-Lennox’s secret thoughts
Lennox
“Oh, my God! It just keeps getting bigger!” I groaned, looking at the mirror in horror.
“Leave it alone and stop picking at it,” Paxton sighed in exasperation.
I glared.
“This is like…life or death. It’s massive. My face hasn’t broken out this much since I was sixteen! I’m twenty freakin’ six! I’m dying!” I declared, rather loudly, too.
“Mr. Beane? Can you hear me?” Melissa yelled loudly.
I looked up, as did Paxton and the rest of the nurse’s station, to see Melissa across the hall in room one doing a sternal rub on the patient.
A patient who had come to the ER because his children had been worried about him.
More like his children had forced him to come because he was acting funny, but then we’d gone in there to see him and he’d refused any and all treatment unless he could have a Vicodin.
Since we weren’t willing to give that to him without running some tests to see what he already had in the system, we were discharging him.
Melissa had actually walked in there to give him his discharge paperwork.
“Mr. Beane, open your eyes,” Melissa said loudly.
Mr. Beane didn’t react. Not to the yelling, nor the sternal rub.
Standing up, I walked over to the closest Pixus, or secured medicine storage, pulled some Narcan, and started towards the room.
Paxton was now leaning over Mr. Beane, doing his own version of the sternal rub.
However, since he was a man, it ended up being a lot rougher.
The man still didn’t flinch.
Then, surprising me, Paxton said, “If you don’t open your eyes, I’ll have my good friend over here give you some Narcan. That’ll take out every bit of narcotic in your system and you’ll be in pain again.”
Paxton always cracked me up when he tried to be a badass.
He was a very attractive man, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his whole body.
He had a love for all things living and hated doing harm, even when it was necessary to make someone better.
I’d met him during school, and we’ve stayed friends since. Even going so far as to move in together, at one point, before buying homes next door to each other.
Mr. Beane flinched at Paxton’s threat, but other than that, didn’t react at all.
Sighing in annoyance, I walked up to Mr. Beane, and pushed the Narcan.
He was fucked in the head if he thought we were joking.
Narcan really was my favorite drug.
It was always fun to see how mad the men and women would get when their high that they’d spend a grand on was swept away from them in a matter of moments.
Something that happened right then with Mr. Beane.
One second he was doing a bang-up job at ignoring us, and the next instant, when I went to do another sternal rub, he practically levitated off the gurney.
“Owww!” He yelled loudly. “You bitch!”
“Glad she’s not mean to just me,” a dark voice said behind me.
I whirled around and glared. “What are you doing here?” I hissed.
He lifted his hand in the air, waving it around slightly.
“What…how…what…why…shit,” I said in horror. “What are you doing standing? Sit down!”
He moved to the room where I guessed he’d been originally, and sat on the bed.
I snapped my fingers at Melissa. “I need the clutz’s chart.”
Melissa laughed, and moved to the cart where we held all the charts, spinning it around idly until she found what she was looking for.
Once she had his chart, she pulled it and walked it to me, all the while leaving a smirk on her face that I wanted to scratch off.
Best friend or not, I was not above sharing her secrets. Fighting wouldn’t work. Not with her.
I’d have to do something drastic to knock that smile off her face, and I wasn’t ready to pull that card yet, so I’d wait until she really stuck her foot into it.
Snatching the chart from her extended hand, I turned to Bennett’s room and stalked inside.
“So…how’d that happen?” I asked without preamble.
He winced, holding up his hand.
“Well…the first part was when I was following a suspect over a fence. A barbed wire fence,” he said, pointing to a large, mangled gash in his hand about an inch long. Then he moved to the knife that was sticking out of the webbing of his fingers. “And this happened when that guy decided to throw a knife at my face. I pulled my hand up just in time for it to lodge here.”
Indeed he did.
Holy shit.
I moved around his side, studying the wounds.
“The doctor’s going to have to look at the knife wound. And pull it out. I can stitch it up if there are no nerves that have been hit,” I said, squatting down so I could see the other side.
“That’s some zit you have there…” Bennett said, eyeing my forehead.
I slapped my hand over my face and stood abruptly.
“I know it’s there. You don’t need to point it out!” I snapped, spinning quickly to go wash my hands, then left the room.
I found Dr. Steven’s at his usual spot, pecking away at his charting.
“Dr. Steven’s, I’ll need you to come take a look at his hand. I’m sure I won’t have any trouble, but I want a second opinion,” I asked pleasantly.
Dr. Steven’s didn’t like me. Not even a little bit.
He didn’t like me because he thought I was ‘too young’ to be a PA, and that I should’ve never been hired. He liked to say that it was my father’s ‘handout’ that allowed me to be where I was.
Pretty much, he didn’t respect me and probably never would.
Which was fine with me. No skin off my nose if he didn’t like me. And I had no qualms calling him in for a second opinion.
“You can’t do something so miniscule yourself?” He asked, raising a surprised brow at my question.
“I never said that. I just think I’d like a doctor to look at it to make me feel better with my assessment. If you’re unable to do that since you’re so…busy…I can go get Dr. Milford,” I said sweetly.