After the Storm (manxman)

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

(Stephen's private inner office)

Stephen...

Pushing through the door of my office, the first thing I noticed was that all the lights were dim over the reception desk, and the second was how quiet it was. Rosie had long since gone home for the night and I have to remember to check my text messages, our agreed upon method of communication to let me know that she got home safely. She had stayed behind way longer than her shift required to make sure that everything I was supposed to do today was rescheduled and spread throughout my hectic itinerary for the remainder of the week.

I closed and locked the outer door and dragged my tired body down the hallway to my inner office.The day just seemed to have flown away from me. I recalled coming in this morning and listening to Rosie as she micromanaged my entire day that had unfortunately for the both of us went completely off the rails by one of my post surgical patients developing a fever high enough to send his fragile body into febrile seizures.

It's hard to use ice packs and other external methods to cool a body down when more than half of that body is covered by fresh skin grafts. Then on top of it all, the young man's heart decided that the shock was too much for his system and it started fluttering away and sent the patient into ventricular tachycardia. At one point his heart rate had peaked at over two hundred beats per minute. Way too much strain was being placed on the cardiac muscles and I had to order stat intravenous medications to slow his heart rate down. I had to chemically paralyze him as well.

Once, his heart was stabilized. I had to have the nurses, God bless their hard working little hearts, to pour liter after liter of cold saline intravenously into my patient, which I had to counterbalance with yet another medication to make sure he urinated enough to pass out all that extra fluid. Otherwise all those liquids could potentially settle around his lungs and heart and send him into heart failure as well as swellings of his limbs which could cause his fresh skin grafts to stretch and not heal properly. It was days like this that sometimes made me wonder why the hell didn't I choose another career path. Then you speak to the grateful parents or loved ones of the person you are fighting for and the gratitude they express makes it all worth it.

A wave of dizziness swamped me and I threw out my hand and leaned against the wall until my world stopped spinning. "Fuck, when was the last time I had something to eat." My exhausted brain thought and tried to recall when it was, and I came up with nothing. I had spent all day at my patient's bedside making sure that all sterile techniques were being performed at all times.

The young man just had his grafting done the day before and I feared that if he got an infection, he wouldn't be able to survive it, so I also increased the dose of the broad spectrum heavy duty intravenous antibiotics I ordered on him. The poor man looked like he had IV tubing lines coming from all over his body, two more of which I had to add today right there at his bedside.

I pushed myself off the hallway wall and took a deep breath to center myself and that's when I picked up the mouth watering aroma of hot food. My stomach grumbled as if on cue, and I pushed myself towards my office. I opened the door to my private office space and opened my mouth getting ready to reprimand Rosie about staying back so late only to have to return early in the morning, but my words died on my tongue at the sight in front of me.

Luis was standing behind my desk he was busy pulling and arranging steaming containers of Chinese food from a huge take out box he had set well away from my paperwork to notice me standing in the doorway. The hardships from my day just melted away from me as I leaned against the doorframe and studied my man, and damn, he is so freaking pretty. Luis wasn't just beautiful on the outside, the sweet man was just as nice on the inside as well.