DISCLAIMER: Anyone or anything that you recognize as part of the ER series
is not mine. The plot, however, belongs to me.
Now, for chapter 4!
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SAVING GRACE- CHAPTER 4
********************************************
"Hey, Carter. You on again?" Frank greeted Carter as he walked through the ER doors and felt the relief of air conditioning hit him.
"Of course, Frank. This place is my life. What's new?" he replied as he made his way to the lounge.
"Nothing much, at all. We're not incredibly busy, so there's no hurry to get changed and out here." Frank sat back at the computer.
"Oh, Frank, what's up with my Jane Doe?" Frank furrowed his eyebrows in question.
"I don't know anything about a Jane Doe." Now it was Carter's turn to look confused.
"Yeah, they brought her in just after midnight. Kid hit by a car, parents never showed up...?" Frank shook his head.
"Sorry, Carter. Doesn't ring a bell at all. Try asking Kerry or someone."
"I'll do that, thanks," Carter called back as he left for the lounge. After throwing on his lab coat and stethoscope and pulling on his work shoes, he went back out into the ER. Checking the board, he saw that the girl was in recovery from an operation. Carter, with surprise, found that she was somehow still in the ER, in Curtain one. He made his way there, running into Kerry Weaver halfway.
"Oh, watch it Carter," a disgruntled Kerry said, quickly regaining balance before she fell. Carter reached out to help steady her.
"Sorry, Kerry," he apologized. He headed back to Curtain one.
"Hey, Carter, your Jane Doe is fine," Kerry called to him. He doubled back to meet her.
"You've been treating her? How is she?" Carter asked Kerry, trying to get an update on the patient.
"She's doing phenomenally well, for what she's been through in the last fourteen hours," Kerry said, leading the way over to curtain area one. "She is out of surgery, which went well. They were able to repair her spleen, and she received a unit of blood. Somehow, the excess fluid in her cranuim drained out, and the swelling is going down progressively. We are pretty sure that there is no brain damage from the pressure buildup," Carter let out a sigh of relief as they approached the area that the girl was being kept in.
He pulled back the curtain to find that she was not on a ventilator, but still had the oxygen being given to her. Her broken leg had been set and was in a cast, and the blood had been cleaned from her skin by one of the nurses.
"She unconscious?" Carter asked Kerry, taking his stethoscope and measuring her heart rate and listening to breathing sounds.
"She's still out of it from when she had the surgery. She hasn't woken up yet from the anesthesia." Carter nodded.
"All right, then. Call me if she wakes up or if her parents come by," he told her as he left the curtain area. As he was coming down the hall, he heard Frank calling.
"Apartment fire coming in. Luckily there were only two victims, ETA around a minute!" He shouted from the desk. Carter ran to the desk.
"I'm on it," he told Frank. He went out to the ambulance bay to wait, and was soon joined by Susan and Luka. They waited as the ambulance pulled in and began to unload the patients.
"We've got a Hispanic female, mid to late twenties, some smoke inhalation and first degree burns. Also got her 3-year old son, severe smoke inhalation, and first degree burns." The paramedic began to rattle off stats for the mother and child as they were lifted out of the ambulance and wheeled inside of the ER. Both were taken into Trauma 2.
"Luka, take the kid, and I'll deal with the mother. Gallant, you're with me. Susan, help Luka out with the kid," Carter told them urgently. Susan left and Gallant appeared at Carter's side.
"What can I do?" he asked Carter, who was rushing to get an oxygen mask on the patient while a nurse hastily cut off her clothes, away from her burns.
"Get her a blood gas, type and cross match, cell count, and check her white cells. I can get an x-ray of the chest to make sure that her lungs are clear. This one looks like she'll pull through, though." Pratt nodded.
"Right," he said. "I'm on it." He went off to get the tests done, and Carter stayed with the woman, who wasn't improving a great deal.
"Okay, bump that O2 up to 50%, start a saline drip at 500 an hour to re- hydrate her. See if you can't get some Hydrol to put on those burns," Carter resumed his work on the patient. He saw Luka and Susan working feverously on the child. Carter quickly whipped out his stethescope and listened for vitals.
"We've got stridous breathing sounds, and a thready pulse. BP seems normal, though. Think you can manage without me for a minute?" he asked the nurse. She nodded.
"Sure thing, Dr. Carter," he thaned her quickly and made his way over to the smaller victim.
"How is he?" Luka shook his head.
"Not well," he said, a bit of his Croatian accent slipping through. "Weak pulse, low BP, not breathing on his own, and he is dehydrated and not fighting to the burns well." Susan worked to check and recheck the boy's vitals.
"Start a saline drip?" Carter asked Luka.
"750 an hour." Carter thought for a moment.
"Try magnesium on him yet?" Luka looked shocked.
"Magnesium?" he asked, confused. Carter nodded.
"Yeah, helps to draw the carbon monoxide out of his blood, so he will be able to get oxygen to those burned tissues easier," he explained. Luka thought for a moment.
"All right, let's give him 3ccs of 5% magnesium sulfate." Susan loaded a syringe and injected. The three of them stood and waited. After about half a minute, his stats began to improve. Luka smiled. Susan turned to Carter.
"Nice call, John." He beamed.
"Thanks, Susan." He went back to check on his own patient.
Once Carter had made sure that both of the patients were relatively stabled enough to leave them, he slung his stethoscope behind his neck, and left the trauma room. He found the admitting desk in a rather cheerful mood, knowing that he had made a difference to a mother and her child. He found Frank at the computer.
"Hey, what else do you have here?" Frank gestured toward the clipboard rack.
"Well, let's see. Take your pick: vomiting woman, old guy with leg pains, or construction worker with glass embedded in his shoulder?" Carter grabbed a clipboard.
"I'll take door number three, Johnny," he said jokingly. He made his way over to chairs where he found a middle-aged, bespectacled, burly man clutching a blood-soaked towel to his right shoulder. "Mr. Richards?" The man nodded. "Follow me, please."
After removing the glass, cleaning, packing, and dressing the wound, and having the guy sit around for observation, Carter left for the lounge feeling pretty good about his day so far. He was only a couple of hours into his shift, but it looked like a good start. He headed for the lounge, and pushed the door open.
The lights in the room were out, and sunlight streamed in through the window as the sun began to sink in the sky. When Carter entered the room, though, something seemed off. A soft sniffle from the couch helped Carter pinpoint the problem.
There, sitting on the old sofa with knees pulled up nearly to her chin, cup of coffee in one hand and a tissue in the other, sat Elizabeth. Her eyes were slightly red and puffy, her red hair a bit tousled from a long shift. The moment she spotted Carter, she tried to calm herself. She turned away from him as fast as she could, but was not quick enough.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Elizabeth," Carter started in awkwardly. He began to back away. "I can leave you to yourself if you like. Sorry to have disturbed you." He turned to leave.
"No, no, don't be silly," She told him. He lingered for a moment.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, of course, go get a cup of coffee or something. I'll be okay," she said, staying on the couch and crumpling her tissue in her hand. Carter cautiously approached her.
"Are you all right? You don't look so great." Elizabeth stopped for a moment.
"Well, I suppose I'm not, but I did just get off of a particularly long shift. Actually, I'm not off yet. I still have about an hour to go yet." She took another sip of her coffee and straightened up. Carter smiled gently at her.
"Um, do you mind me asking, what is bothering you? Is there anything I can do to help?" She sniffled again, and sighed heavily.
"I can't believe this. I thought I was over it already, but I guess I wasn't and I should be...It wasn't my fault, really, but it really was, and there's obviously nothing that I can do now, but still..." she rambled on, voice growing thicker from a sob that was choking her, forcing its way out. She unraveled the tissue and buried her face in it. Carter grabbed the tissue box off of a table and handed it to Elizabeth.
"What's wrong? What was your fault?" he asked, out of pure curiosity. Elizabeth looked at him meaningfully, and Carter read in her eyes what was upsetting her so. His own eyes widened.
"No!" He said, "No! I don't believe it, not you too. What is suddenly making you think about, about her?" Elizabeth shook her head.
"It is her birthday," she answered flatly. "I'm sorry, would have been," she corrected herself. She burst into sobs again before he could stop her. "She trusted me to get her through it. I had just told her about all of the horrible things that had happened, and what did she do? She thanked me for helping to save her. But I didn't save her, I couldn't."
Carter looked at her helplessly. All he could do now was lend a sympathetic ear and hope not to become emotional himself. He sat on the couch beside her and rubbed her back. She looked up at him.
"She knew she was having a PE, and I could tell she was scared. I had told her though, I told her I would get her through it, and she swallowed her fear and looked up at me with a look of pure trust. She trusted me with her life. I failed her." She sobbed again. Carter felt himself growing a lup in his throat.
"It wasn't your fault. You did the best that you could. It couldn't have been stopped," Carter told her. She was now sobbing uncontrollably.
"I C-c-called it! I called it," She said between tears. "I killed her. We should have tried harder, gone up to 300, to 325, to 360, even 400. We could have gotten her back. But I didn't. I just stood there, frozen."
"It's okay, Dr. Corday, you tried your best. Some patients are beyond your help," Carter gave her a hug, and she broke down. She was shaking in his arms. He awkwardly tried to comfort her, which was incredibly difficult as he could not even comfort himself on this issue. He couldn't imagine how awful Elizabeth felt. Lucy's last words had been of appreciation and thanks to her, after all.
"She had her life ahead of her," she cried. "She was young, pretty, smart, and she had so, so much potential, and I deprived her of that." That was all it took to get a tear to roll down Carter's cheek. Elizabeth handed him a tissue, and he dabbed it away quickly. Elizabeth relaxed a bit, comforted by Carter's hug. They stayed like that for a minute or so in silence, just lost in their own thoughts. After a while, Elizabeth dried her eyes, and stood up from the couch.
"I suppose I'm being stupid," she told him, "doting on things of the past, when really I need to be here in the present. I will never be able to forget her, though." Carter nodded iin agreement. He rose and poured himself a cup of coffee as Elizabeth left the lounge.
He had never truly appreciated Elizabeth, really. She had been there when Lucy passed on, there when she spoke her last words, took her last breath. She had fought, with Romano, to save Lucy's life. She hadn't succeeded, but she had fought the good fight all the same.
The good fight. That's what it was all about in the end after all. He remembered telling Lucy that sometimes, you just have to walk away knowing that you fought the good fight.
And somewhere, deep inside him, he heard a voice just then. Maybe it was his conscience, or maybe he was just crazy. Or maybe, just maybe, it was Lucy looking down on him, whispering in his ear.
"You fought the good fight for me, Carter. Tomorrow, you will move on to fight another one."
***********************************************************
That's all for chapter 4!!!
The next chapter is when things really start moving.
Thanks to all of my reviewers for your feedback. I am glad that you kept reading (
Now, for chapter 4!
********************************************
SAVING GRACE- CHAPTER 4
********************************************
"Hey, Carter. You on again?" Frank greeted Carter as he walked through the ER doors and felt the relief of air conditioning hit him.
"Of course, Frank. This place is my life. What's new?" he replied as he made his way to the lounge.
"Nothing much, at all. We're not incredibly busy, so there's no hurry to get changed and out here." Frank sat back at the computer.
"Oh, Frank, what's up with my Jane Doe?" Frank furrowed his eyebrows in question.
"I don't know anything about a Jane Doe." Now it was Carter's turn to look confused.
"Yeah, they brought her in just after midnight. Kid hit by a car, parents never showed up...?" Frank shook his head.
"Sorry, Carter. Doesn't ring a bell at all. Try asking Kerry or someone."
"I'll do that, thanks," Carter called back as he left for the lounge. After throwing on his lab coat and stethoscope and pulling on his work shoes, he went back out into the ER. Checking the board, he saw that the girl was in recovery from an operation. Carter, with surprise, found that she was somehow still in the ER, in Curtain one. He made his way there, running into Kerry Weaver halfway.
"Oh, watch it Carter," a disgruntled Kerry said, quickly regaining balance before she fell. Carter reached out to help steady her.
"Sorry, Kerry," he apologized. He headed back to Curtain one.
"Hey, Carter, your Jane Doe is fine," Kerry called to him. He doubled back to meet her.
"You've been treating her? How is she?" Carter asked Kerry, trying to get an update on the patient.
"She's doing phenomenally well, for what she's been through in the last fourteen hours," Kerry said, leading the way over to curtain area one. "She is out of surgery, which went well. They were able to repair her spleen, and she received a unit of blood. Somehow, the excess fluid in her cranuim drained out, and the swelling is going down progressively. We are pretty sure that there is no brain damage from the pressure buildup," Carter let out a sigh of relief as they approached the area that the girl was being kept in.
He pulled back the curtain to find that she was not on a ventilator, but still had the oxygen being given to her. Her broken leg had been set and was in a cast, and the blood had been cleaned from her skin by one of the nurses.
"She unconscious?" Carter asked Kerry, taking his stethoscope and measuring her heart rate and listening to breathing sounds.
"She's still out of it from when she had the surgery. She hasn't woken up yet from the anesthesia." Carter nodded.
"All right, then. Call me if she wakes up or if her parents come by," he told her as he left the curtain area. As he was coming down the hall, he heard Frank calling.
"Apartment fire coming in. Luckily there were only two victims, ETA around a minute!" He shouted from the desk. Carter ran to the desk.
"I'm on it," he told Frank. He went out to the ambulance bay to wait, and was soon joined by Susan and Luka. They waited as the ambulance pulled in and began to unload the patients.
"We've got a Hispanic female, mid to late twenties, some smoke inhalation and first degree burns. Also got her 3-year old son, severe smoke inhalation, and first degree burns." The paramedic began to rattle off stats for the mother and child as they were lifted out of the ambulance and wheeled inside of the ER. Both were taken into Trauma 2.
"Luka, take the kid, and I'll deal with the mother. Gallant, you're with me. Susan, help Luka out with the kid," Carter told them urgently. Susan left and Gallant appeared at Carter's side.
"What can I do?" he asked Carter, who was rushing to get an oxygen mask on the patient while a nurse hastily cut off her clothes, away from her burns.
"Get her a blood gas, type and cross match, cell count, and check her white cells. I can get an x-ray of the chest to make sure that her lungs are clear. This one looks like she'll pull through, though." Pratt nodded.
"Right," he said. "I'm on it." He went off to get the tests done, and Carter stayed with the woman, who wasn't improving a great deal.
"Okay, bump that O2 up to 50%, start a saline drip at 500 an hour to re- hydrate her. See if you can't get some Hydrol to put on those burns," Carter resumed his work on the patient. He saw Luka and Susan working feverously on the child. Carter quickly whipped out his stethescope and listened for vitals.
"We've got stridous breathing sounds, and a thready pulse. BP seems normal, though. Think you can manage without me for a minute?" he asked the nurse. She nodded.
"Sure thing, Dr. Carter," he thaned her quickly and made his way over to the smaller victim.
"How is he?" Luka shook his head.
"Not well," he said, a bit of his Croatian accent slipping through. "Weak pulse, low BP, not breathing on his own, and he is dehydrated and not fighting to the burns well." Susan worked to check and recheck the boy's vitals.
"Start a saline drip?" Carter asked Luka.
"750 an hour." Carter thought for a moment.
"Try magnesium on him yet?" Luka looked shocked.
"Magnesium?" he asked, confused. Carter nodded.
"Yeah, helps to draw the carbon monoxide out of his blood, so he will be able to get oxygen to those burned tissues easier," he explained. Luka thought for a moment.
"All right, let's give him 3ccs of 5% magnesium sulfate." Susan loaded a syringe and injected. The three of them stood and waited. After about half a minute, his stats began to improve. Luka smiled. Susan turned to Carter.
"Nice call, John." He beamed.
"Thanks, Susan." He went back to check on his own patient.
Once Carter had made sure that both of the patients were relatively stabled enough to leave them, he slung his stethoscope behind his neck, and left the trauma room. He found the admitting desk in a rather cheerful mood, knowing that he had made a difference to a mother and her child. He found Frank at the computer.
"Hey, what else do you have here?" Frank gestured toward the clipboard rack.
"Well, let's see. Take your pick: vomiting woman, old guy with leg pains, or construction worker with glass embedded in his shoulder?" Carter grabbed a clipboard.
"I'll take door number three, Johnny," he said jokingly. He made his way over to chairs where he found a middle-aged, bespectacled, burly man clutching a blood-soaked towel to his right shoulder. "Mr. Richards?" The man nodded. "Follow me, please."
After removing the glass, cleaning, packing, and dressing the wound, and having the guy sit around for observation, Carter left for the lounge feeling pretty good about his day so far. He was only a couple of hours into his shift, but it looked like a good start. He headed for the lounge, and pushed the door open.
The lights in the room were out, and sunlight streamed in through the window as the sun began to sink in the sky. When Carter entered the room, though, something seemed off. A soft sniffle from the couch helped Carter pinpoint the problem.
There, sitting on the old sofa with knees pulled up nearly to her chin, cup of coffee in one hand and a tissue in the other, sat Elizabeth. Her eyes were slightly red and puffy, her red hair a bit tousled from a long shift. The moment she spotted Carter, she tried to calm herself. She turned away from him as fast as she could, but was not quick enough.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Elizabeth," Carter started in awkwardly. He began to back away. "I can leave you to yourself if you like. Sorry to have disturbed you." He turned to leave.
"No, no, don't be silly," She told him. He lingered for a moment.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, of course, go get a cup of coffee or something. I'll be okay," she said, staying on the couch and crumpling her tissue in her hand. Carter cautiously approached her.
"Are you all right? You don't look so great." Elizabeth stopped for a moment.
"Well, I suppose I'm not, but I did just get off of a particularly long shift. Actually, I'm not off yet. I still have about an hour to go yet." She took another sip of her coffee and straightened up. Carter smiled gently at her.
"Um, do you mind me asking, what is bothering you? Is there anything I can do to help?" She sniffled again, and sighed heavily.
"I can't believe this. I thought I was over it already, but I guess I wasn't and I should be...It wasn't my fault, really, but it really was, and there's obviously nothing that I can do now, but still..." she rambled on, voice growing thicker from a sob that was choking her, forcing its way out. She unraveled the tissue and buried her face in it. Carter grabbed the tissue box off of a table and handed it to Elizabeth.
"What's wrong? What was your fault?" he asked, out of pure curiosity. Elizabeth looked at him meaningfully, and Carter read in her eyes what was upsetting her so. His own eyes widened.
"No!" He said, "No! I don't believe it, not you too. What is suddenly making you think about, about her?" Elizabeth shook her head.
"It is her birthday," she answered flatly. "I'm sorry, would have been," she corrected herself. She burst into sobs again before he could stop her. "She trusted me to get her through it. I had just told her about all of the horrible things that had happened, and what did she do? She thanked me for helping to save her. But I didn't save her, I couldn't."
Carter looked at her helplessly. All he could do now was lend a sympathetic ear and hope not to become emotional himself. He sat on the couch beside her and rubbed her back. She looked up at him.
"She knew she was having a PE, and I could tell she was scared. I had told her though, I told her I would get her through it, and she swallowed her fear and looked up at me with a look of pure trust. She trusted me with her life. I failed her." She sobbed again. Carter felt himself growing a lup in his throat.
"It wasn't your fault. You did the best that you could. It couldn't have been stopped," Carter told her. She was now sobbing uncontrollably.
"I C-c-called it! I called it," She said between tears. "I killed her. We should have tried harder, gone up to 300, to 325, to 360, even 400. We could have gotten her back. But I didn't. I just stood there, frozen."
"It's okay, Dr. Corday, you tried your best. Some patients are beyond your help," Carter gave her a hug, and she broke down. She was shaking in his arms. He awkwardly tried to comfort her, which was incredibly difficult as he could not even comfort himself on this issue. He couldn't imagine how awful Elizabeth felt. Lucy's last words had been of appreciation and thanks to her, after all.
"She had her life ahead of her," she cried. "She was young, pretty, smart, and she had so, so much potential, and I deprived her of that." That was all it took to get a tear to roll down Carter's cheek. Elizabeth handed him a tissue, and he dabbed it away quickly. Elizabeth relaxed a bit, comforted by Carter's hug. They stayed like that for a minute or so in silence, just lost in their own thoughts. After a while, Elizabeth dried her eyes, and stood up from the couch.
"I suppose I'm being stupid," she told him, "doting on things of the past, when really I need to be here in the present. I will never be able to forget her, though." Carter nodded iin agreement. He rose and poured himself a cup of coffee as Elizabeth left the lounge.
He had never truly appreciated Elizabeth, really. She had been there when Lucy passed on, there when she spoke her last words, took her last breath. She had fought, with Romano, to save Lucy's life. She hadn't succeeded, but she had fought the good fight all the same.
The good fight. That's what it was all about in the end after all. He remembered telling Lucy that sometimes, you just have to walk away knowing that you fought the good fight.
And somewhere, deep inside him, he heard a voice just then. Maybe it was his conscience, or maybe he was just crazy. Or maybe, just maybe, it was Lucy looking down on him, whispering in his ear.
"You fought the good fight for me, Carter. Tomorrow, you will move on to fight another one."
***********************************************************
That's all for chapter 4!!!
The next chapter is when things really start moving.
Thanks to all of my reviewers for your feedback. I am glad that you kept reading (