Angels on the Night Shift (20 page)

He paused, then sighed once more.

“I just have to stick with my vice president on this one. My hands are tied, Robert. I’m sorry.”

“But Bill—” I tried one more time.

“Robert, I’m sorry. My hands are tied.”

There was nothing left to say, and I turned and walked out of the office.

Walter Stevens was standing beside the secretary’s desk, pointing out something to her on a report he held in his hand. He looked up as I passed by, and without a word turned his back to me.

6:50 p.m.
Three days had passed, and we hadn’t heard anything from Amy. Virginia had tried to call her in the morning, but there was no answer and her voice mail was full.

“I’ll try again tomorrow,” she told me when I came in to begin my night shift. “And just so you know, Walter Stevens came down here this afternoon. He wanted to know if any more drugs were missing, and when I told him no, he seemed to take great satisfaction. I told him it had only been three days. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Case closed.’ It was all I could do to hold my tongue.”

Word of Amy’s firing had quickly spread through the ER and throughout the hospital. The reason for her firing was known by a growing number of people in the department, and it would be impossible to keep that from spreading as well, try as we might.

“Virginia, it really bothers me that the person who’s been stealing the drugs knows that Amy’s been fired, and probably knows why. Yet they haven’t come forward and are willing to let her take the fall. It’s bad enough to be doing this in the first place, but to knowingly allow someone else to suffer for it, and Amy with kids…”

“I know, and it stinks,” she huffed. “But what can we do?”

She was right, and I knew it. We were both helpless to do anything for Amy. I wasn’t used to that feeling, and I knew it bothered Virginia. I picked up my briefcase and headed to our office.

“Oh, and Dr. Lesslie,” she called out to me. I turned and walked back to her. “Darren Adler called in sick again this afternoon. And this time he
won’t
be coming in. Says he can’t stop vomiting or some such.” She made this last statement with a measure of skepticism in her voice and on her face.

“And Patsy Wilson will be coming in. In fact, I think she’s already here, back in the lounge. You’ll be working with her and with Clara Adams tonight.”

That will be interesting,
I thought, nodding my head.

“Good,” I replied, and once more headed down the hallway.

“Well, well—Dr. Lesslie, I presume.”

The voice was behind me and was familiar. I turned around and was facing Patsy Wilson.

“Patsy,” I said, leaning forward and giving her a hug. “How long has it been? Three, four years?”

“How about seven?” she answered.

Ouch! Where had the time gone?

She hadn’t changed a bit since she’d last worked in the ER. She had the same smiling, cheerful face, and the same confident, energetic bearing. It was good to have her back, if only for this night.

“The place looks about the same,” she told me, glancing around the department. “Different faces, but everything seems to be where it’s always been.”

“‘Don’t mess with success.’ Isn’t that what you always said?” I quipped.

“Nope. I always said ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ So if you’re going to quote me, make sure you get it right.”

Clara Adams walked up and asked, “Get what right?”

“Oh, never mind, Clara,” I responded. “Have you had a chance to meet Patsy Wilson?”

“Yes, I have,” she answered smiling at the older nurse. “We ran into each other in the lounge. It turns out we went to the same nursing school.”

“Just a few years apart,” Patsy quickly added. “Actually, Clara was still in diapers when I was in nursing school.”

“They had diapers back then?” I teased.

Two charts sat on the countertop, belonging to patients who still needed to be seen. Clara slid one over in front of me.

“Here, why don’t you go do something?” she told me with a mischievous smile on her face.

The evening went by smoothly, and it seemed as if Patsy had never left the department. She helped Clara start a difficult IV and later showed her some tricks in effectively delivering a breathing treatment to a wheezing and uncooperative two-year-old.

A little after ten, Jeff Ryan came through triage, pushing a middle-aged man in one of our wheelchairs. I was standing behind the nurses’ station and looked up as he passed.

“Cardiac,” was all he said, motioning with his head and hurrying toward that room.

Clara had been assigned major trauma and cardiac, and she started off after Jeff.

Patsy was walking out of room 5 and Clara asked, “Patsy, can you give me a hand?”

“Sure, I’ll be right there. Let me give these orders to the secretary.”

Ozzie Fielder was a fifty-two-year-old man with a long history of diabetes and cigarette smoking. He had come to the ER complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath, and Jeff had immediately noticed his pale color and labored respirations. By the time I got to cardiac, Jeff had him up on our stretcher and was placing electrodes on his bare chest. Next he connected him to our heart monitor.

“Here, let me take over,” Patsy said, stepping up beside him.

“Sure,” Jeff answered, moving out of her way. He told us what he knew of Mr. Fielder’s history and then gave us his vital signs.

“Heart rate is around 50, and his blood pressure’s a little over 80. His lungs sound a little wet too.”

Ozzie Fielder was having a heart attack and was already getting into trouble. Clara and Patsy were all over him, starting a couple of IVs, getting his oxygen going, setting out the needed medications before I asked for them, and arranging for an expedited trip to the cath lab. Everything went like clockwork, as if these two women had been working together for years. It was great, and I wanted to tell them so.

As Ozzie was being wheeled out of the room by the cath lab techs, I looked at Patsy and Clara and said, “I want the two of you to know you handled that perfectly. It couldn’t have gone any more smoothly.”

“Hey, we’re just doing our jobs,” Patsy responded, smiling at her partner. “Isn’t that what you always say, Dr. Lesslie?”

“You know what I mean,” I mumbled. Patsy knew, and she also knew I didn’t give someone a compliment unless I really meant it. “Okay,” I groused. “Forget it then. You guys are terrible.”

“Now
that’s
the Dr. Lesslie we know and love,” Patsy chuckled, helping Clara straighten up the room.

The three of us had just walked out of cardiac and over to the nurses’ station when we heard a loud commotion from out in triage. It was the voices of several men, angry and cursing, and it seemed to be escalating. Suddenly the ambulance entrance doors opened and Denton Roberts, one of the paramedics on EMS 2, came hurrying into the department. In his arms was a small child, wrapped in a beige blanket that was covered in blood.

“We need major trauma,” he called to us, his eyes wide not with fear but with anger.

“Major’s open,” Clara told him, hurrying ahead and turning on the room’s lights.

As he passed me, his head turned toward triage. He heard the yelling and muttered, “How did those guys get here so fast?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, hurrying along beside him.

With a disgusted look on his face he said, “I’ll tell you in a minute, Doc. It’s crazy.”

Patsy and Clara were standing on each side of the trauma stretcher, ready for Denton and the bundled child.

“Her name is Jenny,” he told us, carefully placing her on the thin, sheeted mattress.

Patsy began opening the blanket, a look of growing horror on her face. There was blood everywhere, and when a tiny hand came up toward us with a long gash extending from the wrist to the elbow, Clara gasped.

“It’s awful,” Denton whispered, staring down at the child, his bloodied hands hanging by his side.

When Jenny had been fully exposed, we just stood there for a split second, looking down in silence and not able to tear our eyes away. I had never seen anything like it. I immediately checked her breath sounds and listened to her heart. For the moment she seemed stable.

I gave Patsy and Clara some instructions and they sprang into action. Then I turned to Denton.

“Tell me what happened.”

As he began, the two nurses quietly talked to each other as they gingerly but rapidly undressed Jenny. Clara used the intercom to call for lab and X-ray, and Patsy prepared to start two IVs. All the while, they spoke soothingly to the little girl, and when they could, stroked her tangled and bloody hair, trying to calm and reassure her. She just lay there, strangely quiet, staring up at the ceiling.

“We got a call for a dog bite,” Denton said, stepping back from the stretcher and lowering his voice. “Down on Elm Street, about five minutes from here. When we got to the scene, there was a big ruckus out in the front yard, with maybe twenty or thirty people standin’ there and hollerin’. We had to push our way through the crowd, trying to find this little girl,” he paused, motioning with his head to the stretcher.

Then his face clouded. “It seemed liked no one was worried about Jenny—they were all watchin’ two guys fightin’ over by this dog pen between these two houses. It was absolute chaos! You know Junior Starr?” he suddenly asked me.

“The guy with all the tattoos on his arms and face?” I responded.

“Yeah, that’s Junior,” Denton nodded. “He was right in the middle of it with a big hawkbill knife, swingin’ it at this other guy, swearin’ and sayin’ he was gonna kill him.”

“Where was Jenny?” I interrupted.

“Like I said, Doc, everybody was watchin’ this fight and we had to look around for the ‘dog bite.’ We saw this woman kneelin’ on the ground by the front porch and lookin’ down at something. I ran over there and found…It was Jenny’s mother, and she was holdin’ Jenny in her arms and screamin’. We hadn’t been able to hear her with all the other stuff goin’ on.”

He stopped and looked down at his bloody hands.

“I called Joey over and we got started. She was breathin’ and had a good pulse, and she seemed alert. But the whole time, she never made a whimper—she just was lying there, staring up at the sky. I gotta tell ya that it scared me. We both tried to get a line started but couldn’t. That’s when we called it in and headed to the truck.”

He took a deep breath and turned his head to the trauma room door.

“Those guys out in triage, one of them must be Junior Starr,” he muttered. “While we were workin’ on Jenny we heard someone yell, ‘He’s been stabbed!’ and people started runnin’ everywhere. That’s about the time the police came down Elm Street with their sirens blarin’. Joey was goin’ over to check on those guys but they had already disappeared. I don’t know how they did it, but it looks like they beat us here!”

“Who is ‘they’?” I asked.

“Junior Starr,” he answered. “He owns the pit bull, the one that got loose.”

“Pit bull?” I exclaimed, now understanding the damage done to the little girl.

“Yeah, he has a pit bull—Jupiter, they call him. He apparently got loose this evening and went over to Jenny’s yard. She was out playin’ and didn’t see it comin’. No warning or anything. That dog just attacked her and did this…” He again motioned toward the stretcher.

“When her daddy—Toby Ragin—heard the noise, he came out of the house and picked up a shovel and went after the dog. That’s when Junior came over, lookin’ for Jupiter, and the two got into it. Toby must be out in the waiting room too. He’s probably the one who got stabbed.”

I had heard enough and stepped over beside the stretcher.

Two lab techs had drawn blood and were hurrying out the door, whispering to each other, while our X-ray tech was preparing to shoot some portable films. Patsy and Clara had done what they could to clean up Jenny, but nothing could lessen the devastation of what I now saw.

She was lying calmly on her back with her arms at her sides. The deep bite on her right forearm was covered with saline-soaked gauze. There were a dozen or so scattered bite marks on her left arm and hand, and on her right thigh.

But it was her face that grabbed my eyes and wouldn’t release them.

Her right upper eyelid was ripped from the brow through her lashes, and it flopped aimlessly every time she blinked. There was another gash that started in her right nostril and extended down through her upper lip, gaping open and exposing her upper baby teeth.

Jupiter, the pit bull, had meant business. At her jawline, just above her jugular blood vessels, were two deep bites, the lower one exposing the bone of her mandible.

I was hoping that the left side of her face had escaped this terrible damage, but as I gently moved her head to the right, I saw her ear. The top part was missing, and the lobe had been shredded. It was covered in clotted blood and dangling loosely.

Patsy took a deep breath behind me, looking down over my shoulder. “Do you want me to cover as much as I can with wet gauze?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “And we’ll need to get in touch with whoever’s on for plastic surgery.” Then I turned to her and whispered, “I just hope they can put her back together.”

She turned to the counter and opened a cabinet, reaching for more sterile four-by-fours. The trauma door opened and a policeman walked in. He stepped over to where I stood and looked down at Jenny Ragin.

His hand flew to his mouth and he recoiled, a look of horror and disbelief on his face. “What in the…” he gasped, reaching out for the wall behind him.

Clara immediately helped the young officer to a stool and he sat down.

“Doc, I had no idea…” he mumbled. “I knew it was a dog bite, but…”

“It’s bad, Jimmy,” I said, recognizing him from other late-night visits to the ER. “But she’s going to live.”

There was loud shouting in the hallway, just on the other side of the door.

“Where’s my daughter?” a man screamed. “Where’s Jenny?”

I quickly looked over to the stretcher, knowing the little girl must have heard this outburst. She didn’t move a muscle, just kept staring up at the ceiling. Clara was rubbing her head while Patsy began dressing the wounds on her face.