Death Flight
Page 25
When I came back, Dr. Callendar was doing "sign out" with a thin, blond, stork-like man in glasses and greens. They strode around the room, talking about patients' results and what needed to be done.
When I got within a five foot radius of them, Dr. Callendar flicked his fingers at me like he had water on them. "Go see more patients."
The blond doctor laughed and shook his head. "Wait a minute. You're a new resident?"
I nodded and held out my hand. "Hope Sze. R1."
He shook it. "Dave Dupuis. Welcome aboard."
"Thanks." At Western, once you were a resident, and therefore, a fellow M.D., a lot of the staff physicians let you call them by their first names. It sounds like a small thing, but after four years of undergrad and four years of medical school, I was ready for a tap on the shoulder.
Dr. Dupuis smiled down at me as if he were reading my mind. "Are you interested in working the ambulatory side or the acute side?"
Runny noses vs. potential heart attacks. No contest. "Acute."
Of course, Dr. Evil had to step in. "Dave, she's already started on the ambulatory side. She's ready to review a UTI." Dr. Callendar gestured at the chart in my hand.
I opened my mouth to object, but Dr. Dupuis was already on it. "Good. If you know that case, you can review it. But if a resident wants to work the acute side, she should." He turned to me and added, "Are you interested in emerg?"
"Yeah. I'm thinking of doing the third year."
"Good woman," he said.
We grinned at each other. Dave Dupuis was on my side. There was a hierarchy here, and Dupuis trumped Callendar. Good to know.
Some people, you just know you're on the same page. Like me and – Alex, I remembered, and my smile dimmed. But for only a second. If he didn't call back and beg my forgiveness, it was his loss. I had a job to do.
After sign-over, Dr. Callendar glared at me like I needed deodorant and a brain transplant. "So what do you think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you want to give her? Okay." He scribbled his signature after my note, tore out the green slip, and stood up to go.
A mere 45 minutes after I first saw her, I handed my patient her prescription. It was the first time I'd written a script without getting it co-signed, and it felt good for about 60 seconds. Then Dr. Dupuis handed me a chart for a seventy-five-year-old woman with abdominal pain. "Have fun."
I drew the dirty pink curtain around bed number 11 before I began the interview. The patient's son helped swish it around his side of the stretcher. My patient turned out to be a tiny, white-haired, half-deaf woman who only spoke Spanish. Her family spoke a little French, but not much. I found myself yelling and playacting a lot. "Do you feel nauseous? Are you vomiting?" Grab stomach, pretend to retch. "Do you have pain in your chest?" Hands to heart, with tormented eyes raised to the acoustic tile ceiling, like I was Saint Hope at the stake. "Do you have diarrhea?" That one was hard. I made shooing motions around my rear end. Even the patient laughed.
During the physical exam, my hands traversed all over her abdomen, while I asked if it hurt. "Dolor? Dolor?"
The family enjoyed this demonstration of fifty percent of my Spanish vocabulary (the other word I knew was si, or yes) and praised my excellent command of the language. "Très bien!" The patient beamed at me. She didn't look too pained. I was in the middle of asking her to turn over for a rectal exam when I heard a flat woman's voice from the speakers overhead, "CODE. BLUE. OPERATING ROOM."
I froze.
"CODE. BLEU. BLOC OPÉRATOIRE."
The pink curtain ripped open, revealing Dr. Dupuis' flushed face. "Come on!" he yelled.
We flew around the nursing station and past the X-ray light boxes. He slammed the side door open with the heel of his hand. We dashed down the narrow back hallway.
He punched open another teal door. As we sprinted up two flights of stairs, one of my black leather clogs almost went airborne. I jammed my foot back into it. Dr. Dupuis ended up a half-flight ahead of me, but I caught up to him on the landing.
We dashed left, and then another left past the elevators, and then we were at the T junction of a hallway and Dr. Dupuis was yelling, "Where is it?" at a guy in a white uniform and a blue bonnet-cap.
The guy pointed back over Dr. Dupuis's shoulder. "Men's change room!"
Dr. Dupuis doubled-back a few steps and shoved open the door to a small, jaundice-yellow room.
Should I follow him in a men's room?
The door nearly swung shut again. I thrust it open.
Beige lockers lined the four yellow walls and made a row down the middle of the room. A wooden bench stretched lengthwise in each half-room.
In the far half, wedged between the bench and the lockers, I spotted a pair of men's leather shoes. The feet sprawled away from each other. The scuffed gray soles of the shoes pointing toward me.
Dr. Dupuis crouched at the man's head, blocking my view of the top, but someone had yanked the man's charcoal T-shirt up to his armpits, exposing his white belly and chest, above his brown leather belt and khaki pants.
A black woman in a white coat pressed her fingers against the side of the man's throat. "There's no pulse."
"I'll start CPR!" I yelled, running toward them. I'd only ever seen one code blue, on a sick patient in the emergency room who didn't make it. I'd never heard of a code in a men's room. We didn't even have gloves. Mouth-to-mouth wasn't my first choice.
I knelt on the cold tile floor, my arms extended, hands laced, and braced to do CPR. Then I finally saw the man's face.
His features were mottled purple, his filmy eyes fixed half-open, his jaw hanging open under his moustache.
The man was dead. Long dead. Cause NYD.
* * *
Sex, drugs, and doctors
Code Blues
Also by Melissa Yi
No Air
Code Blues
Notorious D.O.C.
Family Medicine (combines the short stories Cain and Abel, Trouble and Strife, and Butcher’s Hook)
Terminally Ill
Student Body
The Sin Eaters, a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award
Blood Diamonds
Stockholm Syndrome
Human Remains
Blue Christmas
Death Flight