Page 54
Of course he did. Nothing generally stays a secret for very long in this town.
“It is. It needs quite a bit of work, but it’s got good bones and you can’t beat that location or those views.”
“I bet.” He lingers a bit awkwardly just inside the door. “Say…I was going to head over to the diner for a quick lunch, could I interest you?”
“Actually—”
I’m about to tell him I had hoped to drop in on Pops at the pub and maybe pick up some paint on my lunch break, when one of the ER nurses yells at us as she passes.
“Need all-hands-on-deck. Two incoming, bike versus motor vehicle.”
Rohan and I both rush after her to the emergency entrance, just as the first gurney is being rolled in.
“Patrick is a thirty-two-year-old male, unrestrained driver ejected through the windshield of a pickup after hitting a cyclist and veering off into a tree. He’s unresponsive and …”
Oren Swanson’s verbal report fades to the background the moment I see the second gurney coming in. This one holds a young child, a girl.
“Preadolescent female—no identification—thrown off her bike when she was hit by a motor vehicle,” Lizzie Chernowski, one of our other EMTs, reports as we move the backboard the patient is strapped to from the gurney to the bed.
“Trauma to the back of the head, loss of blood, loss of consciousness, open fracture to the left lower leg, and multiple large abrasions along the left side of her body.”
I’m already cutting away the girl’s clothing as Lizzie starts rattling off vitals.
The poor girl is a mess, large patches of raw tissue where the road surface scraped away the top layer of skin. Her blond hair is matted with blood from her head injury, and her small foot, still wearing a pink sock, is pointing in the wrong direction as a result of the nasty break halfway up her shin.
The room is organized chaos. From an outsider’s perspective, I’m sure it looks like absolute mayhem, but the truth is, everyone in here knows their job and we work together like a well-oiled machine. But even with my ears tuned into barked orders and vitals updates, I’m still able to hear the young girl softly moaning, as I set a second IV line in addition to the one the EMTs placed en route.
Tuning out the chaos, I bend down to the girl’s head.
“Hey, honey, you’re in the hospital. You’ve been in an accident but we’ll take good care of you. What’s your name?”
Her blue eyes snap open and widen as she looks at me.
“It’s okay, we’re here to help you. We can give you something for the pain.”
I shoot over a glance at Rohan on the other side of the bed, who immediately orders some IV pain medication.
“My name is Dana, what’s yours?”
“Bri…Bridget.”
“Hi, Bridget. How old are you?”
“Nine,” she manages. Then her face crumples as she cries, “I want my mom.”
“Of course you do, sweetheart.” I stroke her hair with one hand and hold tight onto hers with the other, as I try to keep her focused. “But I need your last name too, so I can contact your mom.”
“Larson. My mom is Sandy Larson.”
“I know Sandy,” Lisa, one of the nurses, pipes up. “She’s a teller at Edwards Community Bank, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, that’s my mom,” the girl confirms.
“Better go give her a call,” Dr. Sharma directs at me. “Explain her daughter’s condition. We’re probably going to need some surgical consent forms signed.”
I glance at the poor kid’s leg, which doesn’t look like it’ll be simple to put back together. Luckily, the pain medication is making her a little drowsy, so she barely even notices when I let go of her hand and slip out of the room.
The call with Sandy Larson is short and to the point. To the mother’s credit, she doesn’t panic and is able to process the information I give her, promising me she is on her way. So often these phone calls are frustrating because the family wants to know what happened and what is wrong with their loved one, when we don’t have those answers yet, and I end up repeating, “I don’t know,” many times over.
