“LANEY!” Ronan’s voice was a distant roar. “Jesus, help her! Call an ambulance! She has a heart condition!”
My name, shouted with pure terror, was the last thing I heard as the world went black.
34
ONE BEAT AT A TIME
LANEY
“Ithink she’s waking up. Laney? Can you hear me?”
The first thing I noticed when I woke up in the hospital was the regular beep of a heart rate monitor. Slowly, I opened my eyes and immediately closed them again. Everything was too bright. The white ceiling. The fluorescent lights. Even the streetlamp flickering off Megan’s hair.
Megan.
I squinted one eye open again. Then the other.
Megan was grinning down at me. “Hey there. Welcome back to the land of the living.”
I groaned. My throat was sore. My chest was sore too, and I was so, so tired. “What happened?”
My dad appeared on my other side, face creased with worry and his thinning hair standing up like he’d been running his hand through it for hours. “Hey, kiddo. You’re at the hospital.”
My eyes popped fully open now. “I—what? No, I don’t want to?—”
As I started to move, several sensors apparently attached to different parts of me went off.
Almost immediately, a woman in a pair of purple scrubs hurried into the room. “Welcome back, Ms. Fisher. You’re in the cardiac wing at the University of Washington Hospital. My name’s Halima. I’m the nurse on duty right now.”
“I don’t want surgery,” I croaked. “I didn’t ask for?—”
“No, you didn’t, but you needed it.” Halima flicked a few buttons off and helped me to sit back in my bed. “Which is why Dr. Palmer finished your ablation two hours ago. You’re just now coming out of anesthesia.”
Already, I was too tired to fight. Instead, as the nurse proceeded to record a number of vitals, I sank back into the pillows and turned to face Megan and Dad. My best friend’s face was red, her eyes swollen from obvious crying.
“You,” she gritted through her teeth, “scared the crap out of me. Don’t ever do that again.”
“Goes for me too, Laney bug.” Dad reached over to squeeze the hand that didn’t currently have an IV coming out of the top.
I swallowed, back to feeling bleary. “I—they did the surgery?”
“We did.”
We all turned as Dr. Palmer entered the room, carrying a clipboard. He smiled kindly. “You know, Laney, when I asked you to come in for a consultation, I didn’t mean to the ER.”
I managed a rueful smile. “Well, I like to go big or go home, I guess.”
He rewarded my weak joke with a chuckle. Dad joined him, albeit hesitantly. Megan didn’t seem to think it was funny at all.
“Anyway, I wanted to stick around until you came out of surgery. Walk you through what happened and everything we did. You gave your friends and family a bit of a scare.”
I listened as the doctor laid out everything that had happened. After I blacked out in my apartment, the cops radioed in for an ambulance. One of them did chest compressions while the other got an AED from the squad car.
“You were lucky they were able to shock you so quickly,” he said. “You were already coming around when the EMTs arrived.”
Once I arrived, Dr. Palmer rushed me into surgery to perform the operation that essentially destroyed the extra electrical signal in my heart.
“It was a complex ablation procedure, in part because you were already under distress, and in part because the accessory pathway was so close to your normal pathways, but I’m happy to tell you that the cryoablation was successful.”
