I cut off the pointless narrative as I rifle through my locker and pluck out clean scrubs. Hair tie to pull back my hair, hand sanitizer in the pocket, flats changed over to sneakers, and this doctor is ready for work. I’m stuffing my clothes into my locker when I notice the orange envelope that’s half slipped in between my hairbrush and an emergency unopened can of Red Bull on the top shelf. Working at the hospital is a lot like high school in some respects—there’s plenty of drama and people sleeping with other people they shouldn’t be, and when we want to pass notes to each other, we shove them through the vents in each other’s lockers. Or rather other people shove notes into other people’s lockers. I have neither shoved nor been the shove-ee before. I collect up the envelope and stick it into the pocket of my pants. Maybe I’ll catch a moment to read it later, after I try to slip onto the emergency room floor without my tardiness being noted.
As it goes, no one makes any comments because the place is in uproar when I arrive. There’s a rapidly spreading pool of blood on the floor, and three nurses are trying to pin a patient—a young woman, vomiting said blood, who appears to be convulsing at the same time.
“Dr. Romera, if you’ve got a minute!” the male nurse calls, wrestling to keep the woman’s arms from flailing so wildly. If the woman is having a seizure, standard procedure is to the support the head and leave the limbs well alone, but this woman’s in a gurney. She could break her arm if she hits the rails.
I rush to the patient, reaching for my flashlight. When I shine the light into the woman’s eyes, the pinpricks of her irises tighten even farther.
“Has anyone taken bloodwork?” I ask.
“Doubt she’s got any left!” the nurse—it’s Paul, one of the longest serving members of staff at St. Peter’s—grunts out. “We’d have tried but we can’t get her still enough.”
“How long has she been seizing?”
An EMT appears in the scuffle, blood sprayed up her face. She looks like she’s in shock; a narrow yellow band across her right top pocket might look like a regular part of her uniform to a member of the public, but it tells me that she’s probationary. “Four minutes in the rig. She—she was complaining of stomach pains and then—I didn’t—there was so much blood!”
I look around for the girl’s partner, but there’s no one to be seen. “Where’s your senior paramedic?”
“I don’t—I don’t know. She ran to the bathroom as soon as we got the patient inside.”
A series of possibilities are forming inside my mind. “Okay, either way she’s been seizing too long. Push ten ccs Fosphenytoin. We need to move her to radiology. We need to see what’s going on inside her. Ma’am? Ma’am?” I get no response. Not that I really expected one. Still, I have to try. “Ma’am? Have you taken any medication?”
Nothing.
“What you got?” Oliver appears out of nowhere, relieving one of the nurses who was trying to get hold of the woman’s legs. An instant sense of relief floods me. It’s one thing being thrown into the deep end after being away from work, but it’s another thing entirely having someone die on you within the first three minutes of your shift.
“Vomiting blood. Grand mal seizures. Could be Wilson’s,” I tell him.
Another nurse returns with the Fosphenytoin and lifts the woman’s sleeve to find a vein. Shock races around the team working on her as we all see the liquid-filled blisters marking the woman’s skin.
“This isn’t Wilson’s,” I say, almost to myself. I lift her shirt from her stomach and the blisters are all over her belly, too. They’re everywhere. Practically forming right before my eyes. No, this isn’t Wilson’s disease. This is something much, much worse. “Everyone, get into hazmat. Right now,” I clip out. “She has chemical poisoning.”
******
The thing about chemical poisoning is that, ever since 9/11, whenever a case presents itself, a small part of your brain instantly starts screaming TERRORIST ATTACK! TERRORIST ATTACK! in giant capital letters. News reporters often tend to do the same.
There are four news vans outside St Peter’s by the time our patient dies. Nannette Richards was only twenty-six, just finished a masters in marine biology, and apparently on her way to the airport to go and visit her boyfriend in Florida when she dropped down on the ground and started seizing in a gas station three miles from the airport.
There would probably be less panic revolving around Nannette’s death if the EMT who brought her in and provided mouth to mouth resuscitation hadn’t immediately fallen sick and also started vomiting blood, too. Now it seems as though the whole hospital is falling apart. A lockdown order went out thirty minutes ago, at which point four nurses came around and confiscated our cell phones, to avoid ‘unnecessary panic to the public’ should we decide to tell our family members or loved ones something that might be taken out of context.
“My mom called me eight times earlier. She’s probably losing her shit right now. She’s totally going to think my face has melted off like that guy in The Rock,” Oliver informs me, as we stand on the peripheries of the ER floor. We’ve been observing the breakdown in civilization as patients try to leave and are subsequently told by security to return to their seats until the good doctors—my colleagues and I—can ascertain if they’ve all been infected with some violent and deadly strain of biological warfare. The guards don’t use those words, of course. The term, ‘for your own safety’ is bandied around a lot, as is ‘thank you for your patience.’
Oliver shifts, scrubbing his hands up and down his face. “Do you think we’ll be out of here by dinner? I have somewhere I need to be.”