Shift

6. Aiden

I felt like crawling inside the hospital bed beside John and hold him tight. I wanted to apologize for the part of me that had resented him. Instead, I stroke his forehead in time with the beep of the heart monitor.

For a while there, I thought he'd chosen this, that he had deliberately tried to leave me. I'd been a little angry at him because, shame on me, the alternative would be being very, very angry at myself.

I should have seen it coming, I thought, over and over again. I knew John to be the definition of a troubled soul. Despite being acknowledged by his peers on his skill and expertise, despite being loved by his patients, he'd always had those lingering feelings of self-doubt that surfaced from time to time, brought about by the worst possible events. A dangerous cocktail. I'd overlooked the way he felt, the day of the accident, I'd dismissed those feelings as unimportant.

These thoughts were so deeply set into my mind, that my skewed view led me to miss different possibilities. It took a layman like Max to point them out to me.

Maybe John hadn't chosen this. He'd always overcome his crisis of existential dread before, and came back with a vengeance too.

I remember well our first meaningful interaction, the first small proof of his endurance.

He was a fresh out of med school intern, I'd been working in Bondston General for a couple of years by then and, although we saw each other almost every day, we'd never quite worked together except for the occasional short exchange about this patient or that.

It was a rainy day, and we were both working the ER shift. It was a particularly terrible rainy day. An old building had collapsed, a bus had crashed into a couple of cars and it was the flu season. The ER personnel was overwhelmed.

"Help me, please! She can't breathe! My daughter can't breathe!"

Somehow, the woman's voice managed to be heard over all the painful moans and running medics and rolling carts and yelled orders.

Dr. Jane Oliver, at the time supervising John and a couple other interns, but also occupied with relieving a tension pneumothorax on an overweight man, sent us out.

"Dr. Raynor, you're up. Howard, cover for Aiden. Aiden go aid Raynor."

The girl was about eight years old, yet the mother was carrying her. She was pale, struggling to get some air inside her lungs, to no avail. "Please, please, help her!"

"Try to calm down, ma'am. Tell us what happened."

"I... I don't know, we were just... home, dusting the living room. And then she started coughing and... and suffocating!"

"We'll going to help her, OK?" I said, settling the girl onto a wheelchair. "Dr. Raynor?"

John stood beside be, staring at the struggling girl and her mother like a deer in the headlights.

He froze. It happened sometimes; inexperienced doctors pushed into solving an emergency, caught between the knowledge of what they should do and the knowledge of every single one of the multiple ways it could go wrong. John wasn't even supposed to be practicing on his own yet, but circumstances so demanded.

"Dr. Raynor?"

He fiddled with the stethoscope, hanging around his neck.

I grabbed his arm and squeezed hard. "John!" I spoke close to his face to keep the mother from overhearing. "She's having an asthma attack. You know the protocol for asthma."

I'm convinced the magic word was 'protocol'. These young doctors might not know how to properly hold a forceps, but they have all them long lists memorized and on auto mode.