Page 1 of The Heart We Guard
1
GREER
“Need you to stay and cover,” the chief of surgery says, looking as tired as I feel. Dr. Jose Mendez is an ass with limited people skills. We call him Chief to his face, and Bulldog behind his back. “Lennox called out again. His kid has RSV, and the OR board is packed.”
I’d been attempting a power nap until I’d been paged. And the demand rubs me up the wrong way. “I’m post call. I think the last thing I ate was a banana four surgeries ago and haven’t had any continuous sleep in thirty hours. You need to hire more surgeons.”
Mendez rolls his eyes. “Welcome to public medicine. You know we lost two surgeons last week. Even if I could hire more surgeons, none of that would help me right now, with that.”
He points to the surgeries that are mounting up.
“What do you want me to say? ‘Sure, yes, I can do them all, Chief. I’m superhuman, Chief.’ You’ve leaned on me too many times.”
“And I’m leaning on you again. Get over it and say yes.”
“Fine, then gimme the simple ones.”
Chief frowns. “That’s unlike you. You usually want the hardest.”
“And I do. But not when I’m this tired. Give me the ones I could literally do in my sleep, because I might be sleeping when I do them. Which, if we took a minute, we’d all realize isn’t safe for anyone.”
“I’ll do my best to find you coverage for some time this week. But right now, I just can’t.”
“Fine. I got it,” I huff.
I head back to the room I was napping in but make the mistake of looking at my email.
Janice Le Page is an officious and sanctimonious chief medical officer, and I should ignore the email withurgentin the subject title, but I open it.
“Fuck my life,” I mutter as I read it.
Steve Jian, an anesthesiologist I’ve worked alongside for years, chuckles as he walks by. “Someone’s having a good night.”
I lean back against the wall. “Le Page just added me to the Quality Review Committee with a prompt start at seven in the morning on Friday for a quarterly review.”
“Yeah, but it’s an easy meeting,” Steve says. “Outcomes, complications, that kind of thing.”
“It’s not the meeting; it’s the fact I’m in the OR until midnight Thursday. That’s barely enough time to grab some sleep and shower.”
“Ouch.”
“Yup, I?—”
“Dr. Hansen,” a nurse says. “Melody Yang needs you down in the ER. Says it’s urgent and you’ll need an OR.”
“On my way and can you ready operating room three for me please,” I reply. I turn back to Steve. “See you later.”
“What have we got?” I ask after running down to the ER. Honestly, it wasn’t hard to find the spot I was supposed to go togiven the periodic yelling. I shake off the dregs of the power nap I’m desperately in need of and replace it with my daily fury that we don’t have enough staff at this hospital to maintain even the most basic level of care for our patients or ourselves.
My father would say it’s because I’ve wasted potential income, sticking with a not-for-profit hospital instead of working for some fancy private one in New York. But seeing as he let me and my older brother, Eli, drift into foster care when I was five, and only reappeared once I’d qualified as a doctor, his opinion counts for little.
Melody Yang reminds me of me. She’s capable, calm, never overly dramatic with her delivery, but way more ambitious than I ever was.
“Nicholas Gray. Young male. Early twenties. He’s got penetrating abdominal trauma. Gunshot wound with internal bleeding. Possible liver lacerations.”
I take the chart she offers and then look at the bed holding the young man whose clothes are being cut off. His skin is pale and clammy, and his breathing is shallow and labored. He’s got dark hair, hollowed-out cheeks, and a gauge piercing in one ear. If the painfully familiar leather cut declaring him a prospect didn’t clue me in to his motorcycle club affiliations, the gang tattoos would let me know he’s a man who runs with the wrong crowd.
If I look at him long enough, I know he’ll morph into Eli. My brother was the poster child for making the kind of choices Nicholas has made.
