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I frowned at the word ‘survived.’
Had I?
“Who?” I wondered.
My eyes had fallen back closed again, and I couldn’t help but notice how tired I was.
“I don’t want to tell you,” she whispered.
My eyes popped open, and without thought, I closed them again as a memory assaulted me.
“Jasper.”
Her eyes widened.
“You…how?” she gasped.
I closed them again as peace assaulted me. “He’s in a much better place.”
CHAPTER 23
I don’t always exercise. But when I do, I’ll do it tomorrow.
-Text from Mavis to Fran
MAVIS
I should’ve been on top of the world.
At least, one would think that I would be seeing as my husband had just survived a heart transplant when he’d just been on his death bed only two weeks before.
But, the thing was, he wasn’t doing near as well as I thought he should be at this moment in time.
Granted, I hadn’t dealt with a ton of heart transplant patients in my career as a nurse, but I had dealt with a lot of surgery patients. The last few years of my life had been nothing but that.
And I would’ve thought by now that he would have more steam to him.
He was alive. Yes. He was talking. Yes. But there was something more wrong, and nobody believed me.
They kept calling me the ‘worry nurse’ when they thought I couldn’t hear.
But I had heard.
And I was sitting there, stewing, because I knew without a doubt that Murphy should be able to do more things than he was able to do.
He was so weak.
And he had this weird pallor to his skin, and though he was talking, he wasn’t the same.
His thought patterns were the same, but his mouth couldn’t form the words that he wanted to speak.
It was incredibly heartbreaking to see, and the staff thought that possibly it was due to his surgery and the pain meds.
It wasn’t.
A warm hand caught mine, and I looked up to find Murphy’s eyes open.
He squeezed my hand and said, “Okay?”
I was okay. He wasn’t.
“Fine,” I lied. “How are you feeling?”
He pressed his hand against his head and said, “My head hurts.”
My head immediately went into nurse mode seeing as Murphy never had headaches. See, where I got them regularly like clockwork—always at the most inconvenient time—he never got them. That was one symptom that he ended up staying away from.
I frowned. “Your head?”
He nodded. “Actually, it’s pounding like a motherfucker.”
I got up and went to the first nurse I could find, which happened to be one of the ones I liked the most.
She smiled at me when I arrived.
The other four nurses in the nurses’ station quieted and looked annoyed.
“Mrs. Romano,” the one I liked, Cannel, smiled. “How are you?”
I smiled at Cannel.
“Actually, I’m fine. But my husband says he has a headache,” I admitted.
Cannel frowned and stood up, walking with me to Murphy’s room.
She walked over to him and felt his head, frowning when she felt the heat.
“You’re running a fever,” she said. “Is it aching like a headache? Can you pinpoint where it hurts?”
I listened as he described this headache as the ‘worst headache of his life.’
I looked over at Cannel, who looked at me, and we knew.
He had a clot in his brain.
Son of a bitch!
Cannel calmly left the room.
I watched as she left, and then I heard the squeak of her Crocs as she all but sprinted toward the nurses’ station.
Five minutes later, the attending was inside the room, along with two other nurses besides Cannel.
Once the attending found the same thing we did, we all went outside.
My heart was pounding a mile a minute as I listened to them discuss the next step, an MRI.
Twenty-eight minutes later, the doctor was looking at the scans for Murphy’s brain with the neurosurgeon that’d come in.
“Needs immediate surgery,” the neuro declared.
“No can do,” the attending said. “Spencer went to the ER with a possible hip fracture just fifteen minutes ago. He’s the only anesthesiologist that’s on staff right now.”
I felt my stomach clench.
“What about Newton?” I asked.
“Caribbean with his wife,” the attending answered immediately.
“Cryping?” I pushed.
“In surgery at Regional,” he answered. “They had a motorcycle wreck come in.”
I closed my eyes. “What about from the other hospital?”
“That wreck had four other people requiring surgery. They’re at capacity,” he answered.
I swallowed hard. “Get Spencer on the phone. He can tell me what to do.”
They all looked at each other, knowing it was just as bad of an idea as I knew it was.
Yet…there were no other options.
If we didn’t get the clot out, it would kill him.
“Let’s do it.”
• • •
MURPHY
I was rolled into the surgical room with an expediency that told me that whatever was wrong with me wasn’t good.
I mean, honestly, I was aware that a blood clot of any kind wasn’t good. But apparently it being in my brain was bad. Very, very bad.
