Part of me couldn’t wait for my shift to end, but the other wanted to stay there all night. If I was working, I couldn’t think about Ryder…and Maddy…and Maddy’s Fight. I was fairly certain I’d really fucked up with him the night before. I’d been up half the night, vacillating between being angry with myself and believing I was right—or trying to tell myself I was. We both wanted to do the right thing, even if we seemed to have different ideas about what that was, but that didn’t mean I was right in asking him to leave. I’d regretted it but hadn’t done a damn thing about it.
“I have a patient with chest and left arm pain, plus shortness of breath,” Sally, the triage nurse, said as she wheeled a woman in who didn’t look older than thirty-five. She was young, but a heart attack wasn’t impossible. Sweat dotted her brow, her face noticeably pale as I went to her.
“I need an EKG, STAT,” I said to one of the nurses before reaching her. Sally wheeled her to a room, me right beside them. “Do you have a history of heart problems?”
She nodded, her breathing visibly shallow.
“What was her O2?” I asked Sally.
“Ninety-five, but let me check again.”
The nurse put the pulse oximeter on her finger as I looked over and signaled for oxygen, to be safe.
“It’s down to eighty-eight, Doc Hutch.”
More of the nursing staff came in, getting her hooked up on oxygen and transferred to the bed, while Sally read me her vitals.
“Hi, can you tell me your name?” I asked her as they put the leads on her for EKG.
“Meg…Megan…”
“Shh. That’s okay. Megan is enough for now.” I touched her shoulder, hoping to comfort her. Lab was already waiting outside the room. “What’s your pain level?”
“E…eight.”
“She was a walk-in?”
“Her sister brought her. She’s finishing registration.” Sally went into what was known of her medical history, which she got from the sibling. It wasn’t much because she’d needed to hurry, but there was definite cause for concern due to her previous heart issues.
The second she was completely hooked up, I knew we were in trouble. My pulse kicked up, adrenaline rushing through me. “Nitro and aspirin.”
“Got it,” one of the nurses replied. We needed to get her clots dissolved as quickly as possible.
Everything else faded to the background then except Megan and me. No matter what, I was going to make sure she made it out of this okay.
I got off at three and found myself in the ICU. It was ridiculous, really, going upstairs to check on Megan when I could just as easily call. I was sure she was okay—we’d gotten her stabilized after we’d placed a stent, everything going flawlessly. That didn’t always matter in medicine, though. You could do everything right, and something could still go wrong. Life was like that too.
“Is there something you need, Doc Hutch?” one of the critical care nurses asked, clearly surprised to see me there, and especially not in work clothes.
“I wanted to peek in on Megan Oliver.” Certain patients left their mark on me, and she’d been one. Her sister too, whom I’d spoken with twice when Megan was still in the ED.
“She’s in bed five.” The nurse smiled at me as if she understood.
“Thank you. She’s still doing well?”
“Yeah. Cardio was already here too. You got her fixed up good, Doc Hutch.”
I nodded a thank-you and went to the room. Megan was sleeping, wearing oxygen, her heart rate being constantly monitored. Her sister, Bianca, sat in a chair beside her, holding her hand.
I was going to come back later, but Bianca must have heard me because she turned to look my way. Her eyes were red, her face too, clearly having been crying. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You didn’t. You saved Megan; that’s what you did.”
My eyes darted away. It always felt awkward to get praise for something like this. I was a physician. It was what I was supposed to do. “So did you because you got her here so quickly.”
She wiped her eyes with her free hand, the other still latched on to Megan’s. “Do you have any siblings?” she asked.
I stepped closer into the room. “I do. A sister. Her name is Madison.”
“Are the two of you close?”
A pang shot through my chest, splintering out and ricocheting, hitting all my internal organs. “Yes and no. That’s a difficult question to answer at the moment. I love her. She’s one of the most important people in my world, but…”
“But life is hard,” she finished for me.
“Yes. It is.”
“It was always just me and Meg, ya know? Our parents weren’t the best… They’d rather party than worry about us. I’m older, so I took on the mom role. Megan has always been…wilder than me. She just loves life and having fun while I’m always—according to her—obsessing about being responsible.” She chuckled. “I was afraid of turning out like our parents, afraid she would too because of some of the things she did, and that caused a lot of fights between us.”