Special thanks to my editor WickedWendyDru for all the hard work she's done for me these past several weeks...you're one in a million, Your Wickedness!
This story is entered in the Halloween Contest, so please remember to vote
!
*
I had just gone on shift when word came through that major traumas were on the way. The ER braced for the seven car pile-up on the interstate caused by an overturned rig. Reports that were coming in stated that it was bad, very bad; there had been casualties on scene, and I was damn glad I wasn't doing the views.
I gathered my team, getting ready for the fight that would soon consume my ER. Quickly I ran through my personal mental checklist, determined to save as many of the patients who came in as I could.
Death was a necessary part of life, and I understood this. People were born, lived their life, and then died. What I found insulting was when life was taken from a person before they were through using that life. Being an ER doctor took a special type of person.
"Dr. Grey! We're ready...ETA five minutes," my head nurse, Cindy, announced.
Taking a deep breath, I counted to ten and then released it. This calmed my nerves, and stopped the jitters in my hands. I needed to bounce up and down on the balls of my feet a few times, really, but it made some of the nurses with less experience uncomfortable. Cindy wouldn't have minded.
My nickname was Grey. My actual name was Jamie Greyson, but everyone called me Grey. I'm five feet, ten inches and weigh one hundred fifty pounds. My shoulder length hair is jet black. I have been told in certain light it had blue highlights. My eyes are a light sky blue, and are slightly slanted. I'm thirty-two years old.
Our trauma triage nurse came flying around the corner, scrubs already on, clipboards stacked in her arms like metal coffins. She locked eyes with me.
"Male, 52, African-American, possible fractured pelvis, possible GI bleed, lower body with general crushing damage."
"Ortho and Andersen, Bay 2," I said, without even thinking.
She passed the top chart off to my second team who went dashing as the sirens got closer.
"Female, 25, Caucasian, arrested en route, collapsed lung, possible chest wall damage, multiple fractures."
The ambulances screamed to a stop. "She's mine," I said, and Cindy held out her hand for the silver chart. The bay doors hissed open and like a wave, the damaged came flooding in complete with sound, smell and fury.
Please...please, Angel of Death, stay out of my ER, damn it.
Many, many hours later I stood over the body of a ten-year-old child. Her poor body had just been too damaged; there was nothing I could have done to change the outcome. That never stopped me from fighting until the end.
As I sweated and heaved, my shoulders aching as I continued the useless chest compressions on the child's broken ribcage knowing I couldn't save her, knowing she had slipped beyond that place where I could pull her back, I could've sworn I saw a slight fluttering in the air, just past my streaked, grimy face.
I'd barked at Cindy for a wipe and to get the fucking lamp out of my way, thinking one of the idiot interns had brought a UV up to look at something on the girl's head; she had so many injuries. As usual Cindy swiped a cool, damp linen cloth over my forehead quickly and professionally, and never said a word about my profanity at the table. Afterward though, when I'd called time of death and was preparing to go out and tell the father that it was over, Cindy stopped me with a gentle hand.
"Grey," she said, her voice low in the room as the other nurses disconnected tubes, lines, and leads from the body.
Already I'd detached from my patient and was calling her "the body" but I had to, or I wouldn't be able to face the father, whose wife was still upstairs on James's table with her back torn open as he tried to save her remaining kidney.
"Sorry Cindy," I began, ready to apologize, always contrite now that the stress was mostly passed.
"No, it's okay," she said. "I just wanted to know...What lamp were you talking about?"
I stared at her.
"The UV what's-his-dick pulled up to her head while I was still trying to get her back," I said, deliberately not remembering Daniel's name, because the little fucker was lazy, and didn't try hard enough, and besides, he was cute when he fell asleep in the ambulance bay.
"Grey...there was no lamp," Cindy said, her large brown eyes holding mine steadily.
This had happened before -- me seeing things above the heads of patients, just before they slipped away. I flicked my eyes to the door, to where a father waited, desperate to hear that I'd made a miracle happen tonight, and I was going to destroy his entire world instead. I sighed.
"Yeah. Okay. I'm tired, Cin." She nodded, and let go of my arm. I headed for the door.
Fuck you, Death. Fuck you for making me do this.
I wanted to believe in heaven and hell, so that I could believe that there was something waiting for us after we struggled through this life. Losing patients always affected me, and made me fight harder against Death. I'd no sooner finished my gruesome task that another code blue page sounded in the chute.
Damn it all to hell.
The Angel of Death had already claimed too many today. He'd have to fight me personally for any more, and I didn't think he had the balls for it. We'd find out, though, I thought, grabbing my stethoscope.
I ended up staying two hours past the end of my shift mainly to check on a female, twenty-five, Caucasian. She had been one of the first in. The patient parked in trauma bay five direct from chute and opened by me to drain a punctured chest cavity; collapsed lung reinflated manually; patient went into V-fib at 22:14 and was resuscitated with 300 jules on small paddle and epi by injection at 22:20.
Djorak closed, 1500mgs ampicillian administered for infectious controls. Patient was resting comfortably in the Cardiac Wing. I felt like Death had been cheated, a small victory in our private war.
I showered at the hospital and changed into my street clothes. Several of my colleagues were meeting at a bar near the hospital, and I had been invited. The day had been like an emotional roller coaster, one long continuous looping and corkscrewing scream-fest rocketing up and down between the heights of life and the valleys of death.
"You're coming, right?" Cindy asked. "Please do; you need to unwind."
"Sure, why not." I was tired, but was off for the next two days. "It's not like I have anyone waiting for me at home."
Everyone at work knew I was gay. I had been out for several years now. My boyfriend and I had broken up six months earlier. According to him my job was my life, and was more important than he was. He didn't understand how stressful and tense working in the ER could be...that I was literally fighting a battle, that some nights I had to choose who lived and who died, and that I had to live with those decisions haunting me long after I made them.
He couldn't understand my need to question what more I might have done, my need to go over old case files, or my desire to stay late and make certain my staff went home level-headed, regardless of how scattered I might feel. I resented him for not just being there for me when I got home, for not just offering to hold me, or offering to fuck me into oblivion, which would've been the least he could've done. I wasn't upset when he finally left me.
