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Brady, as usual, got right to the point. “They dropped our funding.”
I mashed my teeth together, fighting the urge to curse. Brady hated cursing, and I did my best around him, but it was nearly impossible with that kind of news. “On what grounds?”
“It’s like you said,” he replied wearily. “The preliminary findings are promising, but without the MRI 3T data, we don’t have the numbers to bring it home.”
Brady and I had been working on a new imaging program called “connectomics,” which used state of the art imaging to map out the neural circuitry of the brain. If we could develop it, it would help understand the connections between neurons and provide some insight into brain functions and disorders. We had worked our asses off together during our residency in Salt Lake to get the thing off the ground, but we kept hitting a wall.
Mainly, a funding wall. The imaging we needed to back up our research had only recently been made available, and the machines were expensive to get our hands on.
“Did you give them the literature on the 3T in Colorado? I thought we sent that over.”
“It’s no good, man,” Brady said. Defeat colored his tone. “Without the funding, we can’t get to the machines. And without the data, we can’t get funding.”
Despite Brady on the other line, I swore. Gratuitously.
“Classy,” he drawled.
“You know what, Brady? Fuck that.”
He sighed deeply, his breath static over the phone. “I’m sorry. We’ll keep trying. I spent all night looking for new grants. There’s a federal one we could go for.”
Yeah, us and every other Dr. Schmuck in the country. I loved research. I hated writing grants. “Yeah, alright,” I acquiesced.
“We’ll keep trying,” he promised.
“Keep me updated.”
Brady hung up, ever to-the-point, and I gripped the heated steering wheel as I reached the end of my long driveway. Well, that soured my mood. It was hard enough being two hours away from him, working in a small-town hospital and going crazy from boredom most of the time. But without our research, I would really lose my mind. Without it, things just felt… empty.
Or, they had.
I thought about Laurel sitting in my bed, her steel blue eyes folding in the corners as she smiled mischievously during our banter. I had felt like there was a gaping hole in my life for a while now. I suddenly wondered if that hole was exactly Laurel-sized. And if maybe she might be willing to fill that space.
And that, I realized, was entirely unlike me. I didn’t just let people squirm their way into my life.
Unless they were accident-prone, loved junk food, and had an aversion to lentils. Then, apparently, they could waltz right in.
As I drove into town, I dialed up my favorite restaurant on Main Street, placing an order for a late lunch, and then called Clemens back after I’d ignored his call twice. I only lived fifteen minutes away, but the dude was annoying as fuck when we had a busy ER.
“What’s up, Clemens?” I asked.
“How do you feel about performing an emergency craniectomy?”
“I feel like our hospital isn’t equipped for that.”
“I called for a life flight to U of U, but the storm has them grounded,” he said. He sounded panicked. “This woman has minutes, Cade.”
I stepped on the gas. “Okay, I’m coming. Do you have the imaging ready for me?”
“Already in the operating room.”
Shit, this was going to be a long day.
Remington called me just as I had peeled off my gloves and gown and exited the operating room. The nurse behind me turned off the flatline monitor, and I swallowed against a thick throat clogged with emotion.
It had been a longshot. Anyone would agree with that. The damage done to her brain had been inoperable and unrepairable, and trying to stabilize her for a life flight was a massive, one-thousand-yard-long shot that never stood a chance of landing.
But still, I’d lost a patient. My first in months, actually, and I couldn’t help but think that she might have been spared if she’d lived in a bigger city with a better-equipped facility.
