He Thought Tuesdays Were Pottery, Now He Begs Me Home novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: Friday Shift
My badge opened the ambulance bay doors at 7:58 on Friday night, and I stood there a second with my palm flat against the reader.
Four years, and it still beeped green.
My old locker was still locker fourteen.
Somebody had put a new padlock on it, and taped the key inside a paper envelope marked TARRANT in Cliff's blocky capitals.
The white coat inside smelled of cedar, and the name over the pocket still said Dr. J. Tarrant.
I put it on.
"Well, look what the cat dragged in," said the charge nurse, who had been charging for thirty-one years and had once taught me to start an IV on a frightened toddler.
She hugged me hard enough to hurt.
"We've been placing bets," she said into my shoulder.
"On what?"
"On how long you'd last before you took over the department," she said.
"I'm provisional."
"Honey, so was I, in 1993."
By nine the waiting room was full.
By ten it was a bad night, the kind that comes on a Friday after the first cold snap.
Cliff found me at the whiteboard.
"Three on deck," he said. "Stab wound, bed two, coming in by medic. Overdose in four. And a six-year-old in the triage hall who ate something she's allergic to."
"Which one's worst?"
"Ask the medic."
The medic ran in, calling numbers.
Bed two held a young man, left chest, a puncture the size of a thumb, his pressure falling and his neck veins swelling.
"Tension pneumothorax," I said. "Air's trapped in his chest and it's crushing his heart. Needle and a tube. Cliff, can you take the kid in the hall?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
He was gone.
I found the space between the ribs with two fingers, put in the needle and heard the hiss.
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