Page 62 of No Greater Love
"I KNOW I'm bleeding! Look!" Mr. Hendricks gestured wildly toward the bathroom.
I glanced in, and sure enough: there was bright red color in the toilet bowl. My stomach dropped a little. Maybe this wasn't as routine as I'd thought.
We got an IV started—Mr. Hendricks barely flinched, too focused on his panic—and drew blood for a complete workup. His hemoglobin, hematocrit, and coagulation studies all came back normal. No signs of blood loss.
Twenty minutes later, the stool sample results came back. I read them twice to make sure.
"Heme negative," I said quietly to Nate.No blood detected.
"Interesting." Nate pulled up a chair next to Mr. Hendricks, who had finally calmed down enough to sit on the gurney. "Sir, I need to ask you again about what you've had to eat or drink today. And I need you to really think about it, because it's important."
Mr. Hendricks looked sheepish now, some of his panic having subsided with the normal test results. "I... well, I had my usual coffee this morning. And then around ten, I tried that new Berry Blast Juggernaut from the smoothie place downtown. The seasonal one."
I felt understanding dawn. "The bright red one? With the special holiday coloring?"
"Yeah, that's the one. But I don't see how—" He stopped mid-sentence, his eyes widening. "Oh. Oh, God."
"That Berry Blast Juggernaut has an awful lot of food dye in it," I said gently. "It can... well, it can make things look pretty dramatic on the way out."
Mr. Hendricks' face went through several shades of red that had nothing to do with food coloring. "You mean I... the blood wasn't..."
"Not blood, sir. Just dye."
The silence in the room was profound. Mr. Hendricks buried his face in his hands.
"I am so, so sorry," he said, his voice muffled. "I was so scared, and I... I was rude to you both. I thought I was dying."
"It's okay," Nate said, and I could hear the genuine compassion in his voice. "When you think you're in danger, it's natural to panic. We see it all the time."
We discharged Mr. Hendricks with instructions to avoid red-dyed beverages if he didn't want a repeat performance. He apologized three more times on his way out, shaking both our hands.
The moment the door closed behind him, I felt it start- a giggle that bubbled up from somewhere deep in my soul. I tried to hold it back, but when I looked at Nate and saw his lips twitching, I lost it completely.
"Berry Blast Juggernaut emergency," I gasped between laughs.
"The seasonal one," Nate added, and that set me off again.
We were both laughing so hard we had to lean against the wall for support. Every time we started to calm down, one of us would say "bright red" or "bleeding to death" and we'd start up again.
"I thought we were gonna have to hang a couple units of uncrossmatched blood to gravity," Nate said, wiping tears from his eyes.
That image—universal donor blood running wide open through an IV, as fast as physics would allow—made me laugh even harder. "The look on his face when he realized..."
"I thought he was going to melt into the floor," Nate said.
It felt so good to laugh. Really laugh, the kind that makes your stomach hurt and your cheeks ache. After the heaviness of the past few weeks, the breakdown and all the emotional intensity, this moment of pure absurdity was exactly what I needed.
"You know what the best part is?" I said as we finally started to recover. "He's going to tell this story at parties for the rest of his life. 'Remember that time I went to the ER because I thought I was dying from a smoothie?'"
"His friends are never going to let him live it down," Nate agreed. "Especially if he tells them about pushing past other patients in the waiting room.”
I grinned at him. "This job is insane."
"The best kind of insane," he replied, and something in his expression made my heart do a little flip.
We stood there for a moment, still smiling, and I realized something had shifted between us. Not just back to normal—forward to something new. Working together like this, sharing the ridiculous and the profound, felt natural in a way I hadn't expected.
From across the department, I caught Sophia's eye. She was still watching us, but now her expression held something that looked like approval. Like she was seeing exactly what she'd hoped to see.
