She doesn’t realize how many times I’ve been through this. She doesn’t realize that I know twenty CCs of anything is abnormal. Well, unless it’s being administered to a fully-grown male. It definitely shouldn’t be shot into the circulatory system of a miniscule six-year-old human being. I keep my lips clamped tightly shut, though. I watch as the EMT does her job, handling Millie carefully as she gives her what she needs.
This is fucking bullshit.
Such fucking bullshit.
Millie pulls in a ragged, drowning gasp, her eyelids fluttering as she drags herself free of her seizure. She makes a pained, sorrowful keening sound, like an animal caught in a bear trap, and then her eyes roll back into her head and she’s unconscious.
“Probably for the best,” the EMT says. “Better for her body to take a beat, I reckon. She’s okay now. She’ll be okay, just you wait and see.”
Millie will be far from okay. I know it. The EMT knows it. She’s trying to be kind, to be reassuring by feeding me white lies, but her casual blurring of the truth only serves to make me angry. When have lies ever solved a problem? And when has blind ignorance ever helped a person prepare for what is to come?
As the ambulance tears through the streets of Seattle, following a route I have seared into my head like a goddamn brand, I have to remember to breathe. If I don’t, I’m going to tear this EMT a new one, I won’t be able to stop myself, and that won’t help anyone. Least of all Millie.
******
Sloane
Nothing shocks me anymore. Nothing. I’ve seen it all. Motor vehicle accidents are the worst. The ones where people are brought into the trauma room, talking, asking questions, concerned over their loved ones, maybe complaining of a mild stomach ache but otherwise seemingly okay. And then the next minute their skin is ash and they’re coding, and the mild stomach ache they were telling you not to fuss over actually turns out to be severe internal bleeding, their organs mashed to a pulp, and they’re dying because it’s too late, it’s far too late for anything, and then it’s all over.
Shock. Shock does strange things to the human body. It numbs you, keeps you running, functioning when you should be still. You don’t even realize your injuries are far greater than you first thought until things have progressed past the point of no return, and then that’s it. The end. Nothing to be done.
I see this happen. Every. Single. Day.
“What have we got?” I pull gloves on as I stand outside the front of the hospital, waiting for the ambulance to show up. This is my first call this shift; it’s been a quiet morning, which is good considering everyone is out sick with the flu and we’re operating on a skeleton staff. I didn’t have to shoulder anyone out of the way to take this call, and that’s a rarity for sure. Normally people are climbing over one another to get to the ‘loading dock,’ as the interns so eloquently call it, especially when the patient en route might require surgery. All surgical staff must maintain an average of hours in the OR to comply with St. Peter’s competencies policy; claiming a patient before anyone else can get to them is often the difference between learning on the job or spending hours at the end of the month trapped in a starkly lit skills lab in your free time, and free time isn’t something folk around these parts like to part with unless one hundred percent necessary.
“Little girl,” Gitte, one of the nurses tells me. She’s new—young but very efficient. The nurses like to haze new members of their team when they arrive, a real trial by fire, and Gitte was no exception. However, unlike most new team members, Gitte handled every situation with grace and ease. When faced with the most intense trauma cases, she remained stoic. She was the epitome of cool, calm and collected. When told she needed to clean bedpans and change catheters for an entire shift, she didn’t complain. Instead, she accepted the clipboard Gracie, the head nurse, handed to her and she went and found her first patient, smiling kindly, talking to each person as she moved from room to room.
That was the biggest test. Usually seasoned nurses—any health care provider, really—will think themselves above the basest of tasks after a couple of years treading water in a trauma unit. To come in and accept bed pan duty with a smile and actual interest in each and every patient is, well, it’s almost impossible.
“The EMTs have scanned her info ahead. Millie Reeves, six-years-old. History of Lennox Gastaut Syndrome, with both tonic and myoclonic seizures. Previously admitted to St Peter’s four times in the past eight months, as well as twice over at Halle and Prentice Medical. She seized for approximately eight minutes in the ambulance. Patient is still unconscious.”
I mentally store this information. “Meds?”
“Both clobazam and sodium valproate in the field.”