Mount Mercy

1

Amy

SOMETIMES, I wonder: what if I’d never left the operating theater? I could have stayed safe. Stayed warm. But I’d never have met Doctor Dominic Corrigan. I’d never have fallen headfirst into those blue Irish eyes. I’d never have known what it took to love a man like him, or what it was like to be loved by one.

And we’d be dead. We’d all be dead.

On the morning I met him, I was in the zone. The hospital, the operating theater... all of it had melted away and I was only aware of the soft violins of Bach’s double concerto, the reassuring weight of the scalpel in my hand and the steady rhythm of the patient’s heart. When I spoke, even my voice was a little slow and dreamy. “You can tell Mrs. Barlow her husband’s going to be okay.” I began to close up the incision. “Good job, everyone.”

Krista, my head nurse, grabbed the phone and passed on the good news. She’d barely put it down, and I’d only just finished suturing, when it rang again. “They want you downstairs for a consult,” she told me.

Downstairs. I came out of the zone in a split second. I kept my voice calm, but my stomach was already knotting. “Ask Patel to do it.”

“He’s in the middle of a heart bypass,” said Krista apologetically.

I pulled off my surgical mask. “Weisler, then.” Now my voice was pleading.

“He’s working on a head injury. Some teenager came off her dirt bike.”

That only left me. I had to go down there. I nodded and walked out into the hallway. When I hit the elevator button for 1, Emergency Room, my chest went tight.

Surgery, where I manage to hide most of the time, is on the very top floor of the Mount Mercy hospital, furthest from the outside world. It’s a secure little burrow: no one comes up there unless they’re scheduled for a procedure. The ER? That’s the polar opposite. It’s where hundreds of strangers pour in every day. I could hear it before the elevator even reached the first floor. Yells and screams and running footsteps. Shouts and pleas and anger and above all, people.

I don’t do so well with people.

When the doors rumbled open, I caught my breath and took an unconscious step back. Gurneys rattling past, nurses running back and forth with supplies, the ear-splitting whistle of defibrillator paddles rising in charge and the dull thud as they fired. A babble of voices: doctors and patients and relatives and cops, all demanding answers, now, this instant. Surgery is about planning and precision, sometimes hurried but never panicked. The ER is one continuous panic. You want to know what it’s like? Get four or five mechanics, huddle them around a freshly-wrecked car and then push the whole thing out of a plane and tell them they have to get it working again before it hits the ground.

The doctors in the ER cursed and bitched and joked and somehow it worked, they formed a noisy, close-knit team, like a rowdy group of football jocks who win every game. They communicated non-stop. I’m painfully shy. They made split-second decisions. I’m all about thinking things through. They were heroes who lived for the adrenaline rush. Confident, grinning lions, hungry for the next patient.

I’m more of a dormouse. My dad once told me, people like us do better in a lab. And he was right: I’m a scientist who somehow landed in a hospital. I thrive on order and the ER was chaos. I really, really didn’t want to go out there.

And then I saw him, across the room: the case I’d been called downstairs for. A biker in a sleeveless leather jacket lay on a gurney, a knife buried in his chest right up to the hilt. Definitely a surgical case. My mind was instantly spinning with a diagram of the man’s anatomy, visualizing all the damage the blade would have done. We had to get him upstairs now.

Except... an ER doc, a big guy I didn’t recognize, was leaning over the man. He’d just finished re-inflating the man’s lung—so far, so good—but now he was preparing to do the worst thing possible: pull out the knife.

I felt my eyes bug out. I darted out of the elevator and right into my own personal hell. “Stop!” I yelled. But my voice is moderated for the quiet calm of the OR. I was a mouse squeaking next to a busy freeway.

And crossing the ER felt like scuttling across that freeway. I’m not that small, about 5’5”, but everything felt huge and fast and loud. Carts and gurneys racing across my path, cops tussling with drunks, nurses running between patients... all the people who belonged down there and then me, trying to thread my way between them.

I’m used to people not noticing me. It’s deliberate. I tend to... hide. But it means no one moves aside for me. And as I struggled and dodged, I could see the doctor flexing his arms, preparing to pull the knife…. “Stop!” But just as I yelled, paramedics burst through the doors with another patient, drowning me out.