Emergency

Mila

“We have an emergency,” someone called from the nurse's station, and I rushed to help out. An elderly lady was brought in with a mask over her mouth and nose, her eyes closed. Her family tagged behind her looking lost and shaken.

“What do we have?” I asked.

“Pneumonia. Advanced stages. She can’t breathe on her own. Heart rate is dropping.”

I ran with the gurney, pushing it into an open room, and I worked with another two nurses to stabilize the woman while the attending doctor was paged. The family—three men I assumed were her sons—hovered on the periphery without interfering. Bless them.

When we finally stabilized her, the extra nurses left. I stayed behind with Dr. Nash.

“Are you her sons?” Dr. Nash asked the three men. They nodded. “Your mother is very ill. She has an advanced form of pneumonia.”

“We’ve been telling her to come to a doctor, but she’s always been stubborn,” one of them spoke up.

“How long has she been sick?” Dr. Nash asked.

“Two weeks, just about,” he said. “Is it really bad?”

Dr. Nash paused, searching for words, and I knew the news wasn’t going to be good.

“I’m not going to pretend this isn’t very serious. At her age, she should have received medical care almost right away. We’ll do what we can, but she is very frail, and she might not respond to medication as well as we would like.”

“Is she going to die?” one of the other men asked, looking terrified.

“I hope we can bring her back, but I can’t tell you for sure that we’ll be able to fight this.”

Dr. Nash left the room after answering one or two more questions, and I was left behind. The three brothers hugged each other before moving to the bedside. The old lady was still wearing the oxygen mask, and she looked so small and frail under the hospital sheets, I worried for her. I worried about them.

“We should have brought her in,” one of them said.

“She didn’t want to. We can’t force her,” another answered.

“But she might die, and this will be on us.”

The first speaker only shook his head.

“What would you have done?” one of them asked me, and I was suddenly included in their little bubble of guilt and uncertainty.

“We have a responsibility to respect our elders and their wishes,” I said. “It’s very easy to look back and say, ‘I should have done it differently,’ but you did the right thing by bringing her in as soon you realized there was a problem. We’ll do what we can to take care of her. Is your mother stubborn?”

They all nodded.

“That’s a good thing. Stubborn people are more likely to fight.”

With that little bit of hope, I left the room and walked back to the nurse’s station.

“How is she?” Claire, another nurse on duty with me, asked.

“I hope she makes it. For their sake,” I said. “They’re going to blame themselves for the rest of their lives if she doesn’t.”

Claire shook her head. “This is a tough business to be in. Sometimes, I wonder why I became a nurse. All we see is the bad side of life.”

I shook my head. “No, what we see is people beating the odds every day. We see people getting another shot at life. We see the good when people who are knocked down by life can find it in them to get back up.”

Claire smiled, shaking her head. “You always see a silver lining, don’t you?”

“In this job, it’s the only thing worth holding onto.”

When I finally got off work after a twelve-hour shift, I was exhausted. I had been on my feet all day, running from one trauma unit to the next. But it wasn’t just physical exhaustion. I was emotionally drained. There had been a couple of tough cases today, and seeing the pain and suffering of the relatives who were scared they would lose a loved one got to me more than seeing the patients themselves. We could administer medicine that would do the trick in so many cases, but there was very little we could do for broken hearts, for loss and guilt and sorrow.

I stopped at the store to buy a ready-made meal. I wasn’t in the mood to cook. What I wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep until my next shift, but I had to take care of myself first. If I stopped eating because of everything I saw, I wasn’t going to do myself any good.

I had learned that the first few weeks on the job.

“Mila,” someone said behind me when I stared at the meals in one of the fridges. When I turned around, Ben stood next to me, and he looked concerned. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. “It was a long day at the hospital.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ben said. “I’m sure it gets stressful, but if anyone can handle it, it’s you.”

That brought a smile to my lips. Talking to Ben made me feel better right away. It was a relief to talk to someone outside of the hospital, and the distraction was welcome.

“Ben, we’re paying!” someone called from the checkout point.

“I’m coming,” Ben said before turning back to me. “When’s your next off day?” he asked me.

“I’m off tomorrow, actually,” I said.

“So am I. I get off at seven tomorrow morning. Do you want to get lunch tomorrow afternoon? I could do with the break, and I know you can too.”

I thought about it only for a moment before I nodded. I needed to get my mind off the patients and the difficulties at the hospital, and Ben was a wonderful distraction. I enjoyed spending time with him.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Ben said. “Take care of yourself.”

“See you tomorrow,” I said. When he walked away, I smiled before I reached in to grab a frozen meal.