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Of course, Kayla consented to the surgery. Maybe I had too much faith in Adrian, but I thought it was their only option realistically. When Adrian had mentioned an artificial heart, I had been sceptical—it seemed like something straight out of science fiction. I knew that there had been successes with it in children as young as eleven, but I just couldn’t see how it might work on Jasmine. Her chest cavity, her whole body, was simply too small, even for the downsized version of the machine. I was concerned about how it would handle the situation and how she would adjust to her new life. Even if she got so well that she could be discharged, Jasmine would have to be on a driver until the day a new heart was found for her.
When I pushed aside my concerns about Jasmine, my confusion about Adrian surfaced. He was attractive, he was smart, he cared about me, and he had more depth to him than he showed in the hospital. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I knew that if I gave even a little of myself over to my feelings for him, I’d cave completely. A part of me wanted to cave, wanted to know what it felt like to love and be loved by him. The completely rational part of me that had coached me through an early graduation twice had a terrifyingly small voice at that moment, and all it could do was remind me of how off-limits Adrian was.
My conversation with my mother hadn’t helped either. While she had never been one to pressure me into success, and definitely hadn’t chosen my career path for me, she also didn’t stand for any crap regarding my work ethic. She thought Adrian was a danger to that carefully cultivated work ethic. Not only did he pose a possibly dangerous distraction, but I knew she thought I would end up exactly where she’d been twenty-five years ago: pregnant and out of a job with her reputation in the gutter. She didn’t want me to repeat her mistakes, and as much as I thought I knew better, she had warned me against spending time with him.
How could I tell her I thought I was falling for him?
Every time he spoke, my heart rate picked up, and every time he moved, I moved around him. I was the Earth and he was the Sun and I felt so,sopathetic that I was focusing on that instead of on the life of the girl we would be trying to save later that day. I rubbed my eyes and continued walking, trying to put it all out of my mind.
A flail chest was a common enough injury that I had seen enough photos and victims of it to be acclimatized, and yet this one was particularly disturbing. The patient was a thirty-two-year-old man that had fallen from an incredibly high ladder at work. I had been called in to do the grunt work like handing the doctors bandages and retrieving the portable x-ray but was eventually standing aside, watching the uneven rise and fall of his chest. His body looked like it could have been made of putty if it weren’t for the bandages that slowly soaked with blood. The man was awake, and I couldn’t even imagine the panic he was feeling, the way the world must look when you were in that much pain.
“Intern,” one of the ER doctors grunted, “talk to him; you need to talk to him.”
I could see that for myself, with the way his eyes were wide with panic. He reminded me briefly of a horse I’d seen fall over at a race track once. It had the same crazed look of fear, with heavy breaths pouring from its nose. Then people had surrounded the horse, I’d heard a muted shot, and my mother had driven us home. This man was not a horse. Not something you just “put out of its misery”. This man was alive and scared, and I wasn’t allowed to touch his injuries. However, I could damn well comfort him.
“Hey,” I said moving up towards his head. “What’s your name?”
The man just gasped breathlessly for a moment, before moaning in pain when someone probed at the fracture in his leg. The man groaned and passed out. Jonah had been paged, and I just wanted him to arrive, wanted someone I knew to be there. In a way, I wanted someone to tell me it would all be okay.
“Tucker,” one of the doctors told me, “name’s Tucker.”
“Alright Tucker, I’m Stevie,” I said steadily. What the hell was I even supposed to say? “I’m sorry we met like this, but we’re going to do our best to fix you up.”
The man stayed unconscious, but I had no other way to help than try to reach him wherever he was.
“Did you know I’m an intern here? That’s why I’m not working on you. I know this whole place must look pretty scary to you right now, and I get it. It is kind of scary, even when you work here. I figure that’s why they give you the year to get used to it.”
“Giving the man your life story, Christophers?” Jonah asked, sweeping in confidently.
He stared at the x-rays and immediately started doing things that would have caused immense pain to Tucker, were he awake. One of the doctors muttered something to Jonah, who nodded and released them back to the OR. I dug for an intubation tray, and Jonah took it from me. A new doctor came in and sat by Tucker’s head, prepared to help Jonah with the intubation.
“Tucker, we’re going to insert a tube in your throat to help you breathe,” I said.
Jonah nodded encouragingly at me and carefully tilted Tucker’s head back.
“See you on the other side, Tucker.”
The words had barely left my mouth before everything went haywire. As they tried to intubate him, the still unconscious Tucker looked like he was struggling to draw a breath, and then the machines started beeping erratically. Jonah only took a moment to look shocked before he jumped into action.
“Get a crash cart!” he yelled at me, and I didn’t need to be told twice.
He started preparing for manual compressions, and I said a prayer for poor Tucker who couldn’t die, not like this. I grabbed the cart and paged the crash team, who were hopefully floating around the ER. I darted back into the room to see the anaesthesiologist had gone leaving Jonah alone, and I hoped it was for a damn good reason.
“Get me the damn ECG,” Jonah said, and suddenly there was more blood than before.
Jonah was moved aside by the crash team, who flooded the room and spoke in a fast way that I imagined made sense only to them.
I pulled the ECG up on the computer screen as we were shunted into the hall and showed it to Jonah. He clicked through the lines, moment by moment, and finally—
“Oh shit,” Jonah muttered. “Shit, I should haveseenit.”
He pointed to the screen, and if he hadn’t shown it to me, I wouldn’t have seen it either—certainly not in an emergency setting. On Tucker’s ECG, you could see where the heart had begun to slow and the moment where we began to intubate, and he’d arrested.
“Cardiac tamponade,” I muttered.
Jonah was horrified with himself, and despite the fact that we both had places we should have been, despite the fact that we knew life had to go on, the two of us stood outside the room staring inside and watched a man die.
* * *
