Disclaimer: I don't anything Third Watch - every one else is of my own creation. Thanks for sticking with me (especially SullyFan!) I know it's a long time between posts but these guys don't write themselves in a linear fashion - stay tuned there are a lot of twists & turns in store. Patience is a virtue & as always reviews make me write faster xox Reluctant Flame
Haylee was inside the posh, designer bridal boutique pacing the length of the store and glancing at her watch every 10 seconds – it was 9:45 Sera was already 20 minutes late and hadn't bothered to call or answer her cell phone. Haylee was beginning to get pissed off. "You're late!" Haylee shrieked as Seraphina finally ran into the bridal shop. Haylee looked over her best friend disappointed – Sera's hair was haphazardly scraped back from her face, she was in jeans torn, faded jeans and a crumpled baby t-shirt. Sera's ruined cherry red pedicure was visible due to her strappy jesus-style sandals - in short she looked like she just rolled out of bed. Haylee had envisioned her looking a little more polished to attend this dress fitting. "I'm sorry honey, I just had the shift from hell…If I get one more MVA this month it will be the end of me." Sera panted trying to catch her breath as she dumped her satchel bag on the courtesy seat and threw a weary glance at the racks in front of her. "I need to get back to Pediatrics." She moaned. "Yeah all the runny noses, broken bones, tonsillectomies and kids with cancer you handle – no thank you! I'd rather spend the rest of my days down in the ER pit than dealing with parents. You are a brave woman." Sera shrugged flicking through the dresses on the rack in front of her, she didn't argue with Haylee there wasn't any point.
There was a lot more to her job on the children's ward than what Haylee thought – Sera's specialty was Pediatric Oncology (kids with cancer). It was a tough job she not only dealt with sick children but with their emotionally distraught parents and families. Things could get heated on the ward, especially when someone was newly diagnosed and you had to explain to families what was wrong with their child…every one always wanted to know why their son or daughter had to get sick. It was just the luck of the draw really; nobody had any control over who got cancer and who didn't. For Sera though, the job was truly rewarding – she didn't always get to see them go home, quite often her patients died from their cancer but it was a privilege to be there to help them in their last days. Kids were generally pretty resilient, they faced the prospect of dying with very little fear, they had such courage and tenacity. Often it made Sera think about her own life, her own ridiculous insecurities and fears – when she saw what these kids faced on a day to day basis it made her realize how extremely lucky she was.
"You're not listening to a word I've said are you? What on earth happened today?" Haylee whined glaring at Sera her hands on hips waiting impatiently for an answer. "Trust me you don't want to hear about my day, lets just find a dress okay." Sera suggested weakly. The look on Haylee's face said it all – "I'm not looking at one more dress until you tell me what the hell happened today and why you're in such a feral mood." Haylee demanded as she sat down on the plush brown leather couch and scowled at her best friend. Sera groaned inwardly, doing a mental eyeball roll before taking a deep breath and launching into a recount of the shift from hell…
4:10 pm Thursday
"Hey Boscorelli if all you want to do is brawl then get the hell out of my ER!" Seraphina screamed across the crowded ER. Boscorelli stopped scuffling with his prisoner shoving him harshly down into a waiting room chair. Sera noticed the guy looked pretty busted up, his face was half smeared with blood and he was gingerly cradling his ribs. If she'd had a moment to even think she might have wondered if Bosco had found his suspect in this state or if Bosco was the reason for the guy's current condition. Sera was trying to negotiate her way through the overrun ER, it seemed like half of Manhattan had decided to get sick or injured and come for treatment at Angel of Mercy. Sera was short staffed, the ER chief had just appointed a new resident who insisted upon going against the grain at every turn. Throw into the mix the 6 new interns who were so fresh they still resembled newborns and the beginning of the flu season – it was no wonder Seraphina felt the way she did.
Nothing had gone right for her today, every decision she'd made was a crappy one. She showed up for work over an hour early, hoping to catch up on some paperwork she'd neglected the day before – Dr MacArthur (the new resident) had quickly put the kibosh on that. Instead he'd lumped her with a patient load that would exhaust the extreme patience of Mother Theresa and then disappeared into surgery for the remainder of the day. Not only that but he refused to attend to emergency consults and Sera missed her chance at viewing 2 incredible surgeries. Needless to say her nerves were shot, her temper frayed and her sanity barely holding on by a thread when Boscorelli and his suspect showed up at the ER.
"Yo Jasper, we gonna get this numbskull seen too anytime this century?" Bosco called out to her impatiently. Seraphina marched her way towards him. "Are you blind Boscorelli? Do you not see all of these other sick people in here waiting to see a Doctor? It's very simple math Boscorelli, I am only 1 person, I am three nurses down for the day, I've got an arrogant surgical resident riding my ass, 6 practically useless interns who look at me with disgust because I'm 'only a nurse' and a waiting room of more than thirty people. You want your perp attended to faster, take him to a different hospital." By the end of her rant Sera was wild eyed and breathless, she wasted no time waiting for a response from Bosco. She turned on her heel and strode off leaving Boscorelli standing there open mouthed and dumbstruck with no witting retort, no scathing comeback.
He let out a sigh and rested back against the waiting room wall, his arms tightly folded across his chest. "Haha, that little firecracker sure told you officer." Without looking at his prisoner Bosco smacked the idiot up the side of the head. "Sit there, shut up and don't bleed on my shoes or the next medical personnel you see will be the undertaker." Bosco threatened. He watched as a timid young Dr called out his suspects name and looked around helplessly. Bosco groaned and shoved the guy over to the Doctor. Bosco watched as the young man's face paled as he got a closer look at his suspects face – one eyebrow had been split, blood had dried over his face, he'd also received a nasty gash to the cheek which had debris embedded in it. "Which exam cubicle Doc? We ain't got all day." Bosco bitched as the Doctor just stood there looking around for someone more senior, somebody better equipped to handle a prisoner. Bosco saw Sera hovering at the entrance to a cubicle rolling her eyes at the intern's hesitation.
Sera watched as the intern performed a clumsy physical assessment, asking barely any questions and documenting his findings on the wrong chart. Sera grit her teeth and set her jaw, if she had to put up with one more 'baby-doctor' she would have to plead guilty by reason of mental disease or defect after she had torn them limb from limb. Bosco watched her with a barely concealed grin; Sera was squirming badly, itching to smack the patient chart around the Doctors head a few hundred times. He saw her foot began to tap lightly on the floor once the doc had finished his initial assessment and then stood back for a full three minutes before saying anything or ordering any tests/treatment. "Okay Mr Dordan, lets get you admitted. I'll need to insert an IV for antibiotics, well get FBC, U&E, ECG, Chest X-ray, MRI and book you in for a consult with a surgeon regarding your facial wounds."
Sera's jaw dropped, the guy needed barely any of that – he certainly didn't need to be admitted and as for a surgical consult… "Here's what I'm actually going to do. I'm going to organize chest X-ray and bloods, I may even decide he warrants an ECG but I find it highly unlikely. Then I'm going to get you a sterile dressing tray, you can irrigate the wound, stitch his eyebrow, apply some topical antiseptic cream and prescribe him some oral antibiotics if you really feel it's necessary. Then you can discharge this patient and move on to the next person out of the many sick injured and dying currently clogging up my ER." Sera told him as she took several vials of blood, labeling them and setting them aside for pathology and handing the lab forms across to the inter to sign for the chest X-ray he'd ordered.
"Your ER?" he asked incredulously. "Yes my ER. Seeing as your resident has decided to spend the day up to his elbows in internal organs giving me the painful responsibility of babysitting you and your moron friends and trying to prevent you from killing anyone today and the fact that I'm the most senior person currently manning the ER, you bet your ass it's my ER." She walked out and returned a few seconds later with a plastic packed dressing tray. "You have done this before right? Think you can manage to do it without killing the guy?" She bitched glaring at the doctor, daring him silently to challenge her. "Where do you get off, you're just a nurse!" The intern snapped at her pissed off by her attitude, not realizing that she was actually trying to help him out.
Sera stopped took a slow controlled breath as she counted to five in her mind. "I'm going to ignore that you little weasel only because I bring to this situation something you don't, experience. Now either you can do your job and treat this patient so he can leave us or you can run off to your resident and whine about how the big bad nurse is being a bitch and won't play nice. If you do that you're just going to look like a dickhead who can't handle the pressure of the ER and they'll reassign you to the geriatric ward. Either way I'm still going to be here getting in your face and ordering you about because you obviously aren't capable of making a decision with out holding a powwow with the other interns." Sera waited for the inevitable argument, which for the first time that day didn't occur. "Okay so there may just be hope that you actually have a brain." She commented as she exited the exam room, once the intern had started irrigating the wound.
7:48pm Thursday
Sera was running from bay to bay, doing what she could to try to get these people out of her ER, to limit the number of people who were exposed to the strain of flu going around. Mostly as she ran from patient to patient she was trying to hurry them out not because she'd had enough of dealing with the sick and just wanted to go home and sleep for a full day but because she'd had the feeling all day that something big was going to happen this afternoon. And of course it was bound to happen and it was guaranteed to be huge because not only was she short staffed, she was also short tempered and short on caffeine – a lethal combination. "Don't they teach you how to do this in med school?" Sera wondered under her breath as she inserted yet another IV cannula for one of the interns.
Sera was fussing over an older gentleman who had been brought in complaining of severe chest pain, shortness of breath and a scalp laceration he got when he'd passed out from the pain. He'd just been told that he'd had a serious heart attack and was having trouble coming to terms with the fact that the heart attack hadn't killed him. "So I'm not dead?" he asked. Sera smiled confused, "You thought you had died?" She asked him. "Yeah I mean, I was sure I had. This has to be heaven right? What makes you think that I'm not dead?" "The fact that you're sitting up in bed talking to me with you heart beating and your lungs breathing was a pretty good indication." She looked at him perplexed. "You thought the hospital ER was heaven?" "It isn't?" Mr Johnston asked her his face screwed up, bewildered. "God I hope not buddy." Sera smiled at him broadly giving his hand a reassuring squeeze before moving on to the next patient.
10:28pm Thursday
The next few hours flew by in a blur of sick, injured and hypochondriac patients rotating in and out of the ER. Sera risked a glance at the clock breathing a very real sigh of relief to see that it was only 30 minutes until her shift ended and she could go home and collapse in an exhausted heap. She allowed herself a small grin before turning back to her paper – there was no point counting down the minutes but the knowing today would soon be over gave her a well deserved thrill. "Jasper, why the hell is the fracture hip in cubicle 5 still here? I told you to free that bed hours ago!" Sera took a slow deep breath and tried to block out Dr McInery's rumbling complaint. "That fractured hip belongs to a woman named Mrs Hardcastle. Mrs Hardcastle is still here because there aren't any beds free up in ortho yet."
Dr McInery slammed a clipboard on top of the file Sera was documenting in. "Guess again. The updated bed report came out an hour ago. Get her off my god damned service now! Incase you haven't noticed we need the bed!" Gritting her teeth Sera dialed the number for the Orthopedics ward and began negotiating a transfer for her patient. "No Dr McInery wants her out of here now. Look you've got three empty beds, I have people stacked in corridors…she's the only one…thanks Jesse you're a gem." Okay one bed free 16 people who want it…what's next. Sera thought to herself. her unasked question was answered in the form of the cheif ER nurse Margaret approaching Seraphina determinedly. "I've got another three nurses out with this damned flu, Sera I need you to stay back." Sera closed her eyes, counted to ten nodding slowly. She realized she wasn't actually being asked to stay rather she was instructed. God this day had to end eventually right?
1:56am Friday
It had finally quieted long enough for Sera to make a cup of coffee and settle into a stool behind the expansive nursing station to catch up with her paper work. She sighed frustrated as a shadow fell across the page, she looked up annoyed before realizing the shadow belonged to a familiar ER visitor. "Officer Boscorelli, you've come back to hassle me some more?" She quipped lightly. Bosco shrugged, giving her a slight grin. "I thought about it but you one day I might actually need you to patch me up, figured it wasn't too smart to piss you off completely." "You are actually smarter than you look aren't you Boscorelli." Sera laughed lightly.
"What are you still doing here?" Bosco asked her conversationally, leaning against the desk and stuffing his gloves into his pocket. "Half the nursing staff are out with the flu so I'm pulling my third…no fourth double for the week. What about you, third watch finished hours ago." Sera inquired pushing back an errant curl. "Half our guys got the flu too – the overtime is gonna come in handy this month." Bosco replied nonchalantly as a burst of static screeched from his radio. "55-Central to 55-David 10-10 suspected shots fired in the vicinity of Edgerton sporting goods on West 138th." "55-David 10-4." Bosco shook his head wearily, "My public awaits. Have a good night Sera." He told her quickly stuffing his gloves back on and moving briskly towards the exit. "Be careful out there Bosco!" Sera called after him that niggling feeling of something huge and disastrous still looming just in the distance, slightly out of her reach.