Page 15 of Dr. Fellow

A wild snort reflexively comes out of my mouth. “That’s because I’m sure your brute of a boyfriend is coming along. You won’t even leave the hotel room.”

If I had to make a prediction, our weekend in Vegas will result in the two of them paired up with their men, leaving me and Caroline in the damn dust.

Whoop-de-freakin-doo. I get to hang out with mini-Parker for forty-eight hours straight. All I can do is cross my fingers that she has a little bit of her older sister in her somewhere.

“Beau isn’t the only brute going.” Cass smiles, pausing for dramatic effect. “He invited Walker too.”

Chapter 6

Morgan

The best thing about working as a nurse in the emergency room is that you never know what you’re going to get. Some days are tough. Hell, some weeks are tough, but that doesn’t make me love my job any less. Sure, I could leave the floor for a cushy nine-to-five in a plastic surgeon’s office where I give Botox all day, but where’s the fun in that?

Some people might say I’m a glutton for punishment, or that I have masochistic tendencies because the painful parts of my job just hurt so good. But that’s what all ER nurses are, in one way or another—depraved, chaos-loving wildcards.

“Can we go?” my patient’s teenage son whines to his mom. “Travis asked if I could sleep over.”

“Ooo, a sleepover. Do teenage dudes watch movies and gossip too?” Claire quips, her comment lightening the mood and momentarily distracting everyone from my feeble attempt at listening to my patient’s abdomen. Realistically, there’s no chance I’ll hear anything other than gas, but I do my due diligence here just in case.

In retrospect, Claire should have been paired with literally any other coworker of mine today because I have a hard time focusing when she’s around. We’re like two damn peas in a pod, and while I love having her by my side, I’m starting to get a little nervous about this situation.

When my patient came in, he looked completely fine from the outside. He was walking normally, talking normally, and only had one major complaint—crushing chest pain that ripped through to his back. Now, I recognize to the general population that description might just sound like indigestion, but to an ER nurse, it sounds like a problem. There are certain words that make you move just a little bit quicker, and this gentleman has already used several of them.

As soon as we got him to his room, I asked Claire to go tell Cass that I would need her to watch my patients. While she was gone, I hooked the patient up to telemetry, a device we use to monitor a patient’s heart rate and rhythm. Then, I started two lines with the largest gauge needles I could find. Call it nurse’s intuition, but something tells me we’re going to need them.

“No,” the son scoffs at Claire, trying to look cool as he runs his fingers through his dirty blonde hair. “We play Xbox and hang.”

His mom glances over at me, as if she’s asking permission to allow her son to leave.

“You’ll be here for a while,” I state simply, not wanting to elaborate until I have more information.

She reaches into her overstuffed purse and grabs a set of house keys, tossing them to her son. “Go on. Just please feed the dog on your walk over, and text me when you get there.”

My patient chuckles, his oversized belly rippling with the sound. “Not worried about your dear ol’ dad?”

His son rolls his gray eyes, identical in color to his father. “You’re fine, Dad. Travis just broke up with his girlfriend. He needs me.”

But when he turns to leave the room, he looks back for a moment with a flicker of hesitation on his acne-covered face. “Love you.”

After I finish my focused physical assessment, I draw a set of stat labs, inverting the tubes a few times to ensure that the blood doesn’t hemolyze before it can be tested.

“Hey, Claire,” I state calmly as I stand from the ground. “Can you please walk this to the lab?”

She’s been happily talking to the patient and his wife about their plans for the weekend . . . I think. I honestly couldn’t tell you because I’ve been running through a mental checklist of everything I need to do.

While I appreciate her enthusiasm, and love that she’s the kind of person who likes to intimately know everyone she meets, I learned long ago that you have to set boundaries if you want to continue doing this job and not have a complete mental breakdown—one day she’ll learn that too.

“Walk?” Claire’s baby-blue eyes, the same color as my scrubs, meet mine with confusion. “Why can’t I just tube it?”

She’s referencing the station near the nurses’ desk that looks similar to Mission Space at Disney World. It allows us to send things through the hospital in capsules, rather than having to physically bring them somewhere. In theory, it’s a more efficient system because you can use it for anything that will fit in the pod, but there are occasions where the samples will get lost in hospital space, for lack of a better analogy. And because these labs need to be run as soon as possible, I can’t afford to hope they make it to their destination . . . I need to know they’re going to make it.

“Because I asked you to walk them there,” I snap. “Ask Cass how to get to the lab if you’re not sure, and when you’re back, go help her with my other patients.”

She looks at me suspiciously but nods. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

Once she leaves the room, I recheck my patient’s vital signs and excuse myself to go find the doctor on call.

The floor has been bonkers today because of the weather. A few snow flurries in Atlanta means that everyone forgets how to drive and ends up in the emergency room. The overflow and weather would be fine in any other situation, but I have a nagging feeling it’s going to be a problem for this patient if my suspicions are correct.

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