Right As Rain (Complete)

Chapter 18

Maelee

A chemo port, two appendectomies, three emergency room patients, and four hours later, I need coffee. I exit my final scheduled surgery and toss the surgical gown in the bin at 19:30. My hair is a wreck but doing anything about it is useless; I will likely end up in the OR again before the night is through. Instead of worrying about it, I leave my scrub cap on and go about my day. If Hudson can't like me grungy, he shouldn't like me at all.

I take the stairs to my floor needing to see Noah and Katie before the emergency room floods with its typical late night consumers of medicine. As I round the corner to Noah's room, I run into Ashley.

"Oh! Hey!" she says. "Where are you headed?"

Instinctually, I look down at my watch. "Noah's room," I tell her.

"Can you sign some orders for me first?" she asks.

Ashley and I walk to my office and the only thing she can report are the sound complaints that have come from both Noah and Katie's rooms. I know Hudson is Katie's favorite, but it seems Noah has visited her as well, and I'm sure she wasn't opposed.

I look around my desk to find my tablet. "Where is my iPad, Ashley?" I ask.

"Um, I put it on your desk," she says from the hall.

I look to the floor and around the desk but still find nothing. "It's not here," I tell her. "I'll just do it on the computer." I reach down to turn on my computer.

Ashley fumbles around, unsure of what happened to my tablet, but promises she will find it and smiles apologetically. When my pager goes off, she stonewalls. A page from downstairs can pull me away for hours and I needed to see Noah and Katie before being sucked into the black hole. I pull the pager from its clipped position on my scrub pants and look at its message.

911-408

"Shit!" I yell.

Ashley jumps, ready to help. "What's wrong?"

"Katie Victor," I say quickly. "Come with me."

In my thirty-second sprint to Katie's room, I prepare for the worst. She told me her throat was feeling funny. I assumed it was dry because of her endoscope. Maybe she has a perforation. I must have missed something when I saw her earlier; I shouldn't have delayed her full exam. She wasn't having difficulty breathing. She wasn't wheezing. She was holding her neck a bit. That could be a sign of a cervical perforation. If she does have a perforation, I would much rather it be cervical than intrathoracic. If it's intrathoracic, I'll need to work fast. She will need to go to the OR immediately. She said she drank and it felt good. Swallowing is extremely painful when the perforation is intrathoracic, so it can't be that. It has to be cervical.

I've got this.

Ashley has kept up with my rushed pace but she doesn't seem overly focused or intently hurried. I feel she should be while responding to an emergency, especially with me being in the state that I am. She isn't worried at all. She isn't concerned; she isn't premeditating.

She's excited.

I stop running and stand still in the hall. When I saw Katie earlier, she pledged her allegiance to team Hudson and hinted about his "big move." Ashely's small smirk confirms my suspicion. She doesn't say it. She doesn't have to; her face says more than words every could

This isn't an emergency at all. This is Hudson.

I hesitate before entering the room and plead with my internal self to keep my emotions in check. Regardless of whatever is about to happen, I have to keep it together. I take a focused and determined deep breath and step inside as a guitar starts to play.