DISCLAIMER: If you really care to read it, just click the back button on
your browser and look at chapter 1. Enjoy the story! Remember to leave
your comments in the form of REVIEWS!!!
*****************************************
SAVING GRACE- CHAPTER 2
*****************************************
The sirens screamed and tires screeched as the ambulance pulled into the Ambulance bay. Carter ran with Neela and Abby as the ambulance doors opened. Carter ran over to help unload the gurney. Doris helped to push the gurney out of the ambulance.
"We've got a kid, around five years old, hit by a car. Unconscious at the scene, hasn't come around yet. Looks like she has a broken fib, internal injuries to be determined. Probable head trauma." They had the gurney and wheeled it into the ER. The child was a girl, and she was completely unconscious. Carter ran next to the gurney as they entered the ER and headed for Trauma 1.
"...BP's 80/60, and I barely have a pulse," Abby was rattling off the girl's vitals. They arrived in the trauma room.
"Okay, let's get a CBC, three units of blood, type and cross, dip of urine, CTs of the head and abdomen, start an IV saline drip, and watch her vitals closely," Carter instructed. His requests were carried out immediately, everyone bustling about, a blur of pale yellow as they all wore those plastic smocks over their scrubs. Carter looked at the girl. She was so small, with blond hair that was currently matted with dried blood from her head injury. That was about all that he could tell about her, though, at the moment. A sudden thought crossed his mind. "I'm gonna go look for the parents."
Carter ripped off his own yellow smock, and threw it in the biohazard trash can before he left the room. He almost ran to chairs. There, he found only three people.
"Are any of you here to see a little girl? She was injured in a car accident. No one?" Carter ran back to the trauma room. "Hey, Neela, what did you do with her personals?" Without looking up from the IV she was starting, she called back to him.
"Under the counter over to your right." Sure enough, Carter found the plastic bag of the girl's clothing. He rummaged through it, looking for any information on who the girl was, where she had come from. He needed a name. He found nothing among her clothes. Carter groaned in frustration.
"Dr. Carter, her lab results are back," Malucci handed him the envelope. Carter looked through it all quickly.
"Looks like she has a splenic fracture...that's gonna need surgery...she has fractured her skull, there is a bit of brain swelling, cranial bleeding is minimal. her left leg is badly broken at the tibia...that can be easily handled. There's a nasty gash on her forehead, and some road burn on her side. Thanks," He said to Malucci, as he began to give treatment instructions. In the midst of the chaos, Jerry burst into the room.
"Dr. Carter, the police are here. Want to speak to you about the Jane Doe that you've just brought in."
"Okay, I'll be there in a second." Carter left the trauma room where the other nurses were working to stabilize the victim. He met two cops at chairs: One was rather tall, bald, looked about 50; the other was of average build, with a goatee and darker hair. They introduced themselves as officers James and Zimmer, and Carter introduced himself as well. He noticed that Zimmer carried a small, purple knapsack in his hands.
"Officers, you wanted to see me?" Both of the men stood to talk to him.
"Yes, thank you for taking her, doctor," Officer James told him, running his hand behind his neck anxiously. "How is she doing?"
"She is stabilized. She is incredibly lucky that she didn't sustain more serious injuries."
"What does she have, doc?" Zimmer asked him.
"She has a skull fracture, but cranial bleeding and swelling of the brain are minimal. Her spleen has been fractured as well, but internal bleeding hasn't been too bad, either. We are giving her blood for those things. She also has a few nasty cuts on her body, bruising, and road burn, in addition to a badly broken left leg." The officers seemed shocked about the extent of the girl's injuries. "It could have been much worse." Carter quickly reassured them. Zimmer nodded, then shook his head quickly, as if coming out of a daze.
"Has her family come around?" James asked. Carter shook his head.
"No, nobody's showed up yet, as far as I know. Do have a name yet?"
"No, we are hoping that she will wake up and tell us relatively soon. She's' just a Jane Doe right now," James told him.
"We found this at the scene, though," said Zimmer, holding out the purple backpack to Carter. He took it, looking at it. It was small, child-sized, a bit dirty from the crash. He looked up at the officers.
"Don't you guys want to keep this for evidence or something?" Zimmer shrugged.
"Nah," he said. "Wouldn't be of much use to us. We have our guy down at the station now." He checked his watch. It was 12:47 am. "In fact, we better be getting back there. Lots of paperwork to fill out."
"Here's my card, it's got the number of the station and my pager number. Call us if you get a family to show up here." He held out a business card, and Carter took, tucking it into the pocket of his lab coat.
"Thank you both," he said as the two policemen turned and left through the sliding doors of the Emergency Room into the warm summer night. Carter headed back to the trauma room. He found Elizabeth and Pratt talking to the side. He approached them. "What's up?" He asked. They turned to include him in the conversation.
"Pressure's building up inside her head from the fluids and the bleeding. It will kill her if it gets to be too much." Pratt told him.
"And we might need to do surgery to stop the bleeding in her spleen. This girl's really lucky to be alive, but she is loosing a lot of blood." Corday said.
"Okay, then. Prep the OR, and Pratt, do something to relieve the pressure in the skull. I'll see what else I can do." The two doctors left, leaving Carter alone with the girl in the room. He set the purple knapsack down with the rest of the girl's personal belongings, and turned to the patient.
She was still stable, and her cuts had been cleaned. The gash on her forehead had not yet been sutured. Carter retrieved the supplies, sat on a stool, and began to suture the little girl's forehead carefully. He finished, after nine sutures, and sat back to look at his patient. She was on the board under his name, anyway. The poor girl breathed on her own, as her chest was perfectly fine, except for bruising. She had an oxygen mask on to make sure she got enough oxygen.
Her hair still was matted with blood. Carter wasn't sure why, but he couldn't stand to look at that sight. After several minutes, he had cleaned most of the blood out of her hair. Once in recovery, the nurses would clean her up further. After a moment, Malucci came through the door.
"Carter, we're taking your Jane Doe up to the OR now. It is free, and Elizabeth is going to perform the procedure herself," He told Carter.
"All right then. Let's get this show on the road." The two men, after taking care of her monitors, wheeled the girl up into the elevator, then up to the Pre-Op room. An anesthesiologist took over, giving the child medication to put her under. Carter caught sight through a window of Elizabeth with a mask over her face and hair up in a cap, scrubbing up for the operation. She smiled at him and gave him the thumbs-up. He returned the gesture, and led Malucci back down to the ER.
The place seemed quite quiet again. The paint-sniffing boy had been released, and the board only had three patients, one was Carter's Jane Doe, the other two had only minor complaints. Carter wandered back into the trauma room. On an impulse, he retrieved the girl's personal belongings, and took them into the lounge. The lounge was empty. Carter sat at the scrubbed wooden table, and set the small heap of clothes and backpack on the table.
He wanted to look through the things to see if he could find a clue to her identity. He shifted through her clothes: A light blue summer jacket, a white t-shirt with a butterfly on it, blue jean capri pants, white socks and a pair of worn sneakers. the t-shirt, of course, was practically shredded because of the emergency team's scissors to get the shirt off of the girl.
After checking every tag for a name, Carter carefully folded the clothes and put them back into the plastic bag of personal items. He placed the bag at the side of the table and picked up the backpack, setting it onto the table in front of him.
Just before he got the chance to open the zipper, Abby chose that moment to push open the door and stomp into the lounge, looking annoyed. As soon as she spotted Carter, she exploded.
"Carter." she started angrily, "what would you do if a drunk man tried to feel you up?" She looked at him with her eyes flashing angrily. Carter looked at her, confused as to why she cared about his opinion. It suddenly occurred to him that she didn't care; she was just trying to prove a point. He went along with it.
"I would hit the guy," he said. "But fortunately I haven't been in that situation." Abby crossed her arms over her chest.
"Well, I wish that I would have done that. I tried, actually. Pratt --" she stopped short when she saw Carter with the backpack on the table. Carter looked up at her, trying to ignore the fact that she'd caught him going through a patient's belongings. He tried, and failed, to divert her attention.
"You were saying?" He looked at her expectantly. "What did Pratt do?" She didn't buy it.
"Carter, what is that?" Carter shrugged.
"It belongs to that Jane Doe that was hit by the car," he answered briefly.
"And what are you doing with it? You know that we aren't supposed to be looking through the patient's belongings!" Abby exclaimed. "Isn't that, like, invasion of privacy or something?" Carter couldn't help laughing.
"Abby, relax. The cops gave it to me to see if I could find any clues to the child's identity." Abby opened her mouth to counter, but Carter cut her off. "I don't think that the parents will mind me finding a faster way to let them know where their daughter is."
Abby's mouth was opened again, as if she would say something, but she closed it again, choosing not to speak. Instead, she looked curiously at the backpack. She moved closer to the table, and bent over the small knapsack, clearly wondering what contents it held. Carter smiled and patted the chair beside him. She took the seat, placing her coffee mug on the table beside the backpack.
"So what do you say?" Carter asked her, a note of eagerness in his voice. Abby seemed to be thinking about it. Then she smiled eagerly.
"Let's see what we can find out about this little girl." Carter beamed at her, and Abby seemed to have forgotten the drunk man she had encountered earlier. Carter slowly opened the plastic zipper of the bag, and peeked inside.
At first they found only small things: one by one, a pink hairbrush, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, a bar of white soap in a Ziploc bag, one changes each of underwear and socks, one extra t-shirt. Then Carter removed a lunchbox, containing two juice bags, soda crackers, a Tupperware of what unmistakably was peanut butter, and an orange. It looked as if there had once been more food in the box.
"Wow," Carter mumbled.
"Yeah," Abby marveled at the cleverness of the girl who packed the items. "It looks like she was running away. At least she packed practical things."
Near the bottom of the bag, there was a small, rectangular box, with a lid that was tied on only by two rubber-bands. Abby took the box, and held it, looking it over, disputing whether or not to open it. Carter, looking deeper, pulled out the two last objects from the girl's knapsack: A little pink Hello Kitty change purse, and a light blue stuffed animal, an octopus. The animal was an interesting one, as it appeared to have been homemade. The toy had two black buttons for eyes, and looked a bit dirty and worn, presumably from being carried so many places.
"Hmmm..." Carter said, unzipping the change purse and counting the money inside. "It looks like this girl had...six dollars and forty-five cents." Across the table, Abby had pulled the rubber-bands off of the box, and was shuffling through what seemed to be photographs.
"All I've got here are photos of people...probably the girl's mother and grandmother," Her brow furrowed. "Here's an envelope, unopened." She laid it on the table. Carter looked at it.
"We can't open this. It probably wouldn't be of any use to us, anyways," Carter said, pushing it at Abby, who placed it back into the box. "Any addresses, phone number, there? Anything?" Abby shook her head.
"Nope, sorry Carter," She said, disappointed. She tied the bands back on the box and put it back into the bottom of the backpack. Carter stared, lost in thought, while Abby replaced all of the items back into the knapsack. This girl must have been looking for something, Carter thought.
"Hey, Carter, look at this!" Abby said suddenly, jolting him out of his thoughts and back into the real world.
"What?" He asked, confused for a moment.
"Here, look," Abby shoved the backpack into his arms, pointing at the inside.
Inside, on a small white cloth tag, were three initials: G.E.K.
***************************************
Ooooooohhh....Do I have your attention now? Is that suspenseful enough for you?
For all of you smart-alecs out there who are sure that you have the plot of the story all figured out, don't be so sure of yourselves.
Remember to READ AND REVIEW!!! I can't make the story any better if you don't tell me what you want to see in it (
*****************************************
SAVING GRACE- CHAPTER 2
*****************************************
The sirens screamed and tires screeched as the ambulance pulled into the Ambulance bay. Carter ran with Neela and Abby as the ambulance doors opened. Carter ran over to help unload the gurney. Doris helped to push the gurney out of the ambulance.
"We've got a kid, around five years old, hit by a car. Unconscious at the scene, hasn't come around yet. Looks like she has a broken fib, internal injuries to be determined. Probable head trauma." They had the gurney and wheeled it into the ER. The child was a girl, and she was completely unconscious. Carter ran next to the gurney as they entered the ER and headed for Trauma 1.
"...BP's 80/60, and I barely have a pulse," Abby was rattling off the girl's vitals. They arrived in the trauma room.
"Okay, let's get a CBC, three units of blood, type and cross, dip of urine, CTs of the head and abdomen, start an IV saline drip, and watch her vitals closely," Carter instructed. His requests were carried out immediately, everyone bustling about, a blur of pale yellow as they all wore those plastic smocks over their scrubs. Carter looked at the girl. She was so small, with blond hair that was currently matted with dried blood from her head injury. That was about all that he could tell about her, though, at the moment. A sudden thought crossed his mind. "I'm gonna go look for the parents."
Carter ripped off his own yellow smock, and threw it in the biohazard trash can before he left the room. He almost ran to chairs. There, he found only three people.
"Are any of you here to see a little girl? She was injured in a car accident. No one?" Carter ran back to the trauma room. "Hey, Neela, what did you do with her personals?" Without looking up from the IV she was starting, she called back to him.
"Under the counter over to your right." Sure enough, Carter found the plastic bag of the girl's clothing. He rummaged through it, looking for any information on who the girl was, where she had come from. He needed a name. He found nothing among her clothes. Carter groaned in frustration.
"Dr. Carter, her lab results are back," Malucci handed him the envelope. Carter looked through it all quickly.
"Looks like she has a splenic fracture...that's gonna need surgery...she has fractured her skull, there is a bit of brain swelling, cranial bleeding is minimal. her left leg is badly broken at the tibia...that can be easily handled. There's a nasty gash on her forehead, and some road burn on her side. Thanks," He said to Malucci, as he began to give treatment instructions. In the midst of the chaos, Jerry burst into the room.
"Dr. Carter, the police are here. Want to speak to you about the Jane Doe that you've just brought in."
"Okay, I'll be there in a second." Carter left the trauma room where the other nurses were working to stabilize the victim. He met two cops at chairs: One was rather tall, bald, looked about 50; the other was of average build, with a goatee and darker hair. They introduced themselves as officers James and Zimmer, and Carter introduced himself as well. He noticed that Zimmer carried a small, purple knapsack in his hands.
"Officers, you wanted to see me?" Both of the men stood to talk to him.
"Yes, thank you for taking her, doctor," Officer James told him, running his hand behind his neck anxiously. "How is she doing?"
"She is stabilized. She is incredibly lucky that she didn't sustain more serious injuries."
"What does she have, doc?" Zimmer asked him.
"She has a skull fracture, but cranial bleeding and swelling of the brain are minimal. Her spleen has been fractured as well, but internal bleeding hasn't been too bad, either. We are giving her blood for those things. She also has a few nasty cuts on her body, bruising, and road burn, in addition to a badly broken left leg." The officers seemed shocked about the extent of the girl's injuries. "It could have been much worse." Carter quickly reassured them. Zimmer nodded, then shook his head quickly, as if coming out of a daze.
"Has her family come around?" James asked. Carter shook his head.
"No, nobody's showed up yet, as far as I know. Do have a name yet?"
"No, we are hoping that she will wake up and tell us relatively soon. She's' just a Jane Doe right now," James told him.
"We found this at the scene, though," said Zimmer, holding out the purple backpack to Carter. He took it, looking at it. It was small, child-sized, a bit dirty from the crash. He looked up at the officers.
"Don't you guys want to keep this for evidence or something?" Zimmer shrugged.
"Nah," he said. "Wouldn't be of much use to us. We have our guy down at the station now." He checked his watch. It was 12:47 am. "In fact, we better be getting back there. Lots of paperwork to fill out."
"Here's my card, it's got the number of the station and my pager number. Call us if you get a family to show up here." He held out a business card, and Carter took, tucking it into the pocket of his lab coat.
"Thank you both," he said as the two policemen turned and left through the sliding doors of the Emergency Room into the warm summer night. Carter headed back to the trauma room. He found Elizabeth and Pratt talking to the side. He approached them. "What's up?" He asked. They turned to include him in the conversation.
"Pressure's building up inside her head from the fluids and the bleeding. It will kill her if it gets to be too much." Pratt told him.
"And we might need to do surgery to stop the bleeding in her spleen. This girl's really lucky to be alive, but she is loosing a lot of blood." Corday said.
"Okay, then. Prep the OR, and Pratt, do something to relieve the pressure in the skull. I'll see what else I can do." The two doctors left, leaving Carter alone with the girl in the room. He set the purple knapsack down with the rest of the girl's personal belongings, and turned to the patient.
She was still stable, and her cuts had been cleaned. The gash on her forehead had not yet been sutured. Carter retrieved the supplies, sat on a stool, and began to suture the little girl's forehead carefully. He finished, after nine sutures, and sat back to look at his patient. She was on the board under his name, anyway. The poor girl breathed on her own, as her chest was perfectly fine, except for bruising. She had an oxygen mask on to make sure she got enough oxygen.
Her hair still was matted with blood. Carter wasn't sure why, but he couldn't stand to look at that sight. After several minutes, he had cleaned most of the blood out of her hair. Once in recovery, the nurses would clean her up further. After a moment, Malucci came through the door.
"Carter, we're taking your Jane Doe up to the OR now. It is free, and Elizabeth is going to perform the procedure herself," He told Carter.
"All right then. Let's get this show on the road." The two men, after taking care of her monitors, wheeled the girl up into the elevator, then up to the Pre-Op room. An anesthesiologist took over, giving the child medication to put her under. Carter caught sight through a window of Elizabeth with a mask over her face and hair up in a cap, scrubbing up for the operation. She smiled at him and gave him the thumbs-up. He returned the gesture, and led Malucci back down to the ER.
The place seemed quite quiet again. The paint-sniffing boy had been released, and the board only had three patients, one was Carter's Jane Doe, the other two had only minor complaints. Carter wandered back into the trauma room. On an impulse, he retrieved the girl's personal belongings, and took them into the lounge. The lounge was empty. Carter sat at the scrubbed wooden table, and set the small heap of clothes and backpack on the table.
He wanted to look through the things to see if he could find a clue to her identity. He shifted through her clothes: A light blue summer jacket, a white t-shirt with a butterfly on it, blue jean capri pants, white socks and a pair of worn sneakers. the t-shirt, of course, was practically shredded because of the emergency team's scissors to get the shirt off of the girl.
After checking every tag for a name, Carter carefully folded the clothes and put them back into the plastic bag of personal items. He placed the bag at the side of the table and picked up the backpack, setting it onto the table in front of him.
Just before he got the chance to open the zipper, Abby chose that moment to push open the door and stomp into the lounge, looking annoyed. As soon as she spotted Carter, she exploded.
"Carter." she started angrily, "what would you do if a drunk man tried to feel you up?" She looked at him with her eyes flashing angrily. Carter looked at her, confused as to why she cared about his opinion. It suddenly occurred to him that she didn't care; she was just trying to prove a point. He went along with it.
"I would hit the guy," he said. "But fortunately I haven't been in that situation." Abby crossed her arms over her chest.
"Well, I wish that I would have done that. I tried, actually. Pratt --" she stopped short when she saw Carter with the backpack on the table. Carter looked up at her, trying to ignore the fact that she'd caught him going through a patient's belongings. He tried, and failed, to divert her attention.
"You were saying?" He looked at her expectantly. "What did Pratt do?" She didn't buy it.
"Carter, what is that?" Carter shrugged.
"It belongs to that Jane Doe that was hit by the car," he answered briefly.
"And what are you doing with it? You know that we aren't supposed to be looking through the patient's belongings!" Abby exclaimed. "Isn't that, like, invasion of privacy or something?" Carter couldn't help laughing.
"Abby, relax. The cops gave it to me to see if I could find any clues to the child's identity." Abby opened her mouth to counter, but Carter cut her off. "I don't think that the parents will mind me finding a faster way to let them know where their daughter is."
Abby's mouth was opened again, as if she would say something, but she closed it again, choosing not to speak. Instead, she looked curiously at the backpack. She moved closer to the table, and bent over the small knapsack, clearly wondering what contents it held. Carter smiled and patted the chair beside him. She took the seat, placing her coffee mug on the table beside the backpack.
"So what do you say?" Carter asked her, a note of eagerness in his voice. Abby seemed to be thinking about it. Then she smiled eagerly.
"Let's see what we can find out about this little girl." Carter beamed at her, and Abby seemed to have forgotten the drunk man she had encountered earlier. Carter slowly opened the plastic zipper of the bag, and peeked inside.
At first they found only small things: one by one, a pink hairbrush, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, a bar of white soap in a Ziploc bag, one changes each of underwear and socks, one extra t-shirt. Then Carter removed a lunchbox, containing two juice bags, soda crackers, a Tupperware of what unmistakably was peanut butter, and an orange. It looked as if there had once been more food in the box.
"Wow," Carter mumbled.
"Yeah," Abby marveled at the cleverness of the girl who packed the items. "It looks like she was running away. At least she packed practical things."
Near the bottom of the bag, there was a small, rectangular box, with a lid that was tied on only by two rubber-bands. Abby took the box, and held it, looking it over, disputing whether or not to open it. Carter, looking deeper, pulled out the two last objects from the girl's knapsack: A little pink Hello Kitty change purse, and a light blue stuffed animal, an octopus. The animal was an interesting one, as it appeared to have been homemade. The toy had two black buttons for eyes, and looked a bit dirty and worn, presumably from being carried so many places.
"Hmmm..." Carter said, unzipping the change purse and counting the money inside. "It looks like this girl had...six dollars and forty-five cents." Across the table, Abby had pulled the rubber-bands off of the box, and was shuffling through what seemed to be photographs.
"All I've got here are photos of people...probably the girl's mother and grandmother," Her brow furrowed. "Here's an envelope, unopened." She laid it on the table. Carter looked at it.
"We can't open this. It probably wouldn't be of any use to us, anyways," Carter said, pushing it at Abby, who placed it back into the box. "Any addresses, phone number, there? Anything?" Abby shook her head.
"Nope, sorry Carter," She said, disappointed. She tied the bands back on the box and put it back into the bottom of the backpack. Carter stared, lost in thought, while Abby replaced all of the items back into the knapsack. This girl must have been looking for something, Carter thought.
"Hey, Carter, look at this!" Abby said suddenly, jolting him out of his thoughts and back into the real world.
"What?" He asked, confused for a moment.
"Here, look," Abby shoved the backpack into his arms, pointing at the inside.
Inside, on a small white cloth tag, were three initials: G.E.K.
***************************************
Ooooooohhh....Do I have your attention now? Is that suspenseful enough for you?
For all of you smart-alecs out there who are sure that you have the plot of the story all figured out, don't be so sure of yourselves.
Remember to READ AND REVIEW!!! I can't make the story any better if you don't tell me what you want to see in it (