DOCTOR HAZEL TRAUMATIZES A CHILD
AKA: Dynamic Cardiology
There'll be no strings to bind your hands,
Not if my love can't bind your heart.
There's no need to take a stand
For it was I who chose to start…
"NO! Get away from me! No no no nooooOOOOOOOOOO!"
Doctor Hazel Bolton's 9 year old patient had seen the needle now, so there was no going back. The girl was kicking, screaming and flailing on the tiny cot. Beads of sweat glistened on her skin. A gob of spit flew from her mouth and splashed across Nurse Marwan's face, but he just took it and kept searching for the perfect angle. The kill shot. Searching, and waiting for his holder, Major Elizabeth Kieran, to figure out her arm-bar so the kid would stop moving.
Hazel clapped Elizabeth on the shoulder, and when she failed to respond, she gently manipulated her arm for her. "That's not a good armbar. Lock the arm."
"Get off of me! Get- GET OFF! Fuck you!" The little girl spit again, this time at Elizabeth. Hazel could instantly feel the muscles in her arm tighten up in response.
"Hey, Itzel, I need you to listen to the music for me, alright? Let's try and focus on the music!" She took her hand off of Elizabeth's fat, freckled arm, and brought a blanket to block Itzel's view of the needle. Immediately, Itzel started spitting all over the blanket. She brought up her free hand to try to claw the blanket away, but Hazel quickly moved to hold it down. Her skin was uncomfortably hot. "Marwan, 3, 2…?"
"Big stick," he said. The girl shrieked louder than Elizabeth thought was possible, and kicked her legs so hard that one of her ratty shoes started coming off her foot.
Just call me angel of the morning,
Just touch my cheek before you leave me!
"OW! You bitch, You hurt me! You hurt me! Take it out! Take it out! You hurt me! You hurt me! Take it out! You hurt me! It hurts! It hurts! It's hurting me!"
Marwan calmly flushed the line, and made sure it pulled. A plume of red, like a jellyfish, appeared in the big plastic syringe. He emptied the syringe and popped it off the valve.
Actually, not a valve. He had used some random IV extension tubing and clamped it off before the blood could well up out of the line. They must've run out of valves.
"Tape?" he said. A rogue shoe flew up from Itzel's foot and cracked him in his nose as he moved to tape down the IV. He took a long, deep breath. Hazel could tell he was struggling to keep his composure. "... And maybe we should cover the site, too."
"On it," said Elizabeth. She was looking for any way to redeem herself after her terrible armbar. She grabbed the now unused blanket from off of Itzel's lap and wrapped it a few times around the site, careful to leave enough space at the top to feed a line through. Marwan silently set off to grab the antibiotics.
Now, it was time for a fun conversation. Hazel knelt down next to her wailing patient. It was hard to make meaningful eye contact, but that didn't stop her from trying. She hoped that the colorful marble in her left eye-socket might attract Itzel's attention.
"Alright, Itzel, do you think you can listen to me for just a minute, please? We're done poking you!"
"Take it out! It hurts! This hurts me! Take it out!" Despite her complaints, Itzel seemed to be getting sort of tired of yelling, and she wasn't actually willing to go through the effort of pulling off the blanket wrap and tearing the catheter from her flesh. But she was still pretty pissed. "I want it out! Take the needle out!"
"I actually wanted to talk to you about that, Itzel. There's no needle inside you. We used a needle to put it in, but all that's in there now is a plastic medicine-straw. Wanna see?"
"I don't care, I want you to take it out!"
Nonetheless, Itzel watched with tears in her eyes as Hazel reached for her keys in her pocket. Hanging from her keyring, on the same string as a sarsaparilla bottle cap with a hole in it, was a pink-hub catheter, a 20 gauge. Hazel pressed it against her own skin, and bent it with her finger to demonstrate how harmless it was. "See? It's just a medicine straw. It's plastic. Do you want to feel it?"
"I… I guess." Cautiously, Itzel allowed Hazel to poke her finger with the catheter. She took it between her thumb and pointer finger and rolled it around. "Is that in my arm?"
"That's what's in your arm. Do you want to see it?"
Itzel nodded. Without even having to ask her, Major Kieran had already started removing the blanket wraps. The only good brass in the Supply Corps, and here she was doing grunt work in a Freeside Pediatric Clinic on the off chance that Julie might stop by. Poor woman.
"Alright, see it now? You can't see the straw because that's what we put in your vein, to give you medicine. But you can see some of the pink part."
Annoyingly, Marwan had taped a chevron to secure the IV extension tubing to the hub, so it was actually very hard to see the hub, but Itzel seemed to understand the point. She scratched at her arm.
"Okay. But, but it still hurts! And I don't want to see the blood part, there's like, blood, I don't want to see the blood! And I can't bend my arm much!" She seemed like she was about to start crying again. Hazel gave her a gentle rub on her forearm, just under the IV site.
"I know, IVs just aren't very fun. Even if it isn't a big metal needle, it doesn't feel right to leave it in there, does it?" Marwan returned with a vial of Penicillin G and a bag of saline, which he got to work setting up in the background. Hazel massaged the IV site. "You ever had one of these before?"
Itzel shook her head.
"Alright. Hey, hold up just a second, Marwan, let me check something."
Marwan was seconds away from hooking up the bag of antibiotic-infused saline when Hazel leaned over the bed and squinted at the Penicillin label with her good eye. She paid close attention to the wording:
Buffered Penicillin G, Potassium for injection. 5,000,000 units*
(Five Million)
Doctor Hazel trusted Marwan, but she'd seen good providers inject Penicillin G Benzathine IV before. She just had to make sure. Trust, but verify.
Itzel suddenly looked very panicked as Marwan hooked up the line. Her eyes darted around, scanning each piece of equipment for sharp bits. "What are you doing? Are you going to give me another shot?"
"No, we're just giving you medicine through that straw that we talked about. It's for the cuts on your leg."
"But you already put a bandaid on that," said Itzel. Indeed, her left leg was wrapped in bandages just below the knee. Yellow-brown discharge had already leaked through the dressings. Marwan gave Hazel a silent glance, a sort of 'side-eye,' which was the approved way of asking her, "Can I take this one?" in the Freeside Children's Clinic. He didn't wait for her response.
"Your cut got sick. Do you see this brown stain?" He waved his hand over the dressing. "That is not a good color. You also have a bad fever, which means your whole body is very angry about this cut. This medicine should help make it better. Okay?"
"Will it hurt?"
Marwan shook his head. "If you feel a lot worse after the medicine, yell for us, that is not normal and we can fix it. If you feel itchy, if you get red spots, or if your throat feels wrong, yell at us. We can fix it."
Hazel nodded to herself. Marwan was a blunt instrument, but he knew how to get his point across. "Goon Speak," and "Child Speak," weren't all that different. She looked at Elizabeth and Marwan to make sure no one wanted to do anything else, then flashed a lazy peace sign. The 'Let's get moving' signal.
"I think Nurse Marwan explained that pretty well. We'll stop by again later, Itzel. Just call if you need us!"
The song on the radio changed to something different, something sort of grating in the background - a song about a taxi driver, played several times a day and which Eddie Vasquez adamantly refused to allow in his operating room - as the three worn out providers continued their rounds, each going their separate ways to lay eyes on one of the many sick kids stuck in the Clinic this Friday. Scanning down the rows of cots and chairs, between the grimy, torn up curtains, there was a depressing lack of parents.
There was one new parent, of course. A woman about her age, sitting dead eyed on the edge of Bed 16. She had a little baby swaddled up and sitting in her lap, but it looked more like a rat than a baby. Like some sort of skin-doll.
Hazel didn't like to venture over there. She wasn't a therapist, and she couldn't breath life into the miscarriage. It was probably best for everyone if mom grieved on her own. They'd taken mom's vitals, she was fine physically, she could leave whenever she was ready.
Shoving down the uncomfortable feeling in her stomach, Hazel dropped by the bed across the aisle, where a boy who looked to be about 13 or 14 was lying utterly unresponsive with the world's most textbook base-skull-fracture; bruising under the eyes, behind the ears, all of it. No story with him. Found down in the middle of the street, that was all they knew.
They'd shaved his head and done their best to stitch his ruined scalp back together, but the power had been out at the time, and it was night time. The job was performed under the streetlights by Major Elizabeth Kieran. She wasn't even trained to do wound care, but Hazel was occupied at the time, and they didn't have another staff member.
He'd had that strange breathing pattern, Cheyne-Stokes, that TBIs always presented with. Sunset Scotty had come in and tried drilling a little hole to ease some of the pressure, but that didn't help. So he did some x-rays, and when he saw the results, he cut out a sizable piece of the kid's skull. His breathing got better after that, but his condition was otherwise still very poor.
The X-Rays were still sitting propped-up on the chair. There was a picture of the brain trying desperately to escape through the bottom of the skull, with a signature Sarsaparilla bottle cap 'for scale.' And a picture after the treatment, which looked better. The brain was trying to escape through the surgical hole, which was the intended effect. He had a bandage wrap around the site, but based on the scans, Hazel was imagining a huge bulge in his head where the skull flap had been removed. She knew it was probably a shallow crater, actually, but the swelling was so extreme that it was hard to imagine it that way.
There was no telling how this kid was going to end up, really. He already had a feeding tube straight into his stomachd a tube installed straight through his skin and into his stomach, a PEG tube; Marwan was a big fan of PEGs. In this case, Hazel thought it was a good call. He might be eating through that tube for the rest of his life, so they might as well skip the nasogastric feeding tube.
And if the kid lost his respiratory drive, he was going to need to be transferred to Usanagi's Clinic immediately, because the Children's Clinic had only one ventilator and there wasn't ever guaranteed to be a staff member who knew how to "Dance the Dance," with ventilators. Everyone who worked there knew the controls, even Major Elizabeth. But knowing instinctively when to switch to pressure control mode from volume control, and vice versa? That was a small crowd.
Of course, if the kid ended up on a vent, the sad truth was that they couldn't do much more for him at that point, even at Saint Usanagi's blessed clinic. They didn't have the resources of an old-world hospital. He would spiral slowly down the drain, and he would either come off of it quickly or die slowly. The same thing would happen without the vent if he refused to wake up, of course, only slower. Blood-clots, atrophy and pressure ulcers would chew up his motionless body. But that was a longer timer. If he was going to recover, even partially, he had a minute before that kind of thing started to set in.
Hazel always tried to hold out hope for these cases, while everyone else was quietly throwing around ideas like "Discharge-To-Jesus," and "Hot-Mess-Express." Not long ago, she'd seen this really heavy young woman in Usanagi's clinic who had lost two limbs, a significant volume of blood, and dropped a lung. She'd been intubated prehospital with no respiratory support, to protect her airway - a strange decision, but it worked fine - and had fallen into a coma. She got a chest tube, went on the vent, and miraculously, walked out the door of the clinic a few months later. Now she and Lucas Saller's kid, that up and coming Family Medicine Doctor or whatever he was, lived together on a little farm!
Maybe this would be just like that. As long as no one relented in their care, there was always a chance that this patient, too, could end up living on a farm with a sweet young doctor someday. Maybe he could even end up with Squid! God knows that horrible little goblin needed some companionship.
Hazel smiled to herself as she checked to make sure the site around the feeding tube was still okay, and that the line was clear. Ideally, she'd flush the line to clear out some of the gunk, but water had to be treated like a drug; it wasn't to be wasted. She took the big feeding syringe from the bedside table, attached it to the line and slowly drew up the residual liquid in the boy's stomach, which was predictably not very much. She pushed it back in and drew up the brown gunk out of the tub next to his bed.
As she pushed the gunk through his feeding tube, Hazel hummed along to the song on the radio, and listened to the boy's breaths. The strength, the rhythm… They sounded a lot better than they did earlier, actually. Maybe the swelling in his brain had gone down some. She wasn't an expert on that sort of thing, that was Eddie and Scotty's ballpark. She just caught babies and coerced children into getting better.
Once she'd finished feeding the boy, Hazel's rounds continued. The time blurred. The light through the windows turned gold, then red, as the sun outside set.
She saw a 7 year old named Nova who was sick with radiation poisoning after she'd gone to play hide-and-seek in Bumper Cars of Death outside the Sunset Sarsaparilla HQ. A brown bag of RAD-away hung on a pole beside her bed, alongside an empty bag of fluids. There was a bucket full of waste beside her bed, even though she'd been there less than a day. She looked completely miserable.
Nova would be alright.
She also saw a 10 year old boy who had been shot down by Mr House's Robot Thugs for trying to sneak onto the strip. His name was Zion. Miraculously, Zion was able to breathe to a pulse ox of 92% on his own when they took him off the vent, but he wasn't waking up anymore, his heart rate was insane, his systolic pressure was consistently below 70 on a combo of epinephrine and levophed, his liver and digestive system had been destroyed by the gunfire, he wasn't perfusing well, and his kidneys were surely headed out the door. Without the pressors, he'd probably go into cardiac arrest on the spot. They'd put him on the monitor when they came in, out of curiosity, and he was in V-Tach with such a low voltage that it almost just looked like a wiggly baseline. His heart had clearly suffered serious damage.
Hazel liked to hold out hope for the hopeless. But Zion would not be alright.
At the end of her rounds, Hazel liked to take a break and sit on the radio for a while. There was the one playing music, of course, but there was also a two-way radio in the West wing of the room tuned in to Clark County Dispatch. She clicked the "talk" button, and held the radio up to her chest. A pleasant chirp sounded over the room.
"Dispatch, this is GLOBAL-66, at Children's Clinic. Requesting Permission to speak on Fireground 5." A minute passed in silence. Eventually, a blast of static sounded through the radio.
"GLOBAL-66, you have permission to use the requested channel. I'll go ahead and page WHISKEY-66."
Even through all of the radio chatter, Hazel could detect a hint of sass in Alvarez's voice. They'd had this exact conversation many times before. They both knew what it meant.
Grinning to herself, Hazel swam through channels until she landed on FIREGROUND-7. Their channel. She asked for Fireground-5, but they always went to Fireground-7 because the two were equally unused, and she didn't want anyone snooping in.
She traced her fingers over the tattoos on the back of her hand while she waited for him to speak. She'd never gotten those ones covered up; the roses were gang signs, from a gang that didn't exist anymore, but now they were just pretty.
"GLOBAL-66, do you copy?" His voice was surprisingly clear over the radio. Hazel liked to imagine that meant he was nearby. She held the mouthpiece against her heart, tenderly, and pressed the button. The chirp sounded so inviting.
"Hi Scotty," she said. A gentle breeze blew in through the open window beside her. It felt wonderful.
"How's your day been, Sunrise Girl? How's that kid I saw earlier? The uh. You know the one."
Hazel's heart fluttered in her chest. Sunrise Girl. She crossed her legs and threw her curly black hair over her shoulder.
"Oh, he seems better. I'm glad you were able to make it down here to do the consult - pretty sure he'll still need to be transferred to Usanagi's Clinic, but you may have made the difference in his outcome. If we can keep him off the vent, I'll be happy." She glanced at her watch. She only had 10 minutes here. "... Of course, if I wanted to talk about work, I'd call another consult. This is off the clock. We aren't coworkers right now."
"So what are we then?"
Hazel rolled her eye. Scotty loved that question. It was every five minutes with him. She pressed the button again. This time, the chirp sounded angry, accusatory. "We're very good friends. Obviously. We do a lot of things together."
Sex. She meant sex. They did sex together. Hazel could almost imagine the smirk on Sunset Scotty's face as he drafted out his response on the other side of the radio.
"Yeah, that's, uh, that's definitely one way to put it." He was laughing. The son of a bitch. She shook her head. "We definitely do a lot of things together. But sometimes, I wish we could do more. You know? Like, real dates? I want to make you dinner sometime. Are we too old for that?"
Hazel slumped back in her chair. She raised the mic up real close to her neck, because she could already tell she didn't have the strength to do her radio-voice anymore.
"No, Scotty. We're not too old." She looked at her watch again. 8 minutes. "Just... Look at us."
"You mean the skin-falling-off-thing? Because let me just say, I think that me slowly turning into a ghoul is actually a perk! I mean, look how much weight I've lost. I used to be fat! Oh, and I don't have to worry about cancer anymore!"
On the surface, he was joking, but he really was self conscious about it. No one knew why it had happened, and it had been at the center of his life for a few years now. Most people had stopped asking him how he was doing by now, but he was very much still suffering. He still seemed ashamed when he took his clothes off in front of her.
"It's not because your skin is falling off, asshat," she concluded. She took a deep breath. It probably sounded pretty funny over the radio. "It's just because if we do this - if I let you into my heart - I'm sure it'd feel good at first. But it's a trap. We're senior specialists, I run my own clinic, we're always on call. There's no time to have a real relationship. We don't have any time to grow together."
Tense silence. And then: "So wait - it's not you, it's me? I can't believe you!" She almost hit the button to shoot back an angry retort, but then he continued. "Nah, I'm just messing. That's uh, that's a pretty fair assessment. I just wish I could run away with you sometimes."
"I'm sorry." Hazel tapped her foot against the table. Her heart wasn't sure how to feel right now, but it sure wasn't happy anymore. She cradled the radio mouthpiece against her chest once more. "I wish I could run away with you too."
But I can't. Obviously. They didn't even need to say it. The Children's Clinic became Hazel's entire life once she escaped from the streets, and Sunset Scotty had been the resident Saw-bones since he was in his late teens. They were both pushing 50 now, but the idea of quitting or retiring had surely never occurred to either.
Over in the patient's wing, Hazel heard a horrific gurgling noise, like someone had gotten a slurried beverage caught in their trachea. She briefly peeked out to check, but saw that Marwan was heading over in that direction. She went back over to the radio and checked her watch. 5 more minutes.
"Are you still there, Hazel?"
There was a chirp as Hazel hit the Push-to-talk button. "Yeah, I'm still here. Sorry." She tried to let herself relax. But there was a sudden clamoring in the patient wing - someone was running.
She felt her heart start to pick up. Her hands started to shake. Slowly, she stood up and peered around the corner.
Major Elizabeth had the cardiac monitor in her hand, and was running- oh no, FALLING, around a corner, and letting out a series of pitiful noises as she clamored like a newborn radstag to stand back up on the scuffed tile floor. Marwan was nowhere to be found.
"What the f… heck is happening!? What bed?" Hazel went storming past Major Elizabeth, who had righted herself by now, and towards the sounds of Marwan. He seemed to be over by bed 16 now. The miscarriage?
"Do we have a new patient in Bed 16?! Marwan, what's- Oh my god."
There was blood everywhere. Coming out of her mouth, her nose, it had splattered up onto the ceiling and spilled out onto the floor. It was all over her shirt. All over the skin doll, the malformed baby that she held against her chest. She coughed again, and blood spilled out the sides of her mouth, ran out of her nose. She tried to breathe, but it was like she didn't have any lungs to draw air from. She clutched at her chest and jammed her eyes shut.
"I have the monitor!" cried Elizabeth. Marwan motioned frantically at the bedside table.
"Okay, okay! Put the pads on her, she's about to die. Hazel, call for manpower!"
Hazel barely even processed running over to the radio room, switching to Clark County Dispatch, and jamming down the PTT button. It didn't take up any space in her memory of the event. She got back a "Busy" tone.
"God… ugh!" She hit the button again, and got the same tone. She waited a moment, hit it again, and got back a chirp. "Dispatch! Dispatch, this is GLOBAL-66, we need any nearby manpower! We have a 46 year old female with some sort of embolism, she's 100% about to code on us! Try and get REAPER-66 down here, I don't care how busy he is!"
She didn't wait for a reply. Back at the patient's bed, the pads were on the patient's bare chest, the dead baby was on the floor, her face was turning blue, and Marwan was intubating. Bless him. The patient had stopped coughing by now, and was just breathing these slow, ragged breaths. Soon, she had a tube down her throat, and she was breathing at Marwan's pace.
"Let me check a pulse…" The monitor read Sinus Tachycardia at about 140, but when Hazel pulled the woman's pants down to check for a femoral pulse, she felt nothing. It was pulseless-electrical-activity, PEA. This was officially a code.
Her blood ran cold. She looked around at the two people around her, the two brave souls who she'd be working with until backup arrived. She moved to the side of the bed and placed her hands between the woman's breasts, one on top of the other. And she braced herself.
It was time.
She started pushing.
"Elizabeth, honey, can you do IVs?" Hazel asked, between pumps on the chest. A gob of blood shot up through the trache tube and into the ambu-bag as Marwan delivered another ventilation. Despite her best efforts, Elizabeth couldn't help but show her fear.
"I- I mean…" She straightened her back. Balled up her fists. She was such an unimposing woman, but you could tell that she was putting everything into this. "I can try. I can definitely try!"
She darted off to fetch the IV supplies. Hazel and Marwan exchanged a knowing glance and continued their crusade.
"Alright, are we watching time? Pulse-rhythm check at 2 minutes, that should be coming up soon."
Hazel nodded. "Yeah. Let's say… crap. You tell me when."
Only 2 minutes in, and she was already feeling the strain. She couldn't do compressions like she used to. There was a song playing on the radio still, which made her angrier than it should've. She didn't want to hear it. The idea of music right now made her want to puke. How people could do compressions to "Staying alive" was a mystery to her.
Elizabeth came running back with the IV supplies, just as Hazel ceased compressions to do the pulse check, and to breathe. Still nothing. She shook her head.
Up at the patient's head, Marwan was checking the monitor. He sighed.
"No pulse, right? It is still PEA. Now, move, take my place..."
Everyone moved around and swapped places. Marwan on the chest, Hazel got a chance to take a break and ventilate for a while, while Elizabeth frantically set up the IV supplies. Hazel snapped the fingers on her free hand.
"Just grab an 18 and go to town! We'll put a cap on it later!"
"Um, okay…" She took up a position on the side where Marwan wasn't. Her face turned pale as she stepped over the lifeless skin doll. Blood squeaked beneath her boots. "Um. I don't know if I can do this…"
"Too late for that," said Marwan, from his position on the chest. He wasn't handling the compressions well. His face was already turning red, and sweat was gathering all over his skin.
Hazel watched as Elizabeth took the needle in her shaking hands, and started looking for a vein. She grit her teeth.
"I don't see anything!"
The patient made a gagging noise, and more blood shot up through the trache tube. It was starting to pool in the valve behind the ambu-bag, clog up the trache tube, and flecks were gathering on the inside of the blue ambu bag. Hazel briefly removed it and emptied all the blood out onto the floor.
"Well, try feeling for one then! We need this IV!" She snapped.
That was unhelpful advice. She knew it was unhelpful. But what she really wanted was for her to just start stabbing in places where veins might be. It's not like they'd hurt her at this point.
"I don't… I don't feel anything either!" Elizabeth looked down at the baby, then at the mother, and at the needle in her hand. She shook her head. "I'm sorry! I can't do this!"
"Pulse check!" Marwan snatched the 18 gauge from Elizabeth as he hopped off the chest, huffing and puffing like he'd just run a marathon. He checked a carotid pulse, and then immediately stabbed the needle into the woman's jugular vein. Blood flashed back into the chamber, then started to burble up past the needle. It spilled out onto the ground.
"No pulse. It is not a shockable rhythm, I looked. Elizabeth, you can secure that and figure out the extension tubing while we do work, okay?"
Before anyone could reply, Squid came bursting in through the doors. She was already out of breath.
"Did they say something about a code? Where's the party!? Is someone dead? I can do compressions! Let's fucking go, guys!"
An instrument of chaos. But she was young and fit. And she knew how to do compressions.
The other patients were starting to get up and gawk at this point. Some kids were crying. But Squid strode through the crowd, pushing other kids out of the way like they were peons. But then she turned the corner, and for a moment, the whole facade disappeared.
"That's a lot of blood," she whispered. She stood there, staring. Her eyes were wide.
"Are you going to get on that chest?"
She shook herself out of it. "Yeah yeah yeah! Sorry Marwan! Let's go! Let's party!" She looked around at the others, saw that their palms were covered in red. She swallowed. The mask was slipping again.
She climbed up on the bed, because she wasn't tall enough to do compressions from a standing position. She looked around one last time as she put her hands on the chest. "This girl's not uh… She's not a kid…"
"That's right." Hazel pushed a milligram of Epi through the IV Marwan had established, which had spilled an unbelievable amount of blood all over the floor before it had gotten capped off. Squid got started with the compressions, and although they were sloppy, they were plenty fast if a little shallow. Hazel decided to let her ease into it before immediately correcting her.
"Then, uh, why…" Squid took a deep breath and looked over her shoulder. Immediately, her whole body froze. She stopped the compressions and stared at the floor. At the thing on the floor. "Oh, fuck."
Marwan stopped ventilating for just a second to reach over and physically divert her gaze. Squid didn't resist him. "Keep up the compressions, Squid. Don't look down there."
"Right! Right, yeah!" She kept pushing. She could do that much. But she couldn't stop looking down at the baby. It was like she didn't even know what it was. Through the panting, she managed to laugh a little bit. "God, that's so weird…"
Hazel put her hand on Squid's back; her shirt was already soaked through with sweat. "You're doing great! But push that chest in deeper!"
"Fuck you, Doc! I'm trying my best here!" She wiped the sweat from her forehead and quickly got back to pushing. But she was pushing a lot deeper than before. Putting her whole body behind it. Her soul.
"Alright, Squid, I will count down from three, you will stop compressions and we will check the pulse and rhythm. Okay?"
Squid didn't give any indication that she understood Marwan besides a loud grunt, but that was enough. He checked his watch, and after a few seconds, he raised his fingers.
"Alright. Three…"
"Two…"
"One. Stop, Pulse check."
Hazel already had her tattooed finger on the femoral pulse. Elizabeth, trying to be useful, was checking a pulse too. They both shook their heads at the same time.
"No pulse," said Elizabeth. She bunched up her fists as everyone stared at her. Fucking obviously!
"Still not a shockable rhythm. We're at 50 BPM now, PEA. Squid, ventilate for me. I'm going to push atropine. Hazel-"
"Yeah, I know," she said. She already had her hands on the woman's chest. She started pushing again. The sternum was obviously broken at this point, she could feel the pieces shifting beneath her hands.
"There's all this blood in here- She keeps fuckin gurgling," said Squid. She moved her hand to pull on the tube, but Marwan slapped it out of the way.
"Keep ventilating. Squeeze once every six seconds."
Squid didn't talk much after that. She just stared at the bloodstained curtains and squeezed the bag once every six seconds. Sometimes, she'd look at the baby again. Her body didn't seem to like it when she looked at the baby. Every part of her would react, in a subtle but very noticeable way. It wasn't just a pallor at this point. Squid
was twitching.
A lot of patients were crying at this point. It was like a symphony. It drowned out everything else. And a whole crowd had gathered to come watch the shitshow.
"What's happening? Is someone dead?"
"Is that a baby!?"
"Is she going to be okay?"
"What are you doing? Why are you hitting them?"
"Why aren't you helping the baby!?"
Hazel just kept pushing. She couldn't let it get to her. They were just kids, and they were just curious. She couldn't be mad at them. But if they saw the dead baby, that was on them.
But then she looked at Squid. She was what, thirteen now? This stuff was her everyday life, and she looked like a husk. Like a ghost. How would the normal kids handle it? She took a few deep breaths, and tried to get Major Elizabeth's attention without taking her hands off the chest.
"Hey! Hey, Liz, can you grab something- grab another curtain? Grab a curtain from another bed and put it in front?"
That might've been the most important thing they did that night, in retrospect. The patient coughed up another gob of blood through the tube, and there was another pulse check as Elizabeth came rushing back with the curtain-on-wheels. Their working area suddenly became a lot darker. The woman still didn't have a pulse.
Marwan rubbed his face. His eyes were weary. "The rate is better, but we are still negative for a shock. I'll push some epi. Let's just keep rotating like this until Doctor Vasquez shows up. Elizabeth, you are up next."
Or until we hit 30 minutes, Hazel wanted to say. Whichever comes first.
"Right," she said instead. "Hop on that chest, Elizabeth!"
In 40 minutes, not a single shock was delivered. Not even a momentary pulse was felt. 7 milligrams of epinephrine and 5 milligrams of atropine were dumped into this patient's veins without effect. Blood was coming out of every orifice by the end. Her mouth, nose, vagina and rectum were all leaking bright red blood. The floor tiles were all slick with the stuff. Occasionally, it would still drip from the ceiling. The baby was still on the floor.
And no one else had shown up. Not a single person. Just poor Squid, who was so exhausted now that she looked like she was going to throw up all over the ground. Marwan and his middle-aged body had tapped out early, leaving the rest of them to do even more compressions.
The time was 2305 when they finally called it. They went ten more minutes than they were supposed to, and pushed drugs the whole time. Hazel really wanted this one. Marwan had started wrapping it up at the 30 minute mark, but Hazel had rallied everyone for one last push.
"Don't you dare," she had said. There weren't any tears in her voice then. No anger. No emotion at all. She'd been steady as hell, guiding the tired crew through the final stages of the hopeless code.
But now that she was alone again, sitting at the radio, figuring out what the hell to say to dispatch? She felt a familiar sting in her eyes. For the first time in months, Hazel felt genuinely overwhelmed.
She pressed the PTT button. The radio came back at her with a busy tone.
She slammed her fist against the desk.
"FUCK!" She screamed. She covered her mouth. "Heck. Frick. Ugh…"
She gave it a minute before trying again. And this time when she tried it, it chirped her right through. But she felt an inexplicable pain in her chest. She didn't want to speak.
"Dispatch… This is GLOBAL-66." She swallowed. "Patient has expired. Time of death is 2305. Cause of death is yet to be determined."
Alvarez didn't say anything for a while. Just as well. And when she finally did speak, her voice was somber.
"GLOBAL-66, acknowledged, did… did anyone respond to the manpower request? No one responded to my pages. REAPER-66 was in the OR. I'm sorry."
A moment of surprising informality from Alvarez. Usually, she'd wait to ask that sort of question in person. She must've felt bad about this one.
"Dispatch, uh, one person responded. A cadet. That'd be…" In the spirit of camaraderie, Hazel checked the recently revised callsign sheet to find Squid's callsign. She owed her that. It'd probably never been used on the radio before. "... FREMONT-STREET-69. She was very brave."
"GLOBAL-66, I'm not sure I… ah. Thank you GLOBAL-66. Acknowledged. Was there anything else?"
"Dispatch, tell Julie to arrange funeral services for two. There was a miscarriage involved. We have two corpses currently in the clinic."
"GLOBAL-66, acknowledged. Is that all?
"Dispatch, that's all."
Hazel prepared to stand up to leave, to go and hide in her bed, but then another voice sounded over the radio. She glanced at the speaker.
"Hey Hazel- uh, GLOBAL-66 this is WHISKEY-66. Let's steal Fireground-5 for a minute, alright?"
Slowly, she sat back down. She dialed in the channel. It was marked on the radio, but she had it memorized in her soul by now. Once she was there, there was silence. She held the mouthpiece up to her aching chest.
You first. The son of a bitch hadn't even tried to show up, and now he wanted to talk on the radio?
"Hazel? Are you there?"
She gave it a minute before she hit the button. The chirp echoed in her ears.
"Yeah. I'm here."
"Oh, good. I was worried I might've missed you." He didn't say anything else after that. Hazel glared into the mic.
"And?"
Confused silence. "And I'm glad you're here? From the radio chatter, it sounds like you just ran a pretty tough one."
Hazel put the pieces together. He hadn't gotten a page. He wasn't even on the schedule today. He was probably calling from his little farmhouse, up in the hills, situated strategically away from any clinic so he wouldn't be paged for "urgent" things on his off days. He'd probably only answered the call for the kid with the head injury earlier as a favor, because he knew it would mean a lot to her. There was no way for him to make it to this one in time if he was at home.
Shamefully, she raised the mic to her chest. There were tears in her eyes again.
"Yeah. I'm really sorry. I'm just, I'm very on edge right now. The whole clinic is a mess…"
It was true. Everyone had been in tears afterwards, except for Squid. Squid was just laughing every once in a while. But she wasn't really laughing. She was just doing those breathy little laughs that people do when they're worried. She was laughing because she didn't know what else to possibly do.
"Hey, that's alright, Sunrise Girl. You'll make it through this. How much longer is your shift?"
"12 more hours." She checked her watch. "Well. 11. I'm staying the night here."
She was sort of intrigued about this line of questioning. She took a deep breath and leaned back in her chair as she waited for the response…
"Okay. Well, how about I drop by, and we have a couple Hard Sarsaparillas? And I do mean, a couple. I'll only bring two. We'll be responsible about it and everything."
She looked at the patient wing. All the crying children, the chaos, the pain… Two drinks wouldn't hurt, right? They might even help. She needed something to take the edge off right now or she was going to go insane.
"I could do that," she said. She traced a finger over a tattoo of a snake on her neck. "And Scotty… don't bring that stupid plaid sleeping-bag again, alright? Mine is big enough for both of us."
The radio channel went silent. The background noise of the clinic flooded Hazel's mind again, but it didn't seem quite so overwhelming anymore. She took her keyring out of her pocket, and clasped her hand around the Sarsaparilla bottle cap on the string. The edges bit into the sensitive skin of her palm. She closed her eyes.
Sunset Scotty wouldn't walk through the doors for a long time. Another couple hours, probably. But she could think about him until then, and feel just a little bit better.