Page 20 of Life To My Flight

Which made it all the worse.

I couldn’t get my hopes up.

Not again.

“Alright. Well, have a good day,” I said softly as I walked away.

I didn’t look back, even though every cell inside my body screamed at me to turn around to see if he was watching me leave.

I arrived inside in time for a large trauma to enter through the emergency doors.

This wasn’t unusual.

We were the biggest facility in the Ark-La-Tex. That’s the Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas region.

This particular trauma was a man in a sheriff’s department uniform with what amounted to a shiv made out of paper impaled in his eyeball.

“What happened?” I asked Cody as I slipped gloves over my hands.

Cody spoke as he walked with me.

“An inmate stabbed him in the eye with a shiv made out of toilet paper and shit made to look like a paper airplane. Guard shot him with the thing sticking out of his eye, though. Dead fucking center. Inmate’s dead,” Cody said as he read from the chart.

“Okay,” I said as I walked up to the gurney.

“Can you tell me your name?” I asked the young man on the gurney.

His head turned my way. Which consequently meant the paper shiv did too.

“Lamont Thurgood,” he rumbled.

“Can you tell me where you are?” I asked as I started hooking him up to the heart rate monitor.

He shook his head.

“That little fucker, Jarvis, shoved a shit covered paper airplane through my fuckin’ eye. I’m at the hospital where, hopefully, they can get this thing out,” he said as he pointed to the airplane.

“Are you feeling any pain?” I asked as Dr. Norwood walked through the curtain.

I didn’t much care for Dr. Norwood. He felt like he was too good for us lowly nurses, and he didn’t care that we were professionals just as he was.

Sure, I had a lot less schooling than him, but he didn’t have to act like I was gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

The bastard didn’t have any problem delegating tasks. Even ones he damn well knew he had to do them himself.

He was a good trauma doc though; which was why the ER still had him hired on, despite the numerous complaints by nearly three quarters of the department.

“No,” Lamont said brusquely. “The medics gave me some good meds on the way over. Fucking sucks not being able to see, though.”

“I’m sure it does,” I agreed.

“Mr. Thurgood, my name is Dr. Norwood. I’m going to take a look at your eye now. That’s going to require me to take the bandages from around the paper, though. It might feel funny, but try not to move, okay?” Dr. Norwood asked.

“10-4,” he agreed.

The shiv looked about as one would expect.

It was luckily through the side of his eyeball, and not directly in the middle.

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