Mind the Bleep

11 | You've Got This

TW: very mild depiction of medical gore.

—

"Look, I think it's best if you head back to the medical emergency call on Maple ward. Preeti and I will go to one cardiac arrest each, and I'll have Dawn join you on Maple so you're not alone."

"But—"

"No. No buts Caliana. I'm going to need you to step up now." Isaac affirmed; the earlier tenderness had been superseded by the familiar hardened countenance. He wasn't being unreasonable per se. If anything, this was the very situation that mandated tough love. "All I'm asking you to do is keep the patient alive until I get there. That's simple enough, right?"

"Right." She parroted, her voice trembling twice on the single-syllable word.

Isaac didn't hang around to placate her concerns any further, already sprinting off in the opposite direction towards the main entrance. She stood frozen in time for a second, witnessing Isaac's frame become smaller and smaller before he disappeared fully into the distance.

She released a quivering breath, the sound reverberating as it bounced off each of the walls of the barren hallway. Caliana wasn't feeling particularly fatigued despite the ungodly hour of the night – the earlier compromising situation Isaac and she had been in had fuelled her with adequate adrenaline for this fight response.

Now, she summoned all her strength to hold her head up, before dashing down the corridor.

You've got this, Callie. Five years of medical school have prepared you for this moment. You've got this.

Did she believe it? Hell no. Would she keep repeating it until she did? Hell yes.

She barged onto the ward which was a far cry from what she and Isaac had witnessed less than half an hour earlier. A swarm of nursing staff stood cluttered beside the nursing station; a few of them peeking through the obscured window of one of the side rooms.

"I just got an emergency call here. Is anybody able to give me a handover for the patient? Do we know what the situation is?" Caliana questioned, stabilising her voice, feigning confidence to the best of her abilities.

It was believable. Almost.

"He's only just come up to us from the Emergency Department. He's got an early warning score of nine. We don't know very much else about him." One of the junior nurses croaked. "Our charge nurse, Nurse Nightingale is already in there with the patient doing the primary assessment."

"Okay, thanks. Can one of you get me the medical notes, and his drug chart, please?" Caliana donned a pair of sky-blue chromatic latex gloves, and a sterile plastic gown as she entered the side room.

Her eyes instantly drew to Nurse Nightingale as the latter woman scurried around the patient, scooping his face up and into a non-rebreathe oxygen mask.

The patient rolling on the bed was a rather large man, clutching the right side of his chest, and taking shallow gasping breaths, his body bereft of oxygen. He raised his head slightly as he heard Caliana enter. Several drips of tears of pain rolling down his cheeks as he did so. Caliana immediately noticed how immortally pale he appeared; his lips and the tips of his fingernails turning a concerning aquamarine blue.

"Hello, sir. My name is Callie, I'm one of the night doctors here. Are you able to tell me anything about what happened to bring you into the hospital tonight?" The man endeavoured to open his mouth, his nostrils flaring as he struggled to formulate any coherent words; a harsh wheeze emerging instead. He opened and closed his mouth repeatedly several times before Caliana pressed a gloved hand over his, shaking her head at him. "It's okay if you're not able to. I'm going to try and help you feel better, okay?"