"Sir! Sir! Stay with me." The Med-Tech seemingly popped out of nowhere to grab Donald's arm, keeping him upright.
"What's wrong with me?" Donald was having trouble focusing, feeling unsteady on his feet as waves of vertigo threatened to send him to his knees.
"Here, if you'll sit here, we'll get you checked out." The young Tech eased him onto a bed then turned - shouting over the din, "Nurse! Nurse to Triage!"
Abruptly, a light shone in Donald's eyes, causing him to squint against the brightness. Dizziness washed over him, making him feel disconnected from his limbs. He looked up, confused as to why the bright white ceiling above him kept flashing to orange. Seconds later the blackness overtook him.
The Med-Tech shouted in earnest now, his lack of experience manifesting as a rising panic.
A bronze skinned nurse in scrubs that were already liberally stained with blood came running into the room just as the Med-Tech was about to lose it. She elbowed the panicking man aside, automatically grabbing for Donald's wrist. The age-old gesture of checking for a patient's pulse seemed almost anachronistic when surrounded by the best technology that modern medicine had to offer.
"They've got to stop sending us newbies," she muttered under her breath.
"Ma'am...he was fine and then he..." The Med-Tech's stuttering explanation was silenced by a glare from the woman.
"Pull yourself together," still glaring, she dropped her eyes to the name tag on his scrub top, "Mr. Asaya." Keeping him pinned under her gaze for what seemed like an eternity, but in reality was just a few seconds, she watched him make an effort to calm down. "What I need you to do Mr. Asasya, is pull yourself together, we need blood transfusions started now. On everyone."
Asaya, the Med-Tech looked around the bay at the incapacitated Marines, eyes wide with disbelief, "Transfusions? On…on everyone? Why?"
The nurse ignored him, instead frowning at something on the digital chart she was holding. She continued as if he had not spoken, "We're low on synthetic O Neg, so call the lab and then get them moving. Put a call out to the crew for blood donations and keep them stable." She paused a moment, studying the tech to see if any of her instructions had made it through, or if he was still in shock. "I'll send help and I've ordered a round of biologics for them." She continued, hoping the routine orders would be enough to break him out of his fog.
The Med-Tech knit his brows, "Biologics? Why?"
Folding her arms, she glared at the now cowering tech, she was exasperated at the lack of training they were giving these guys in the race to get them to the frontlines. Time was of the essence, so she took pity and just explained, rather than drilling him on the proper treatment for the symptoms he was seeing. "Radiation exposure, possibly some other contamination that is undetermined."
The tech looked down at an unconscious Donald, "But the new pills..."
Gruffly, out of patience, the nurse responded, "Didn't work apparently." She stared him down, "Follow the procedures outlined on their chart. The nurse opened a drawer nearby, pulling out two small boxes. She opened one, pulling out the thin metal rings, motioning for Asaya to come closer. "Give me your hand."
Asaya complied and she slid the metal bands on his fingers watching them shrink to fit. Then she clipped the small screen to the outside pocket of his scrub shirt. "This is a radiation dosimeter, if it beeps and turns red, get someone in here to replace you, she paused as he nodded robotically, "and if anything changes," she paused for emphasis, "anything, you get me or someone else immediately."
The young man nodded eagerly, "Roger that."
She eyed him for a moment longer as he dutifully started checking vitals, making small adjustments to help keep them comfortable. She nodded to herself and then pushed through the doors into the main surgical theatre on the spaceship. Going from the quiet of the triage bay to the cacophony of alarms and shouts that had taken over the medical bay used to be a jarring experience for her, but now she barely registered the change. Medicine had come so far, but when it came down to it, doctors still stood at the brink of life and death, doing their best to nurture one and prevent the other.
She ducked into the scrub room, the sudden quiet another jarring change from the chaos of the Med Bay into the sterile silence of the room. She quickly washed up and used her hips to edge open the door back into the din. Alarms were wailing steadily as doctors shouted orders. To an outside observer, it would seem almost random and uncoordinated, but there was an underlying rhythm to it, the voices were measured, edged with urgency, but not panic.
"I'm going to have to open her... get me a lap set NOW... I want blood hung... where is that lap set!" doctors continued shouting orders as they frantically worked on the Marines lying on the slabs.
A striking black woman looked up at the nurse's entrance, zeroing in somehow amid all the chaos, "Ani! I need you here now! Bring a lap set and my suture kit."
The nurse, Ani, hesitated for just a moment at the unusual request. They had more modern tools that had taken the place of regular surgical steel implements, but she trusted Dr Laridan implicitly and opened the drawer on the side where she knew the tools were stowed, pushing down unwelcome memories that surfaced at the sight of them. Tools in hand, Ani expertly dodged the moving bodies as nurses and Med-Techs hurried to comply with their surgeons' orders. Sliding in across from the doctor, Ani looked down, a pang of sorrow and rage shooting through her at and doing her best not to react at the shock of red hair or the fact that she knew the woman on table.
The young nurse had lost count of how many times someone she knew had made their way onto the table, the first few times had been devastating, but now Ani had learned to compartmentalize a bit, saving the fear and anger for the quiet of her bunk, or the din of noisy bars in the space stations on the rare occasions they got shore leave. This time it was hard to push the emotions away, everyone knows Chloe on this ship, the woman with a smile and a friendly word that made you feel like you mattered when she turned those brilliant blue eyes on you. Ani had broken her rule and gotten to know her. Now, her friend was lying on the surgeon's table struggling to survive.
Ani sighed to herself, at least it was Dr. Laridan's table. The woman was a brilliant surgeon. Chloe had a real chance to survive.
The doctor in question raised her voice breaking Ani out of her momentary lapse, speaking to everyone and no one at the same time "Give me suction... why isn't suction working... Come on people we have to get in there."
Ani, grabbed the vacuum tube from the Med-Tech who turned to help another surgeon that was calling for more blood. Ani pressed the button to activate the suction, frowning when nothing happened.
"Come on people, we're losing her, find the bleeder!" Dr. Laridan fixed deep brown eyes on Ani for a second, "Ani where's the suction?"
"I don't know doctor, it isn't working." Ani bent over the console, checking the connections.
"Oh shit! The ventilator stopped!" another young Med-Tech called out, banging the machine that had been breathing for Chloe when it wouldn't start, Laridan paused for a second as shouts went up around them and one by one the machines they relied on to help them save lives started shutting down one by one.
To her credit, Dr. Laridan only hesitated for a second before shouting "Listen UP!" her voice easily drowning out the other voices now that the humming and beeping of the machines was gone. "We trained for this. Forget the machines, focus on what your patients are telling you and let's save some lives people. It's what we do!"
Ani couldn't spare a glance to the table next to them where another fight just as dire was taking place – she forced herself to focus, already feeling within the wound to find the vein that was bleeding, pulling it away to isolate it for Dr Laridan to clamp. The doctor now spoke calmly to her team, the urgency in her voice replaced with a different sense of purpose. She was fighting to not flash back to another time and another place and failed, being brought back to that dilapidated barn she saw in her nightmares still.
Ani and Dr. Laridan had been on one of the first colony worlds that the Gaks had attacked, supply lines were cut off, most of the base destroyed and the small peacekeeping force overwhelmed beyond belief. They operated anywhere they could, in the backs of vehicles, in the woods outside of the colony, even setting up shop a barn at one of the farms their band of refugees had retreated to. It was the first time they lost more people than they saved, Ani had never had to deal with anything like it. They had all lost all of the modern tools that made a doctor's life easy, it had been battlefield amputations and horrors of infection and sickness that had forever left their mark and was why she and Dr Laridan squirreled away extra sets of outdated surgical tools that only needed a skilled hand to wield them.
Ani shook her head, willing the memories away. She had worked on so many patients, the motions were rote by now, allowing her to move quickly and efficiently. She followed Dr. Laridan's sharp commands, working to stabilize, sew and cauterize if necessary, the multitude of wounds the redhead had sustained. The hardest part was trying to stay detached and not think about how such a vibrant life as Chloe's teetered on the edge. Ani spared a glance at the doctor, watching the sweat form on her forehead as she fought to save Chloe's life, carrying on a conversation with her patient in between barked commands to medical team.
"Come on Chloe, I know Ani owes you a few drinks and wants a chance to pay those back…Ani, move the light…gauze…there we go…okay Chloe, we got you, your doing great you hear me? Ani smiled to herself, they were winning the battle. When they worked like this, time always seemed to slow, or ebb and flow only outside of the bubble around the table, so Ani had no sense of how much time passed before Dr. Laridan was stepping away from the table and putting on new gloves. Now that Chloe was stabilized, the doctor gave some quick instructions to the Med-Tech's before moving to the next table, motioning for Ani to follow her.
Ani and the doctor slid in next to young olive-skinned man whose scrubs were liberally coated in blood, making him look more like a butcher than a doctor. He was sweating profusely, cursing under his breath as he worked on the young brunette woman on the table. Dr. Laridan elbowed him gently, putting her hands over his and pressing down into the slim woman's chest cavity, stilling his movements.
"Vijay, it's okay, I got this." The young doctor looked up at her – wiping his brow with his arm and smearing blood over his cap.
"No, I can do it." He started to protest.
"Vijay, you know these machines better than anyone, I can take over here, you go figure out what happened to them." After a moment he nodded with relief. Dr Laridan immediately turned to the Med-Tech standing at the head of the table, rhythmically pumping air into the young woman's lungs. "What do we have here?"
Without hesitation the tech rattled off a litany of statuses. "Lieutenant Mitchell, 27-year-old female, major damage to the left ventricle, left lung and four broken ribs. We were able to repair the left ventricle and part of the damage to the left lung. Still assessing all the damage doctor, we were looking for the other bleeder when suction stopped."
Ani checked the integrity of the sutures and felt the small woman's heart start to flutter. "Doctor! We're losing her!"
Dr. Laridan glanced up at Ani, "Not on our watch."