Patch Me Up

Six hours in the emergency room shift and I was ready to pass out. I had one hour left and even though it was my job to fix people up and the reality was that I loved it, but the hours for emergency room doctors was hell. I'd been up since four and my patience and nerves were wearing thin. If I had to convince another mother that her child's headache did not usually warrant a trip to the emergency room I would scream.

"He'd better be running a fever of 105 or I won't look at him," I'd yelled. Doctor Aguirre, the supervisor, had given me an earful for that, but all I did was apologize sweetly to him and the mother and he left convinced I'd reformed. I dragged my feet back into the corridor, flexed my shoulders and neck, and geared up for my final hour, hoping that it'd be a slow one.

All I'd had were a few cuts and fractures to deal with --too major to be sent up and too minor to be big problems-- before I was finally ready to call it a day and head back to my small but adequate flat in Deusto to sleep what I couldn't the night before.

That was when I heard the giggles. A few of the new female interns and nurses started ogling over some apparent hotshot who'd come in, and then I heard Iraide, another doctor who'd just graduated from intern like me and who was, of course, also given the crappy early morning emergency room shifts.

"Let Idoia look at him." I nearly fainted. I'd all but turned my heel to head into the locker room and taken my labcoat off. I wanted to walk in there and yell at her.

"Idoia? Whyyy?" one of the interns whined.

"Maybe this one can actually get her on a date." There were no words to explain how much I resented that. The reason I wasn't dating anyone was because my hours were crap and I had no energy to even eat, much less make myself pretty for some guy I'd never be able to spend time with. I grunted before heading into the room to face the girly mob.

"This one's yours," Iraide said with a smirk and pointed to the curtained room that I could hear grunts and hissing intakes of breath from.

"Thank you," I seethed through my teeth. The smile never left her face and I composed myself just before sliding the vinyl curtain, the metal rings screeching along the runner. I was greeted with two men, one who looked like he was barely eighteen, average height --for a Spaniard anyway--, dark hair and brown eyes, whose hands were on the shoulders of a much taller man on the table who looked to be in his early 20s. Both were wearing Athletic Bilbao uniforms, and the man on the table had blood gushing from punctures in his shin that looked to be about a centimeter in diameter. He was the one breathing in through his teeth and moaning. For being a footballer, the amount of pain he was in seemed a bit exaggerated, though there was a lot of blood.

"What happened?" I asked as I took the clipboard from the stand on the edge of the table. Fernando Llorente Torres was written on it. The younger one looked at me.

"It was practice, I didn't mean to, the ground was wet and I slid--" he stammered, unable to complete a phrase.

"Oh come on, Javi."

"I'm sorry, man!" The kid looked like he was about to burst into tears. I grabbed a pair of latex gloves from the counter and examined the injured leg.

"Do you think anything's broken?" Javi's face went white while Fernando shook his head. His eyes were a stunning shade of light blue, made even more stunning by the paleness of his face.

"I don't think so," he said between breaths. I did my best to mop up the blood that was running down his leg, and felt around his lower leg. He yelped when I touched one of the puncture wounds, and I apologized quickly. Nothing seemed to be broken, but it was hard to say.