Page 11 of Sinful in Scrubs

“Quick question for you,” I said.

Two nurses turned their attention to me, eyebrows raised.

“When we have incoming patients, what kind of information do you get?”

One nurse shook her head. The other shrugged and stepped forward. “Depends on who’s running the ambulance, I guess. Depends on how bad it is.”

“I mean, if we’ve got some little old lady with elevated blood pressure, we’ll know her whole life history because she’s capable of being chatty and telling the EMT everything,” the second nurse explained. “But if you’re talking about, like, yesterday…”

I nodded.

“Or, like, this morning, when we had that gunshot victim—we didn’t have much to go on because the EMTs were too busy in the van trying to keep them alive. We were lucky to even know we had an incoming gunshot wound.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “So, you can’t really share information with us that you don’t have.”

“Yeah,” the first nurse replied. “This job doesn’t come with a crystal ball, though I swear it would make my life easier sometimes. Especially when patients hit that call button like I can magically know what’s wrong without their saying a word.”

I nodded in understanding. Not that most of my patients were able to help me figure out what was wrong. They were usually unconscious, screaming, or just telling me, “It hurts.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe we did need to figure out something to make the process smoother—so we weren’t asking annoying questions when answers weren’t readily available.

Maybe I would sit down with Dr. Walker and discuss what he thought the protocols should be. At the very least, I could figure out what needs of his weren’t being met by our current way of doing things.

6

MARCUS

There was something very similar and routine about my work, even though no two hospitals were ever quite the same, no two populations and incoming patient cases the same. But the work itself—assessing patients, setting bones, stitching stitches—never seemed to change.

There was something… oh, what’s the word I was looking for? Not homey or comforting, but yeah, there was almost a sense of comfort in the familiarity of routine.

There was almost a comfort and familiarity in the injuries, in similar injuries. The same broken ankles, the same appendicitis pain, which sounded like a crass and horrible thing to say, because I didn’t find comfort in other people’s pain. The comfort came from my ability to ease their pain. The familiarity came from the fact that I knew what I was doing without a doubt.

The comfort came from not having to endure constant uncertainty and wondering whether what I was doing would make a difference. But there was… and I knew I was making a difference every day in people’s lives. I had to deal with a level of uncertainty and discomfort because after I left the military, I focused on the general population. These were not soldiers. These were not tough, hardened individuals who had training and who knew they were going into a dangerous situation when they walked out their door in the morning.

The patients I cared for were somebody’s children. And because I chose to specialize in juvenile cases, I was working on somebody’s kid. That’s where the uncertainty came back into my life.

I never wanted to hold some guy’s life in my hands, telling him everything would be okay when I was covered in more blood than he had pumping through his body. That was not the trauma I chose to expose myself to anymore.

It didn’t make sense, and somehow along the way, I convinced myself that it made this job easier. But that goddamned flatline, monotonal beep, combined with the emergency repetitive pinging of a system crashing, didn’t care if I was trying to convince myself that my choice to be here working on this child was an easy job.

“Goddamn it,” I growled as the nurse started the heart compressions.

“I have to tie this off, keep?—”

“But, Doctor, no?—”

“I refuse,” I said. I continued stitching in the cramped quarters because the nurse had to lean halfway over me. “Get a goddamn heartbeat back!” I barked.

The monotonous, tonal sound hiccupped.

I paused, sutures and hemostats in hand, and stared hard at the back of the nurse who blocked my view of the telemetry on our patient. Another hiccup, another beep.

She eased away as the kid’s heart took over, and I let out a long, heavy breath. Yeah, this job was so much easier.

I wrapped up surgery, my patient finally stable, and got the kid transferred to recovery. I headed back to the locker room to clean up.

I needed to wash away the reminders—not of that child’s precious life, but of all the lives that had almost slipped through my fingers and the lives that had slipped so successfully, against my every effort.

---