Page 17 of Dr. Fellow

I’ve seen clots before, but I’ve never personally encountered a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm firsthand because cases like this usually get sent to the trauma hospital fifteen minutes away. I also still have no idea if it can even be treated surgically, but I’m making my best educated guess based on the knowledge that I have of other emergencies.

Sometimes being a nurse requires you to speak with unwavering confidence, even when you have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. This is especially true when you’re barely taller than five feet and have to assert your competence just to get anyone to take you seriously. If you waffle, even for a second, you immediately lose any credibility you had. And right now, I need all of the trust that I can get because I have a feeling things are about to get bad . . . very bad.

“Be right back,” I tell them before stepping out of the room.

“His BP is dropping,” I say as soon as Dr. Averill is within earshot, skipping formalities. She’s already heading toward me like she somehow knew I needed her. “I increased the fluids, but think you should go in there and update them.”

She nods. “I let blood bank know we needed O-neg. Go grab them. I’ll meet you back in there.”

I pause, confused by her instructions. If she already confirmed the rupture, we should be rushing the patient to the OR, not giving him a transfusion at the bedside. “No surgery?”

The bags under her eyes have somehow deepened in the hour since I last saw her. “Who would do it?”

“I don’t know. How about any of the egotistical asshats on call? Surely there’s one who wants to get in on this case.”

She sighs and starts walking toward the patient’s room. “Midtown Memorial doesn’t have any vascular surgeons on staff.”

I grab her arm, holding her back. “Send him to Grady then,” I demand, hearing my tone sharpening. “Life flight would get him there in less than five minutes.”

“You have no idea how much I’d like to do that, Morgan, but they stopped all flights thirty minutes ago because of the weather.”

I can feel my throat closing up as I process her words. I don’t like feeling helpless. It’s one of the reasons I became a nurse—to help people who are helpless—not to feel that way myself.

My eyes dart around the ER, searching for a solution because it shouldn’t be this hard. “Have Blue over there drive him,” I plead, pointing at a paramedic whose name is momentarily escaping me. “He’s not busy.”

My grip on my favorite doctor’s arm tightens as she tries to pull away, resignation written on her long face. “There’s no bus. All of the ice has everything backed up.”

“There’s not even any ice left,” I argue, feeling my chin wobble in frustration. “People just can’t fucking drive.”

“Let’s go,” she says. “We’re going to do everything we can.”

I’ve heard that phrase more times than I can count, and I hate it. It’s just a platitude that we use to make ourselves feel better when deep down, we already know what the outcome will be—death.

Chapter 7

Morgan

It turns out that the reports of black ice and worsening weather weren’t wrong. Over a few hours, the temperature dipped to around twenty degrees, and all of the water that melted this afternoon is now frozen again.

Did the city put salt on the roads? Absolutely not. Because that would require preparation, and if there’s one thing Atlanta is good at, it’s pretending that winter weather doesn’t exist.

Even though my Infiniti QX50 has something called snow mode, I still skid to a stop on the street in front of my rental house. While most of Atlanta is hilly due to its location at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, my street is relatively flat. Which is great news, because if it wasn’t, I would definitely roll backward on the slick road because I still have no idea how to work the parking brake. And yes, I have had my car for over a year, but automotive care is none of my business.

I nearly slip as I hop out of the driver’s seat, and I have to crawl on all fours to make it the remainder of the way to my front door. While that isn’t ideal, it beats the hell out of turning back around because of a broken wrist.

My rental was slightly out of my budget, but the second I saw the blue guest house, I knew I had to have it. The space used to be a garage the owner converted, so the ceiling is tall and held up with beautiful wood beams which make the five hundred square feet seem much larger. Sure, it has issues, but the unique style makes up for it one thousand percent.

Unlocking the front door from my knees, I feel the delicious warmth of my apartment wash over me. I love air conditioning and keep my apartment at a brisk sixty-six degrees in the summer, but the thermostat stays locked at seventy in the winter.

What can I say? I’m a southern girl through and through, even though I technically spent the first six months of my life in Connecticut, a fact my little brother loves to remind me of whenever he’s in the mood to piss me off. The number of times I’ve had to yell at him for calling me a Yankee is honestly egregious at this point—we shouldn’t fault people for things they have no control over.

Dropping my keys on the hook by the front door, I kick off my Hokas, and make a beeline for the kitchen. I barely had time to eat anything all shift other than a slice of old pizza in the break room, and I feel like I’m on the verge of passing out. While I would love to sit and read my current mafia romance, what I need right now is to shove some mac and cheese into my mouth, take a long shower, and then flop down on my freshly made bed.

Today officially goes down in history as the most draining one of my career, and somehow, I have to get up tomorrow and do it all over again, like none of the emotional trauma ever happened.

I love being a nurse most of the time, but there’s nothing that can erase some of the things we witness. We just have to keep going, soldiering on like trauma doesn’t fundamentally change us to our core. We don’t have time to process our feelings because we force ourselves to keep working until, eventually, everything piles up and explodes after years of ignoring our emotions.

That’s the one part of the job that doesn’t get easier as time wears on—the death. You just keep adding the names of patients to your subconscious list of losses, thinking of them whenever you can. Sometimes, you even think of them when you don’t want to. A song, a specific food, or a familiar scent will trigger a memory, and suddenly, it’s like you’re face-to-face with a ghost. I recognize that probably doesn’t sound healthy, but it’s the truth—death sticks with you no matter what.

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