He Thought Tuesdays Were Pottery, Now He Begs Me Home novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Shockable

Joss restarts Rosalyn's heart on the courthouse steps, a paramedic calls her Doctor, and in the ER Cliff tells her he wrote her six times.

I put two fingers on Rosalyn's neck and felt nothing.

I put my cheek by her mouth and felt nothing there either.

"She's not breathing," I said. "You," I told the man in the delivery uniform. "Call 911. Say cardiac arrest, courthouse steps, Lakeside."

He had his phone out before I finished.

"Then run inside and bring back the defibrillator on the lobby wall. Red case. Go."

He went up the steps three at a time.

Bennett still held his mother's head.

"Lay her flat," I said. "On the stone. Now."

He lowered her.

I tore her gray jacket open, then the silk blouse under it, and the pearls skittered down the steps one by one.

I locked my elbows, set the heel of my hand on her breastbone and pushed.

Rosalyn's ribs gave under my palm.

That happens.

It doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.

"Bennett, kneel here and count out loud. One, two, three, all the way to thirty. Louder than the wind."

"Joss, I can't-" he said.

"You can count."

He counted.

His voice shook, but the numbers came out evenly spaced, and I pushed on every one of them.

Two inches deep, hard and fast, and let the chest come all the way back up.

A crowd had made a ring on the steps, and nobody spoke.

I'd done this a hundred times in the ER, with a team and a crash cart and a man shouting the time.

I had never done it in a camel coat on a stone staircase.

I had never done it to someone who spent five years telling me what I wasn't.

It made no difference at all.

Her chest was a chest.

The delivery man came back down with the red case in both arms.

I flipped it open, peeled the pads and slapped them on her bare skin, one under the collarbone and one low on her left side.

The machine said, in a calm woman's voice, "Analyzing. Do not touch the patient."

"Hands off," I said.

Bennett jerked back.

"Shock advised. Charging. Stand clear."

"Everybody clear," I said. "Bennett, no part of you on her."

"Press the flashing button."

I pressed it.

Rosalyn's whole body jumped on the stone and lay still.

"Resume CPR."

I went back to compressions without looking for a pulse, because the machine was right and the first shock almost never does it alone.

"One, two, three," Bennett said. He had started to cry, and he kept counting.

The machine analyzed again.

"Shock advised."

"Her heart is quivering instead of pumping," I said, because he needed to know what he was looking at. "It's electrical chaos. The shock is how we reset it."

"Press the flashing button."

I pressed it.

This time, when she jumped, her hand opened on the granite.

I put two fingers to her neck.

A pulse knocked under my fingertips, slow and then steadier.

Rosalyn Hetherington dragged in a long, ragged sound and opened her eyes.

She looked straight up at me.

"Don't talk," I said. "You're all right. I've got you."

Her mouth worked.

She didn't say anything.

Sirens turned in from Lakeside Avenue, and a rig bumped up onto the curb.

Two paramedics jumped out with a stretcher.

The older one, a gray-bearded man, stopped dead when he saw who was kneeling on the stone.

"Dr. Tarrant?"

"Hi," I said. "Sixty-four-year-old woman, witnessed arrest on the courthouse steps. Pulseless, no respirations, fibrillating on the AED. Two shocks, CPR throughout. ROSC just now. She's got a pulse, thready, and she's fully awake."

"Copy that." He grinned at me, quick and real. "Damn, Doc. Four years and you're still the best I ever saw run a code."

Bennett lifted his head slowly.

"Doc," he said.

"She quit on us," the paramedic told him, loading Rosalyn's stretcher. "Best second-year we ever had. Sir, are you family? You can ride in front."

Bennett was looking at me.

He had told thirty people I'd never finished anything.

"Doctor," he said again.

"Go ride with your mother," I said.

"You're coming."

"For the patient, not for you."

I climbed into the back of the rig and held two fingers on her wrist the whole way to Metro.

Rosalyn's eyes stayed on my face.

She did not thank me, and I didn't expect her to.

Cuyahoga Metro's ambulance bay smelled the same as it had four years ago, of diesel and bleach and cold air.

The doors opened before we stopped.

A tall man in navy scrubs, with a bike helmet clipped to his hip, took the head of the stretcher.

He started rolling it without a word and read the monitor as he went.

Red-brown stubble, a nose broken twice, green eyes that went straight to the strip.

"STEMI," he said. "Get the cath lab on the phone. Who ran the code?"

"I did," I said.

He looked up.

For a moment neither of us moved.

"Tarrant," said Cliff Dempsey.

"Hello, Cliff."

He kept pushing the stretcher down the hall, and I kept pace, and he never took his eyes off the monitor.

"I wrote you six times," he said, very low. "You never answered once."

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