Officer Dawn Lerner grabbed one side of the stretcher and started wheeling it up the hall. "You, Edwards!" she pointed at him. "Get over here now and save this woman!"

Edwards nervously pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and hurried forward. "Put her in exam room 4. We'll have to amputate."

One of the returning officers, Gorman, stepped forward. "It's too late for that, Doc. We found her by the side of the road," he exchanged a smug look with his partner, "and she was already bit. That was about a half hour ago, but there's no fever, yet." He shrugged.

"Why did you bother bringing her back here, then? There's nothing I can do if that much time has passed!"

Dawn lashed out with her palm and connected with Edwards' left cheek. "Come on Edwards, don't act like you're just flying by the seat of your pants, here. You've been working on something lately, I know it. And you're either going to grow a pair and try to save this woman or she's going to die today because you chose to do nothing!"

Edwards held his cheek where a bright red mark was forming, then grimaced and shook his head, making the decision. "Get me the dialysis machine NOW! She looks to be severely dehydrated, so I'll need a saline drip set up. And get that sweater off her." Dawn snapped her fingers at the officers, motioning for them to do as he said.

He tried not to let panic overtake him, but he was breathing hard, his mind scrambling to remember all the things he needed to do. He knew diseases inside out, and how tissues and organs responded to them, but this situation made him feel like he was in way over his head with a mile of ocean beneath his kicking feet. His comfort level had always been in examining things through a microscope, removed from the situation and patient suffering. Now here he was with a living breathing person's life in his hands, and it scared him to death.

Someone rolled the dialysis unit into the room next to the young woman's bed, and Edwards' hands shook as he sterilized them in the sink. He was glad he had been proactive and installed the pH filter in the machine already. It would be one less step, and would buy the patient more time.

"I don't have time to make the incision to create an arteriovenous fistula..."

Dawn looked over and snapped at him, "What's that?"

"It's when you join an artery and a vein inside the patient's arm to create a temporary loop in their circulatory system. It allows for greater blood flow for dialysis. Blood from the heart flows through the artery into the dialysis machine and returns to the body at another point downstream in the connected vein." He dried his hands and put on a new pair of vinyl gloves. "An AV graft is quicker. You just use an artificial external vessel, a small tube, to connect the artery and vein outside the arm."

Saying an internal prayer, he located an artery and swabbed the young woman's arm before inserting the needle and connecting it to the port of the small, clear tube, making sure the valve was closed first. Edwards fought the urge to push his glasses up, and fumbled to find the vein he wanted, first wiping with alcohol and then inserting another needle and bringing the other end of the tube down to meet it, reopening the small valve.

He searched the tray next to the bed for the larger guage needle he had set aside weeks ago. "The blood is then removed through this," he inserted it in the artery upstream from the graft, "and goes into the machine for hemodialysis through a pH filter that, I hope, causes some of the virus to be inactivated..."

"You hope?!" Dawn yelled at him and grabbed his arm.

"Yes, I hope, Dawn. You're expecting me to pull miracles out of thin air, here! So, if you want this to have any chance of working then stay out of my way or your precious resources will have been wasted for nothing." Edwards bristled with anger, shrugging her hand off before he inserted the needle that would return the filtered blood after dialysis into the vein downstream from the AV graft.

The doctor connected the tubing from the machine to both IV needles, reaching over to begin the hemodialysis, but stopped at the last second. "Dammit," he said quietly. "We need to set up a citrate drip so her blood doesn't clot while it's outside of her body."

Dawn stepped forward from watching him, "We don't have much left in the medicine cabinet. Can't we use Heparin, instead?"

Edwards shook his head vehemently. "Too risky. There's more chance of localised infection with Heparin. This woman is going to need all the luck we can give her."

Dawn gave a quick nod and rushed out of the room, returning moments later with the vial, which Edwards set up on another drip into the unconscious woman's arm.

Then, with a deep breath, he turned on the dialysis machine and watched the blood move through the tubing from her arm, into the machine, and back into her arm again.

He stepped back and willed his heart to stop racing. "We'll let this run for 4 hours, no more. Her entire blood volume will circulate through the machine every 15 minutes. The saline drip will re-hydrate her and help counteract against the slight drop in pH of her blood. All we can do now is wait."

Dawn crossed her arms and looked at the figure on the bed. "How long after that will we know if it worked?"

Edwards shook his head and exhaled. "I'm not sure. We'll have to monitor her temperature, watch for any signs of decline in health. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll know within 24-48 hours how her system has reacted to all of this."

He shuddered at the odds this poor woman was facing, knowing he'd done what he could to give her a chance, but that if she survived the night he might just started believing there was a God again.

Dawn Lerner nodded and glanced at Edwards. "I'll leave you to it, then," and walked out of the room.

He sighed and decided to start tending to his patient's secondary wounds. He gave her a sedative as she would likely do herself more harm than good if she woke up, frightened and in an unfamiliar place, while undergoing the dialysis. The doctor cleaned the bite and the ugly gash on her left cheek as best he could, stitching up both in turn. He wrapped her wrist in a soft cast to finish and decided to go lay down in his office for an hour or so and then come back and check her vitals.

Before he left the room he looked down at the pale figure on the bed, her long blond hair splayed out across the pillow, and wondered what her name was.

Please leave a comment. I'd love to know your thoughts on this chapter! Thank you.