And for a few more minutes Johan was still just a man in a corridor. A tall young man, deep in conversation with the policeman. He was wearing work trousers, the sort tradesmen wear, full of pockets and covered in paint. A rucksack with a bike helmet clipped to the side. His eyes, striking even from a distance, swerved away from the police officer mid-conversation and momentarily met mine.
I registered a fleeting shock, although that wasn’t so unusual in trauma. Most of us operated in a heightened state.
Johan’s eyes held mine as he talked, following me. I turned away to call the lift and check Deniz’s monitor, but then I looked back again. Oddly, for me, I couldn’t help myself. He was still talking, still watching me quite openly. Somewhere inside me, a warning signal. For a moment we looked directly at each other. Then the lift doors opened and I was off.
—
It was a bad day in the department. As we came back from scan most of the team was diverted to a code red being helicoptered in from Essex, leaving me on my own to do Deniz’s secondary exam.
I began immediately, starting with the chest drain I’d been worried about. It had slipped, I was right, and the drain wasn’t swinging with Deniz’s breath. I ran across to Resus 2 to ask for help but the code red was just arriving and there was not one person I could have peeled away.
I ran back across to Deniz, whose oxygen sats were now dangerously low. I yelled for anyone else in Emergency Medicine—anyone at all—but nobody came.
At that moment the police officer from the corridor walked into the room, as if it were no more than a ward cubicle, and with him the man in the work trousers with those eyes.
“I’m sorry to trouble, you, Nurse, but I need to ascertain—”
“I’m one of the surgical doctors,” I interrupted. Yanika had taught me to shut that kind of thing down immediately.Nothing will change if you don’t, she’d said, just like my mother would have done, and they were right. “Please leave. My patient needs urgent help.”
He bristled. Police officers don’t like being given orders. “I understand that, Doctor”—a mild note of disdain—“but the thing is, this man, who was an eyewitness at the scene, has the patient’s belongings with him, and before we can release them to her we need to confirm her identity.”
The beautiful man shook his head, apologizing silently. He made to leave, but the officer put up a hand to stop him. “Also, we need to know what sort of injuries the victim has sustained, because we believe we’ve now found and apprehended the hit-and-run driver, so…”
The monitor alarm escalated.
“Out!” I shouted, as the world around me narrowed. Deniz’s lung had completely collapsed, putting pressure on her heart. She was close to cardiac arrest. It was too late to open a new chest drain kit, and besides, I had nobody to help me. So I reached for a scalpel and cut thechest drain stitch, pulled out the drain, and then put my finger in through the hole.
Closing my eyes, praying, I swept my finger around the inside of the chest cavity.
The room disappeared. Just me, the patient, and a growing tide of primal anger. Yet again, I was alone and nobody was coming to help. Lost in a crowd, the people who should be there to back me up nowhere to be seen. All of them too busy. Too fucking busy.
Blood gushed from Deniz’s chest and her rhythm began to normalize on the monitor. I yelled again for help. The A&E reg and a trauma nurse ran in, pulling on new gloves. “What’s happening?” the registrar asked, bewildered.
“The patient tensioned. I had to do a finger thoracostomy.”
“Why?”
“The drain wasn’t draining. It had slipped and kinked.”
He started work on her. “I think that was a little premature—” he began.
“She’s stable because I had to stick my finger into her chest,” I interrupted. “Your stitches weren’t tight enough.”
There was a weighted silence. I realized my fists were balled, as if I was preparing to punch the man. He was a decent enough guy, this one. Chris. I’d done one of my F2 rotations under him down in Epsom.
He looked around at me for a fleeting second, and I held eye contact. Another thing Yanika had taught me. “You did the right thing,” he said after a beat. “Good work.”
He wasn’t happy, but he was a good enough physician to climb down. Plenty weren’t.
“I’ve got it from here,” he said, turning back to Deniz. “Can you show the police officer out and get Joel and Faisel in here.”
I wheeled around. The officer, unbelievably, was still there, by the door.
“What?” There was no forethought, no consciousness. It just burst out of me. “I told you to leave. Why thehellare you still here?”
The policeman stared at me, shocked at first, then angry.
“Get out!” I shouted. I couldn’t stop myself. “Getout! Now!”
