Dr. Shane Howard, currently a passenger on The Jericho. 399 words!
May 30th 2517
Washington Memorial Hospital, Londinium.
The attending was on holiday, so at 8am Shane briefed the trauma team at morning conference. Following a quiet night with only two admissions, the meeting mainly involved updates on cases, imaging, surgeries and plans for patients. Residency was proving to be exactly what she’d expected: questioning decisions, following protocol, diagnostic studies, operating procedures, liaison with interns, students, nurses and support staff, talking to families. It was also proving to be exactly what she needed, consisting of an 80 hour week as standard.
Her pager went off within minutes of the conference closing, as she stood reviewing a patient she’d stabilized the night before. As always, new trauma had to take precedence.
“48yoM multiple GSW to chest T98 P110 R: 18 SaO2: 95. Intubated by AC.”
The team waited in the trauma room in gowns, shoe covers, sterile gloves. The students seemed keenest, their face masks hanging round their necks at the ready, trauma scissors and forms in hand. The Alliance Care transporter was one minute out, and she asked an intern to relay the notes.
“48 year old year-old male with multiple gun shot wounds to the chest with a temperature of 98F, heart rate of 110 beats per minute, respiratory rate of 18 breaths per minute with 95% oxygen saturation. Intubated by AC personnel.”
Maybe she’d check the tube herself, or ask a student to do so as another cut off the clothes. Sometimes, she’d undertake an emergency procedure immediately, enter the thorax or abdomen. Perhaps she’d open the chest and ribs, hold them apart with instruments until she could see the heart beating and know that life went on, regardless of trauma. It wasn’t the students that were the most keen, but Shane herself, though she never showed it in her frosty bedside manner.
Thirty seconds out. Sometimes she thought about Christophe, but she’d learned not to feel it. She sometimes wondered where he’d taken himself off to on sabbatical three months earlier, whether he ever thought of her still, or when he’d come back, but she pushed the longing back down, consistently, and eventually it stayed down. All she let herself feel now was the job, its surges and needs, its arcs and moments, the timbre of surgery, the immediacy of vicarious incongruent injury.
Trauma; she welcomed it, and filled the space he’d left with all it was.
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