The Journey Forward | ONC 2023 Version

Prologue

Usually, as Christmas Eve merged with Christmas Day, the only sounds outside of the beeping machines were the soft Christmas music playing from a computer at the nurses' station.

Sickness didn't differentiate between holidays and ordinary days, but people did. People wanted to spend December 25th enjoying gifts and feasting with family, so they avoided visiting the hospital unless it was critical. Because of this quiet and to build goodwill with my new colleagues, I volunteered to work the overnight shift every year since my arrival so those with families could spend the night playing Santa for their children.

I had just finished adjusting a patient's life support settings when the first Trauma Alert sounded over the hospital speakers. I ignored the first one. Usually, the surgeons and emergency doctors cared for the traumas, and I only helped once they arrived upstairs. I took the trauma training when I first came because they offered it, and I love learning, but my hospital had never activated Trauma Team Three, and I loathed going down to the emergency department.

Immediately after the first call came the second, and my heart stopped as the third call sounded overhead.

"Trauma Team Three to the emergency room, Trauma Team Four to the emergency room."

Neecy looked up at me in horror and shuffled me out of the room we had just finished in.

We didn't have a Trauma Team Four.

"All available staff to the Emergency room."

The quiet nurse pushed me toward the elevator. "That's you, doc. We've got this here." The look in her eyes may have reflected the horror I felt. It had been a long time since I had last seen traumas. Would I freeze up?

The elevator doors opened, and the cacophony of sounds that accompanied multiple ambulances and injured patients assaulted my ears. As soon as I stepped into the din, my chest tightened, and my pulse raced. The scene before me didn't resemble my usual quiet suburban hospital emergency room.

Searching for calm in the sea of insanity, I found Lisa, the usually quiet charge nurse. But even she stood on a chair screaming to each incoming medic team, directing them to the available space and determining the critical needs before the urgent. A sweat threatened to break on my brow, and I was glad I hadn't had time to eat dinner yet as acid began to burn my throat. Even in a small midwestern town, sixty miles from the nearest city, I couldn't avoid the sounds of catastrophe. I tried to escape this when I graduated from my inner-city residency program.

I dodged around one of those teams carrying a crying woman clutching her bleeding arm. If she was crying, she was breathing, so she probably wasn't the first on my list.

"What do you have for me, Lisa?" I asked as the short, olive-skinned woman took a breath between arrivals.

"Dr. Tang, glad you are here. Bed five looks like he will need intubation, and anesthesia is already in the OR. We've called in the backups-" We both turned as the bay doors opened to let in another ambulance exposing the heavy snow that had been falling all night.

"Right, I'm on it, Lisa. Where's Shamel?" I glanced around for the wiry doctor staffing the department that night.

"He's in three with a pregnant woman -" Lisa rubbed her ample belly. "She was just going to work. They all were, mostly. These are our people who have to work when others are spending time with their families."

I nodded and turned away from Lisa when she began hollering at the medics to avoid a collision. I knew what she meant, though. Anyone who worked when others slept counted as "our people." We were the ones who kept the world moving while they rested.