Alice nodded her head, somewhat relieved and very happy to have something to do to help.
Vicky hugged her mother, as Ruth and Kate walked up, also asking how they could help.
“While Mom and Dad are seeing to the visitor’s needs, would you two take their names and phone numbers, and call their families to let them know where they’re at? There will be people calling from out of state as well, so a list will help answer their questions a lot. That is as soon as the phone lines become available again.”
“What should we do if some of them are injured?” Ruth asked.
“Just have the operator page Rebecca, she’ll come down and assess their injury. Listen, thank you all for helping out, I feel better knowing you’re taking care of this for me.”
“Honey,” Alice took Vicky’s hand in hers, “promise me you’ll be careful out there.”
“I will Mom, I promise. I’ve still got a honeymoon to get to!” Vicky grinned and turned back to the communications office. Getting on the microphone once again, she asked for volunteers to gather at the front entrance of the hospital.
“This is Victoria Montgomery-Cassidy again.” Vicky loved saying her married name over and over, because it gave her that added push of strength she needed, to face the disaster. “Will the staff please make sure that our patients are back in their rooms and made comfortable, and then report to your nurse manager. We need volunteers, which your manager will explain. We will be leaving in approximately fifteen minutes.” Vicky knew that the speakers were not in the patients rooms, and the majority of them would not hear what she was about to say next, but still if they did hear her, she prayed it would not cause them to panic. “I understand that you are worried about your own families and friends, and aren’t able to contact them at the moment, but I ask that you remain calm and not abandon your posts. Your patients need you. Thank you.”
Nick handed Vicky a set of scrubs when she walked back into the lobby. “Thanks Nick.” She turned to Paul and said, “Paul, I’ll be ready to leave as soon as I get changed. Have everyone gather here in the front lobby.”
Paul nodded his understanding as Vicky hurried over to her office to change clothes.
Dr. Kline walked up to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nurses desk, and asked why he had been paged. The nurse pointed to Samantha, huddled in a corner, clutching her baby tight to her chest. Both Samantha and the baby were crying hysterically. Another nurse was trying to cajole the child from her, but Samantha was so terrified, she refused, and held her baby even tighter. The nurses were concerned that she might be hurting it.
Samantha didn’t know it was a tornado because the roar of the winds sounded just like the sand storms that blew through the Syrian Desert, buffeting the house so hard she feared it would collapse at any minute. That was where her mind had taken her.
“As you were, Staff Sergeant Vincent.” That worked, Kline thought, she’s trying to focus, “Samantha? It’s all right, Samantha. The storm is over, it’s safe to come out now.” Kline knelt down beside her so she could see his face, hoping he had enough trust built up with his patient by now, to convince her that she was safe. They had only had just a few sessions together, of which she felt was forced upon her by the Army, and so she fought him at every turn. And even though she tested him, he was starting to draw her out of her shell.
Kline’s voice resonated through the baby’s crying, and Samantha lovingly kissed her baby on the forehead.
“Is it over with?” she asked, as Kline helped her stand up.
“Yes, the tornado is gone. You are safe now, Samantha. Why don’t you give the baby back to the nurse so she can tend to him?”
Samantha did as she was told, but never took her eyes off the nurse who carried the baby back to the isolette.
“Samantha, have you eaten today?” Samantha looked over at him and shook her head, “Then why don’t we go down to the cafeteria for a bite to eat?” He could see the worried look in her eyes and assured her, “Your baby will be well taken care of, I promise.”
Samantha relented, only because Kline had his hand on her elbow, pulling her toward the door. And she had to admit, she was hungry. As they entered the cafeteria they passed Jerry carting out bottles of water.
“Where are you going with all that water, Jerry?” Samantha asked. She had a unique friendship with Jerry, even though she had stabbed him in the back with the same knife he used to impale her husband with. It was during the Operation Pink Knight mission, that Aidan, Vicky and Jerry went to Syria to rescue Samantha. She was being held captive by a man and his son, who used her as a sex jihad, or sex slave. It was during the standoff that Jerry was hurt, but he has since forgiven her, knowing she was not herself at the time.
Jerry replied, “The city was hit pretty hard by a twister, so a bunch of us are going down there to help the victims.” He was in a hurry, so he waved and wheeled the cart past her.
Samantha turned to Dr. Kline and said, “We should go help them.”
Kline put his hand on her elbow again, to prevent her from leaving. The last thing he wanted was for his patient to be in the thick of a rescue operation and lose herself to the horror of it, similar to what she had just done in NICU. “I think it would be best if we stayed here. Let’s get something to eat.”
Once they had their food, Kline led her outside to the courtyard, away from the busy activity in the hospital. It was a beautiful area where the apple blossom’s aroma lifted the soul and the sparkling water fountain calmed the mind. There was no visible evidence that a tornado had just blown through, even the benches had dried already. They were alone in the courtyard, and that was an added blessing.
Dr. Kline wasted no time in coaxing her to talk, “Do you want to tell me about what just happened in NICU?”
“There was a storm, I freaked, end of story,” But Kline gave her a look that said he’d wait patiently until she told him, so she rolled her eyes and began, “When I was in Syria, we had a massive sand storm that ripped the door off its hinges. The wind howled so loud, just like it did today, that I was sure I was going to die.”
“What did you do?’
“We all huddled in the corner and waited it out. We were in a very remote area and didn’t have a warning siren like you do here. If we were lucky, we could see the storm coming on the horizon, not that there’s much we could do to avoid it anyway. Maybe put on scarves and the like, so we could breathe, and keep the sand from scratching our skin. When it was over with there was so much sand in the room, you could build a sand castle with it. God, I hated those damn storms!”
As Vicky and her volunteers walked onto the block where the triage was being set up, they gasped at the sight of the injured scattered about on the street. Vicky thought it looked eerily similar to the scene from Gone with the Wind, were the injured just seemed to go on forever. Compounding the macabre scene was the destruction all around them. A tornado has always amazed people with how it could flatten one building and leave another standing beside it, practically untouched. At how it could pick up a concrete mixer truck and toss it a block away as if it were a toy. And how it can destroy a large town in a matter of minutes, only to see the town’s people come together as one, and rebuild it. But for those who had not lived in tornado alley all their lives, like Vicky had, to say the scene was surreal would be an understatement.
Little Rock was considered a small city but it still had several skyscrapers like the Timmons Tower, which was built in 1986 and had forty floors, fifteen more than the Blevins building, a nationally known financial services firm that sat four blocks away. Now the tops of both buildings lay in rubble on the ground, brick and mortar still falling down from their steel frames. Rubble seemingly fell from the skies like rain, landing on cars that had already been crushed under the debris. Windows had been blown out, chunks of buildings lay in heaps under the spray of the fire hydrants spewing water everywhere, and live wires popped dangerously close to that water.
Vicky turned to h
er group and tried to be encouraging, “It looks like we are the first ones on the scene, so you are going to see some horrific things that probably only our ER staff has seen before, so try to stay calm. Remember you are trained professionals here to help. Don’t let this overwhelm you, just take one victim at a time. Be careful, be safe and be helpful.” And with that Vicky led the way into the devastation.
Everyone began to pan out, going where they thought they were needed the most, but what they quickly learned was they were needed everywhere at once. Jerry and Yvonne began handing out water, Aidan immediately helped with rescue, and Vicky followed Joyce over to the tent being set up for triage. Almost immediately everyone had something important to do to help the victims, and almost immediately they were running out of supplies.
Joyce introduced herself to the first person she saw in the tent, “Dr. McMillan, Cardiovascular surgeon, how can I help?”
“Thank God! My name is Larry Burton, an EMT with the emergency department.” Although Larry tried to sound calm and collected, Joyce and Vicky could see the fear in his eyes, “I was parked by that building,” he pointed to an ambulance a block away that had been blown on its side, “and was in the bank when the tornado hit. Anyway, the city is setting up this tent for the most severe injuries that require immediate attention. Since you are the first surgeon on the scene, I will defer to your expertise as to who needs surgery and who can wait until we get the roads cleared. This man over here was just carried in, his situation looks pretty serious.” Larry pointed to a patient lying unconscious on a gurney.
“Holy shit!” Joyce exclaimed when she saw him, “How did that happen?”
Larry looked at Vicky and asked, “First tornado?”
Vicky laughed and nodded her head.
“Seriously, he’s got a pig sticking out of his chest?” Joyce said, pointing to the patient’s wound.
“That my dear,” Vicky said with a chuckle, “is a hog. Or to be more precise, it’s a Razorback weathervane. They’re very common here in Arkansas.” Vicky laughed because Joyce still did not have a clue that the Razorbacks, or Hogs as they are known by fans, is the college football team’s mascot out of Fayetteville. Apparently the weathervane had blown in from a farm about thirty miles from the city, and impaled the man as he was running for cover on the city sidewalk. The reddish-orange weathervane, which was made out of copper, was in the shape of a charging Razorback, and had sliced vertically into the man’s chest. The Hog’s hind quarters were embedded inside his chest with the snout sticking out, giving the visual effect that the hog had run right through him.
Getting past the almost comical scene, and down to business, Joyce asked, “Are there any films on this guy?”
Larry replied sorrowfully, “No, they’re still trying to get the equipment in, so I’m afraid you’re flying blind, doctor. We don’t have electricity either, but we do have some generators over there.”
“Damn.” Joyce drew out the word, “Okay…,” and then took a deep breath, “so what about suction or lights?”
“The lights are in route and so is the suction machine, but I do have a turkey baster, if you’d like to use that? I found it on my way in, thought it might be helpful.”
“Oh my God, are you serious?” The look Larry gave her answered her question, “What the hell am I supposed to do with a fucking turkey baster, I don’t cook!”
Vicky suppressed a chuckle because she knew the real cause of Joyce’s tantrum, and so instead sought to calm her friend’s fears, “Joyce, it’s going to be okay.” She was taking the patients pulse and looking down at her watch, “You can do this, and besides,” “I don’t think he is going to last much longer if you don’t do something soon.”
“You’re right.” Joyce said to Vicky, her eyes darting back and forth until she began to pace, “Okay, think, Joyce, think.” Joyce was willing herself to calm down and come up with a strategy, “Vicky, get on the two-way and find your anesthesiologist, I know he came with us. Also where are the supplies I packed, there’s some surgical tools in there that I’ll need.” As Vicky pulled out her walkie-talkie, what people in the north called two-ways, Joyce turned to Larry and asked, “What about blood, do we have what we need to fly blind here?”
“In regards to blood, no ma’am, but I do have the kit for testing blood types. Plus I brought plasma, morphine, saline and tubing.”
Joyce took a deep breath and looked closer at her patient’s wound, “Without films I can’t tell how deep this thing is embedded or whether it even hit the heart or not, so we have to be prepared that when we pull this thing out, he could bleed out in a matter of seconds. We need to get in there and cauterize it off and then get out.” Joyce turned to the EMT and said, “Larry, find out what type blood he has, and then set up an area and ask for donations. We’re going to need as much blood as we can get our hands on.”
“Right away, doctor.” Larry wasted no time in retrieving his testing kit, which looked similar in size and shape to a Diabetes monitoring kit, and took a blood sample from the patient.
Joyce turned to Vicky and said, “Scrub in and let’s get going.”
“Joyce, I haven’t been in surgery in years, and‒‒”
“Hon, look around, there’s no one else here to help me. Everyone’s busy doing other things. Besides, it’ll be fun, just like in college when I used you to practice on. Come on, let’s scrub up,” Joyce didn’t wait for a rebuttal, she dragged Vicky over to the waterless surgical scrub dispenser.
Meanwhile Aidan helped out as a transport, moving the injured from one place to another, according to the severity of their wounds. She had to fight back the cold chills coursing through her body, at the carnage surrounding her. For a moment she was transported back to the insurgent attack in Iraq, where bombs exploded all around her, while soldiers screamed in pain. It was a vision she vigorously scattered to the far corners of her mind, when suddenly a three story building half a block down from her, imploded into a thunderous mountain of rubble and debris. She rushed down there praying that the building had been empty, knowing that was an unrealistic prayer.
The local news reporters began arriving back in the city, from other parts of the tornado ravished state, and immediately began reporting from ground zero, some even managing to broadcast live, thanks to their wireless satellite connections. Soon the devastation reached the national TV stations that picked it up, and beamed it around the world. They caught the action as Aidan pulled a lady from the rubble of a fallen building, as the bank vault was unlocked to reveal several survivors huddled inside it, and as Dr. Joyce McMillan and Victoria Montgomery-Cassidy, made medical history.
A local cameraman, first on the scene, made his way into the triage tent, and over to Joyce, shining the spotlight from his camera into her eyes.
“What the hell? Get out of here with that thing!” She shoved the camera away. “Damn it, now I have to scrub up again.”
“Hey, aren’t you the one who just filmed my wedding today? Ellen hired you, right?” Vicky asked.
“Yeah, that’s how I was able to get here so fast. Most of us were spread out across the state filming the aftermath in different towns. Lucky for me, you had your wedding today, and I had signed a contract. Otherwise I’d probably be at the other end of the state.”
“Yeah, lucky.” Vicky turned to Joyce again and said, “Joyce, we can use that spotlight on his camera to see inside the wound.”
“Good idea. Okay pal, you’ve just been recruited, but for God’s sake, keep the light out of my eyes.” Joyce pointed to the box of scrubs sitting in the corner of the tent, “Put on those scrubs over there and wash your hands and disinfect your camera, you’re going to get the exclusive of your life.”
The cameraman looked at her, and then at the patient with the weathervane sticking out of his chest, and then he looked back at her. He grinned and did as he was told because he knew getting an exclusive this gruesome would make his career.
*
“You’re wat
ching ZNN news, and we’ve been showing you pictures from the devastated city of Little Rock, Arkansas, where the metropolitan area has just been hit by what the National Weather Center is calling the worst tornadic outbreak of the century. The damage is so extensive that emergency vehicles can’t get through, so the city has set up a triage area at ground zero, and they are asking the hospitals to come to them. One local hospital, St. Frances, is on the scene now. We are going to stream a live newsfeed from that area, including the surgical tent, and let me warn you now, what we are about to show you may not be appropriate for some viewers. Again I must warn you, this is live, unedited and possibly graphic feed and we cannot be certain how explicit it may get.”
*
“Coffee?”
“Oh yes, thank you.”
Ruth handed Kate a cup of coffee, and took a sip from her own cup. She studied Kate through the tentacles of steam rising from her coffee, and wondered how to broach the subject that had been swirling around in her head ever since the reception. She couldn’t imagine what signals she had given out to make Kate think she was in love with her. As far as Ruth knew, she had no signals to give out, because she was always too distracted by the signals she was getting.
When she was married to her first husband, what she now calls an experiment in futility, she was continuously blindsided by his signals. They were both in their teens, not even out of high school yet, and not mature enough to understand what they had gotten themselves into. It was just that their friends were getting married and they didn’t want to be the only virgins left in high school. Ruth came away from that marriage grateful for two things, one was that she didn’t get pregnant, and the other was that her parents had it absolved by the Catholic Church because of her age.
By the time she married her second husband, she was running away from herself. She was in her late thirties when she married again, though she didn’t know she had married until the next day, after she had sobered up in a hotel room in Vegas. But this time, the church was not so lenient, when she asked about a divorce, so she became the dutiful housewife, having supper on the table when he came home. But housework was not her forte so she spent most of her time at the library, reading travel magazines and history books.
Remember This Day Page 12
