doctor, who in turn grabbed Jimmy and ordered him to wash up, buckle up and enter O.R.

As said before, time lost meaning after that.

After the heart surgery, there were broken bones, lacerated skin, sutures that needed to be applied and medicines that needed to be prescribed, filed and administered. All that came like a rush with the uncountable hours of Med School, so Jimmy surprisingly adapted and felt his body blindly obeying orders preprogrammed in his motor memory.

He soothed suffering patients and told funny stories to a little girl who was crying brokenheartedly as her mother had her broken leg and hip fixed. He got called to help with a little boy whose father was in surgery, and gently sutured his cuts while making faces and reciting fairytales.

No good deed shall remain unpunished, much less unnoticed. Despite the buzz, the doctors and the nurses of the St. Louis University Hospital were aware of this newcomer, and gave him the tools and space necessary to work but watched like a hawk his bedside manners and his care with the patients. More than one intern or resident made a move to go talk to him, but they were frozen on the spot when Gloria suddenly appeared out of nowhere and glared at them, ordering them to step back and let the boy do his job. Her vassals, as good servants, bowed to her order and went back to work, stealing curious glances at the doctor who was now teaching a terrified mother how to help her toddler if she suspected he was choking on something.

Satisfied that her doctors had scurried away as the scared little rats they were, Gloria turned and went to the door of the E.R. triage room, watching with calculating eyes as the young doctor gently slapped the baby's back and ran soothing hands on it, all the while talking to the mother in a simple way that her frazzled and terrified mind could understand.

Her years as physician had molded her character and given her an accurate sense to perceive those who had chosen medicine just for the glory and the money the profession sometimes brought to people, and those who had chosen medicine out of a genuine desire to help and heal people, whatever might be the ailing the person might be suffering.

The boy – Gloria couldn't consider him a man, he's too fresh faced for it – held his own before his colleagues and patients. He had a considerable knowledge of the ailing and spouted some interesting and obscure info during Mark's surgery, who rushed to ask Gloria who was the new guy and could he have him assigned permanently to his O.R team. But what caught Gloria's attention was his sincere smile and tender care with his patients, how even when he was sewing the most awful gashes with the patient awake he would keep his attention focused on the person, forcing him to talk, asking about his life, giving sports scores or saying some obnoxious story about a Duck in a pond in Scotland somewhere.

The most remarkable thing was that the patients reacted positively to his sincere face and his genuine interest in their lives. Somehow they sensed that he wasn't there just doing a job, but he was interested in them as human beings, their likes and dislikes, and they reacted positively to it. Children absolutely adored him and the older woman nodded at his stories, while the younger just leaned at him as he treated them not as incompetent for committing a mistake that brought their child to the E.R., but as humans who had failed. Everyone fails sometimes.

Gloria narrowed her eyes and walked away, the new boy's full name written in a piece of paper. She entered her office and sat down, dialing an old friend from Georgetown Med School in DC, school the boy, when enquired, told a nurse he had graduated recently. He owed her a favor, and she was willing to collect it in order to do some digging on a freshly graduated student named Dr. James Palmer.