Page 71 of The Night Shift
‘He is,’ said Mai-Lin hotly. ‘There’s nothing on his chart. That’s why we put out the crash call.’
‘No,’ said Violet struggling to catch her breath. ‘No. I promised him. I wrote it all up. Look…’ She turned to Gus who was scrolling through Mr Zeller’s notes. He could see the entry from a few days ago where Violet had clearly documented Mr Zeller’s wishes to not be resuscitated in the event of a cardiac arrest.
He lifted the bag and mask away from Mr Zeller’s face. ‘Dr Winters is right,’ he said turning the screen around so Anjali and the nursing staff could see the precise documentation, so characteristically Violet in tone that he felt his own heart give a little squeeze as he read it. Just then Cindy’s face appeared around the curtain.
‘Oh! Jakub!’ she said, crossing to the bed to take Mr Zeller’s hand in hers. ‘You’re not trying to put the defib on, are you?’ She turned to Anjali, her face accusative. ‘Because he’s not?—’
‘For resus. We know,’ said Gus. ‘Thanks, Cindy. I think maybe there was no sticker on the obs chart, hence the arrest call going out.’
Mai-Lin looked down at the floor with tears in her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Did we do the wrong thing?’
Gus was surprised to see Violet reach out to Mai-Lin. ‘No,’ she said, her voice gentle. ‘You did nothing wrong. You correctly diagnosed a cardiac arrest, you checked the chart, there was no sticker, you put the crash call out. Exactly as per protocol. Exactly what you should have done. If in doubt, it’s much better to call the resus team than not– okay?’
Mai-Lin blinked back her tears and nodded sadly. ‘Thanks, Dr Winters,’ she said.
‘It’s Violet,’ said Violet. ‘And if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I didn’t check that he had a sticker. I wrote a whole bloody essay about his wishes but that’s no use when it’s stuck on the computer at the other end of the ward, is it? You need that information at the bedside.’
The rest of the team peeled away, back to their jobs on the ward and Gus looked at his bleep which had sounded twice during the aborted resuscitation attempt. Violet was loitering near the bed but he guessed she was there for Mr Zeller rather than himself.
‘That was kind,’ he said. ‘What you said to Mai-Lin.’
She turned to face him. ‘I just told her the truth,’ she said. ‘She hadn’t done anything wrong, and I told her that.’
‘Yes, but it was the way you told her,’ he began, but she put her palm in the air to silence him.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please. Just get on with what you were doing before.’
He nodded, suitably admonished and turned to leave the curtained area. As he looked back over his shoulder he saw Violet leaning against Mr Zeller’s bed, her body heaving with silent sobs as she held her patient’s hand for the last time. All he wanted to do was sit with her, tell her she’d managed to carry out Mr Zeller’s wishes. She’d stopped an unnecessary and undignified exit for this patient who she obviously had cared a great deal aboutandshe’d managed to reassure a junior nursing colleague that her actions had been appropriate. All this rubbish about Violet not being good with people… She wasn’t cold and unfeeling. Quite the opposite.
But he realised as he walked back to the nursing station that he had no right to compliment or comment on her behaviour, professional or otherwise. She didn’t want or need his opinion. He was just another colleague attending a cardiac arrest, nothing more. The intimacy they’d shared only twenty-four hours earlier was gone.
Once he had written in Mr Zeller’s notes and Anjali had recorded time of death, they made their way along the ward corridor together, chatting briefly about the arrest and particularly Violet’s reaction.
‘It’s quite an uncharacteristic display of emotion for her,’ said Anjali, frowning as she glanced through the window to one of the side-rooms. ‘I’ve not seen her get particularly attached to a patient before, I wonder why Mr Zeller struck a chord. Funny, isn’t it? How some of them get to you more than others?’
Gus nodded. ‘Yeah. It is odd how some people get under your skin. She’ll be worried about the fact that she didn’t check the sticker on his observation chart though– Violet, I mean. She likes to do things properly, doesn’t she. No room for error.’
Anjali laughed. ‘God, yes, that’s Violet in a nutshell. She sets herself very high standards. Expects the same of her colleagues too, sometimes rubs people up the wrong way.’ She smiled fondly. ‘You can imagine.’
‘Oh, yes she told me about that.’
Anjali looked surprised. ‘She told you about the complaints?’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘No. She didn’t mention anything specific… I just meant in general she knew that her attitude to work wasn’t to everyone’s liking. That she was perceived as a bit confrontational.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t know about any actual complaints.’
‘Shit.’ Anjali looked cross with herself. ‘Look, forget I said anything. It’ll probably all be fine anyway. She’d be mortified if she thought I was telling everyone.’
But– but I’m noteveryone,Gus wanted to say.Why didn’t she tell me?Poor Violet– what else had she been going through that he’d been completely oblivious to?
He had to admit that he’d found that particular cardiac arrest call difficult. Seeing Violet so distressed while also realising that his presence there may have made the situation awkward for her– the thought of that saddened him beyond words. Anjali was right. Violet wouldn’t want him knowing about the complaints. She had her own barriers and secrets, much as she tried to deny it, and although he had been making some progress in breaking those barriers down, she could rebuild them much more effectively now he was out of the picture. He had created the distance between them, the blame lay squarely at his feet and perhaps related to his earlier actions just as much as the conversation in the surgeons’ coffee room.
He hadn’t really considered how she would react to the news of Amelia’s return, partly because he was unsure of his own response to this fact. But he knew Violet well enough after only a week to understand that she would find his ambiguity about Amelia troubling. She liked things to be clear and straightforward and the problem was he had told her unequivocally that he and Amelia were over, only a few days earlier. He hadn’t admitted his doubts at that point. Perhaps if he had he wouldn’t be in this mess now. Because he could see that for Violet, this was the biggest of his crimes– not the fact that he had doubts, but that he had hidden them, lied about them. And that was why the look she had thrown him just before he’d left Mr Zeller’s bedside had been one of contempt and distrust. He’d blown it, instantly relegating himself to the outer circle of Violet’s acquaintance, little realising how much he might miss being inside it.
Violet
Violetwasdevastated. And furious with herself. And guilty. Guilty of being so sidetracked by her blossoming relationship with Gus that she had taken her eye off what she was good at, which was, as she had told Mr Zeller only a few nights ago, precise and accurate notetaking and documentation. How could she have forgotten to add a little red sticker to his observation chart? Her methodical approach to work had obviously fallen by the wayside of her infatuation with a colleague, who it turned out wasn’t anywhere near as infatuated with her, and it had also likely suffered as a result of her more relaxed approach to patients– chatting with people was all well and good if you wanted to establish a rapport but it wasn’t much help if you forgot to undertake the necessary clinical admin.
Her carefully compiled list of good things from her earlier bike journey to Gus’s house had dwindled to a blank page. She had thought her skills as a doctor were improving. She’d been wrong. She had thought that getting close to one of her patients and taking an interest in their story might be a good thing. She’d been wrong. Look at her now, an emotional mess just because a cantankerous, elderly, dying man had actually died. And what good had her involvement and interest done Mr Zeller? None. She hadn’t been able to cure him. She hadn’t been able to ease his suffering, and it was only luck that had enabled her to facilitate his one expressed wish, that of a dignified and peaceful death. Luck was not a good thing to rely on in medicine.
