Читать книгу Following the Doctor's Orders - Caro Carson - Страница 11

Chapter Five

She’d said yes.

Brooke’s shift had started with two hours of misery, thanks to those miserable parents, but after seeing Zach in the break room, she’d been buoyed along by a sense of sweet anticipation, eight pleasant hours so far, all because she’d thrown caution to the wind and said yes.

Maybe she didn’t know herself as well as she’d always thought she did. Or maybe she’d been intrigued by a glimpse of a man who had layers that ran deeper than a handsome face and a quick, laughing wit. Or maybe...

Or maybe, it was just good, old-fashioned physical attraction. Zach had leaned over her, placed his hand on the wall near her head, and her body had responded. She could catalog all the classic signs of arousal. Blood vessels had dilated, breathing had deepened, heart rate had increased.

Incredibly, being around her had produced the same effects in Zach. She’d been staring into his blue-green eyes when she’d realized that his breathing had changed slightly, too. Since Brooke shined a penlight into patients’ eyes all day long, she’d noticed that the pupils of Zach’s eyes widened as she challenged him. That one telltale sign, a pupil dilation indicating an arousal of the autonomic nervous system which no one could fake, had given her more confidence than all the smiles he sent her way. She didn’t trust her own instincts, the ones that said this attractive man found her attractive, too, but she could trust science.

He was into her.

She was smiling at the thought even now. Just two more hours and her shift would end and her date would begin. The anticipation was intoxicating. Brooke bent her head over the patient’s chart and tried not to look as giddy as she felt inside. It was quite the emotional high to have a schoolgirl crush that was actually being returned. Endorphins, dopamine, serotonin.

She liked Zach Bishop, and he liked her back. Why had she fought that so hard? There was nothing bad about a little uptick in endorphins. How could she have so coldly considered choosing to spend her time with Tom Bamber for the sake of predictability?

The desk radio interrupted her thoughts. An ambulance was on its way in, transporting a patient who was already coding. She wiped the grin off her own face, feeling almost ashamed to be happy when others were not. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her white coat and listened while a nurse wrote the information being relayed.

The radio reported a white male, ninety-six years old, was en route. They were bagging him, using a balloon-like device to push air into his lungs. Defibrillation had failed to produce a heartbeat. Manual chest compressions were ongoing, and had been ongoing for the entire thirty-minute ambulance ride in from a distant ranch. Brooke knew they would still be ongoing when they arrived in an estimated ten minutes; the patient was not going to spontaneously recover. Whoever was forcing that heart to squeeze by pushing on the chest would have to keep pushing.

The last of Brooke’s buoyant emotions sank. It was time to do the hard work of her profession.

Ninety-six years old. A total of forty minutes of chest compressions before arrival. No one was immediately declared dead on arrival without every effort first being made, but the checklist of medical options was short in this situation.

Brooke was waiting in the crash room when they arrived. The paramedics told her the patient had been found in his bed when a family member brought his dinner tray to him. The first item on Brooke’s mental checklist was also the last: assess body temperature. The thermometer’s reading was repeated to be completely certain, but she knew any chance of resuscitation was gone. His body had cooled after he’d died in his sleep, peacefully, well before his family had noticed and called the ambulance. Brooke stepped back from the patient and formally announced the time of death.

That wasn’t the hard part of her job. Declaring a patient dead was something she was qualified to do.

But the next logical step was never easy. She had to inform the next of kin that their loved one was gone. Grief was an unpredictable monster, and no matter how she approached a deceased patient’s family, no matter how young or old the patient was, no matter how expected or unexpected the death was, the monster always landed a blow.

Brooke had learned to protect herself from it as much as possible. She always entered a room of waiting family members while wearing her white coat, a symbol of care and competence and authority which Brooke believed was reassuring to the family in a subconscious way. She shook hands, her polite yet serious demeanor generally the first step in preparing the family to hear the news she had to deliver. She did so as simply and concisely as she could, telling them when, and why.

Then the monster had its turn.

Each time, Brooke could only stand by and witness the assault. Whether the monster caused shocked silence or unrestrained wailing, Brooke stayed in the room. Inevitably, there would be additional questions about what had happened, and she was in the best position to explain why the body had failed, why a treatment had or hadn’t been attempted, or anything else the family wanted to know.

As the monster finished its first round of punches, someone would make the emotional request to view the body, or else someone would ask a practical question about funeral arrangements, and then Brooke knew it was time to leave the family in the competent hands of the hospital’s morgue attendants.

With her duty complete, she would return to the nurses’ station, pick up the next chart in sequence, and move on to her next patient. Laceration of the forearm. Evaluation of abdominal pain. More patients needed to be cared for, regardless of Brooke’s personal feelings, so there was no sense in giving in to her emotions. It was a routine she usually handled as well as anyone could.

Today should not have been different.

Brooke informed the family of the ninety-six-year-old patient that their loved one could not be revived. She waited for the first wave of grief to pass, then left the family when the hospital administrator arrived to handle the final arrangements.

It was time to move forward. Yet Brooke stood at the nurses’ station, and wondered why she felt shaky.

“Dr. Brown, can you take room four?” A nurse held out a clipboard, expecting Brooke to take it the way she always, always did.

Today, she hesitated.

Just give me a minute. I need a minute.

“I’ll complete this death certificate first,” Brooke said evenly.

“Oh. Sure.” After a second of hesitation, the nurse set down the clipboard and walked away.

Brooke’s hand felt stiff and ungainly—what on earth is wrong with me?—as she began filling out the form, taking care to keep her writing legible so the admin clerks wouldn’t transcribe any errors into the final legal document.

This death should not have been a difficult one, as these things went. The patient had lived a longer life than most people. His death had been painless, at home, and he’d clearly lived his last days surrounded by people who cared about him.

But today, Brooke was off balance. She’d made plans for tonight that were out of character. Her emotions weren’t entirely under control, so the monster had grazed her as it hit the patient’s family.

I wish Zach would walk in the door.

For one second, just one second, Brooke let herself imagine a man dressed in black, bigger and stronger than she was, ready to shoulder her worries and cares.

What a foolish thought. If anything, Zach was to blame for her sudden inability to handle the hardest part of her job. Because she’d felt this morning’s endorphin-fueled rush of attraction, this afternoon’s death seemed all the darker in contrast.

She’d failed to protect her emotional stability. She wasn’t usually incapacitated by grief, because she wasn’t usually extraordinarily happy, either. She should never have agreed to start seeing a man who affected her like Zach did.

She could fix that now. She could cancel her date with Zach. She could return Tom Bamber’s call.

She should use her head, not her heart. Or rather, she should use her head, and not her hormones. Her attraction to Zach was purely physical, surely.

Then surely it’s okay to go ahead and see him tonight. There’s no emotional attachment. It’s just physical chemistry. A little flirting with the biggest flirt of them all.

That was perfectly sensible, but her attraction to Zach didn’t feel purely physical. Her emotions were all stirred up every time she was near him, and that was unacceptable.

She looked at the clock. Six thirty. His shift had ended thirty minutes ago; hers had thirty minutes left. There was plenty of time to change plans. They’d exchanged phone numbers this morning. She should call him and cancel, for her own peace of mind. She could pack all her emotions, the good and the bad, into the neat little compartments in her head where they belonged, if she stopped anticipating time with Zach.

The door to the waiting room opened. Not the door to the large waiting room, which had check-in desks and televisions and children’s play areas. This was the door to the smaller waiting area, the one with four walls and soothing artwork and privacy, the one where the staff put the families of patients who were critical and might not survive.

The family of the deceased ninety-six-year-old began filing out. They’d followed the ambulance here in what must have been a small convoy of cars. Brooke had been surprised at the large cluster of adult children she’d had to shake hands with when she’d gone in to break the news. Now they were milling about, discussing who should leave, who would stay until the funeral parlor arrived, who needed coffee and where was the cafeteria, and had Bob had a chance to view the body yet? A broken little family, pulling itself back together, getting reorganized as families do.

Brooke kept her head down. She wrote faster, but she still heard the young girl’s voice. “Do I get to see Grandpa now?”

None of the adults seemed to have heard her. When Brooke had broken the news, that girl had been in the waiting room, too, a lovely young person on the threshold of adolescence, with braces on her teeth and shiny long hair.

“Aunt Lucy?” the girl asked, trying again. “Can I go and see Grandpa with you?”

Brooke wished now she’d shaken the girl’s hand as if she were one of the adults. She feels the loss, too. She’s grieving, too. Pay attention to her!

The girl looked perhaps eleven or twelve years old, but that was old enough to understand and feel everything that was going on. Brooke knew, because that was how old she’d been when her four-year-old sister had died.

The monster hit her hard.

With her pen frozen over the paper, Brooke sucked in her breath at the sudden blow. It had been lurking, she realized, since this morning’s four-year-old patient with the parents who didn’t know how fortunate they were to have a little girl with a common cold.

The aunt patted the preteen on the shoulder almost absentmindedly, but she did answer her. “We’ll say goodbye to Grandpa at the funeral parlor, honey.”

The girl’s family cared for her. Of course they did, just as Brooke’s family had cared for her. Still, she’d been lost after her sister’s death. Watching this little drama in the hall, she could see how easily an older child could be overlooked. When her sister had died, Brooke hadn’t been young enough to require the attention of being fed and dressed and provided for, but neither had she been old enough to be included while the adults in her family had made funeral arrangements and tried to console her nearly incoherent parents.

Brooke’s almost twenty-year-old memories suddenly weren’t old enough. She felt the pain of her sister’s death, a horrible contrast to the pleasure of thinking about Zach.

Zach.

Had she really been blaming him for letting the genie out of the bottle? Her emotions weren’t out of control because she’d said yes to him. They were out of control because a four-year-old little girl had stirred up painful memories this morning, and this afternoon’s death had made them boil over.

She looked at the clock again. It was six forty-five. Unless she texted him that she needed more time, Zach would pick her up at her apartment at seven thirty. She’d given him the address.

Loretta walked up to her. “Can you start one last patient? It’s a straightforward laceration. Shouldn’t take too long.”

A straightforward case would still keep her here another hour. Loretta was asking because Brooke always said yes. All of the doctors, not just Brooke, routinely worked past the end of their shifts. It was the nature of a medical career. Zach would understand. He might not have ended his shift on time, either. She’d text him and push back their date by another hour.

She glanced at the family down the hall. The girl turned away from the cluster of adults. She poked listlessly at a poster on the wall.

Suddenly, an hour seemed like an eternity to Brooke. She wanted, very badly, to see the man who made her smile against her will with his corny lines. She wanted to be with a man who had confidence, who lived life with a bit of swagger. He’d buy her a drink, she’d soak up his casual charisma and life would be no big deal, nothing to worry about.

“No, I can’t start a new patient now.” Brooke dashed her signature hastily on the bottom of the death certificate and slapped it, facedown, in the nurse’s in-box.

“Are you okay, Dr. Brown?” Loretta was watching her with concern.

“I’m fine. It’s been a long shift, so I’m determined to leave on time for once.”

The grieving family was breaking up, a few going back into the waiting room, most of them, including the girl, leaving through the door to the parking lot.

Loretta looked in the same direction Brooke was looking. “That was a nice family, wasn’t it? Listen, I saw Dr. Gregory come in, and MacDowell’s here. You can go on and leave a little early. I’ll let them know.” Loretta patted her shoulder, a maternal move that surprised Brooke into taking a step back.

“Yes, I’ll see you next time.” She walked quickly toward the kitchen, unbuttoning her white coat as she went. She stuffed it into the next laundry bin she passed, grabbed her purse from the locker and headed for the physician’s parking lot at the same pace she usually reserved for heading to the crash room.

She wanted to see Zach. Zach had held Harold Allman’s hand and kept the pain from overwhelming him. She wanted, more than anything, for Zach to hold her hand, too.