Barry nodded, handing her several medical instruments. "Look at how I have my things arranged and put those on your scrubs the same way. Nice flower pattern shirt by the way. Aren't those worn by pediatric nurses? Brings out the green in your eyes."
Sabrina blushed, "Well we've got several young kids on my floor right today, so I'm borrowing this from Deanna. Thought the little ones would like it." She slid all the tools into the small pockets and folds of her scrubs as he continued to talk.
"Let me give you very simple advice Sabrina, and if you can remember some of it, we'll get through this okay today, and we might even help some folks out in the process. First off, stay calm. Panic kills. Panic makes you do things too fast, and even though time is a factor here in the ER, you need to do things at a controlled speed. As long as you're under control, you'll be able to do the right things, right?" Barry asked her, his voice instilling her with a measure of confidence.
Sabrina felt encouraged. "Yeah, right."
"And remember, ABCDE and compression Sabrina. Just go down the check list, and if they are meant to be saved, then it will happen. I'll try to direct you as best I can, and you stay calm okay?"
"Deal."
"You can do this Sabrina," Barry said as the wail of an ambulance's approach could be heard through the heavy ER sliding doors. The first of the victims was here.
Sabrina said a short prayer, and hoped that she could indeed do this.
*****
Very quickly indeed her confidence was thrown out the window.
One after another a series of ambulances pulled in and vomited out a crew of EMTs and blood soaked people that needed incredible levels of skilled medical treatment. She felt like a tornado had descended on her and the hospital, complete with death and destruction in every direction. She focused cleanly on the good young Doctor, and did her level best to follow his every instruction. There were many, many instructions.
The first four injured were whisked directly into the trauma rooms where they were put into direct emergency care. Immediately thereafter a man with massive chest trauma was wheeled directly into surgery. And from there, things went downhill.
"This is where we step up Sabrina. When the ER is full, we need to triage, okay? Decide who can be fixed and who can't, okay?" Doctor Barry was serious now, his voice flat. His tone authoritative.
All Sabrina could do was adjust her gear and nod. She hadn't even helped anyone yet and there were already large smears of blood on her scrubs. It seemed like blood was everywhere. She heard the voices of the next batch of EMTs, and it overwhelmed her.
"Large human bite wound at the neck, appears that the carotid is perforated, blood loss is severe-" and that voice trailed off, loudly and quickly giving Doctor Barry a litany of medical facts that frightened her.
"Blood pressure is dropping-"
"IVs are in and running. But he's lost a lot of blood-"
"Need plasma-"
"Intubate immediately, the airway can be made clear-"
"Gunshot is a flesh wound, send him to the lobby. He waits."
And more. It all sounded like death to her.
Seconds later another patient came in on foot, likely from the same ambulance. He was wrapped in a neutral gray blanket that was stained purple, brown and red from wet and drying blood. He had a lost and vacant look on his face as he stumbled past other people sitting in the ER waiting room. They looked at him with forlorn expressions. He was the nearest thing to normal to walk into the department since the scream of the first ambulance.
It was the closest thing Sabrina had seen to a typical patient in her world, and her mind leapt at the opportunity to help a slice of her mundane. She moved across the room with purpose, and slid an arm around the blanket covering the man like a shawl. "Follow me sir. I'm Sabrina, I'm a nurse here at the hospital. If it's alright with you I'm gonna take you into this room here so I can check out your wounds and injuries. What's your name?"
The man blinked a few times, his feet blindly putting one in front of the other as Sabrina steered him towards the room she was sharing with Doctor Barry. Finally, as they were about to sit in one of the smooth plastic chairs in the triage room, his mind put everything together. "Oh hey, I uh, my name is Matt. Someone bit me." The man named Matt dropped the edge of the blanket that was draped over his shoulder, revealing a massive bite wound on the outside of his arm near the tricep. It was a strange place to be bitten.
Sabrina gasped at the wound, but started to treat it automatically. She didn't even realize that she was treating the man. "Well that's a strange wound sir. Someone bit you then?"
The man was delayed, and his answer took a few extra moments to come out. He almost seemed in a strange kind of shock. "Yeah. Some guy hurt in a car accident over in the finance area of town. Someone hit some pedestrians in a crosswalk. I don't know if he was the driver, or someone in the street. I just saw him hurt, and went to help. I thought he was passed out, or dead, and he sat up and attacked me. I turned away, and he bit into my arm. The police shot him, they had to, but he didn't die. He kept trying to bite people. He hurt a bunch of us. I think he was on drugs. Other people were shot in the crossfire too. It was insane."
"Crazy story Matt. I'm glad this was all that happened to you. Lift your arm for me," Sabrina said. She watched as the torn muscles below the skin flexed painfully for the man.
"Ahh, dammit, that hurts. It burns," Matt said, yanking his arm away.
Sabrina made a face to console him. "I'm sorry Matt. But we need to flush this out real quick and make sure there are no teeth broken off in the wound. Once we check it real quick, I'll get you wrapped up and the pain should start to subside really quickly, okay?"
Matt nodded through gritted teeth.
"Alright then," Sabrina said. She grabbed a bottle of saline solution and after pulling a pair of purple gloves on, she flushed the wound into a metal tray. Water and blood cascaded down Matt's arm, revealing even more damage. He would almost certainly get an infection. Human mouths were dirty beyond belief.
"Sabrina, can I borrow you for a second?" Doctor Barry said from the hallway. He had his sleeves rolled up and was covered in blood. He looked calm, but definitely tense.
"I’m dealing with this man's bite wound Doctor Barry, can it wait a minute?" She asked, her hands never stopping their care.
"Not really Sabrina, I need you now."
Sabrina saw the intensity appear on the young Doctor's face suddenly. He was displeased for some reason, and she felt it was her, "Okay, give me a second."
"Thank you," the Doctor said briskly before disappearing down the hall.
"I'm sorry Matt, but the Doctor needs me. The good news is, you will survive. All you've got is this single bite wound, and it's clearly not damaging anything serious. Just hold this bandage on, and I'll be back soon to help more, okay?"
Matt pressed the large square bandage onto his wound and nodded. He wasn't happy about being left, but he understood. There were cries of pain coming from every direction.
Sabrina tossed her purple gloves into the waste bin and left the small room saying yet another final goodbye to the man. The hallway was considerably louder than the little room she'd worked on Matt in. Doctor Barry was leaning over a gurney in the hall checking a young girl's chest and abdomen with his hands. She cried out in pain when he put pressure on her stomach.
"What can I do for you Doctor?" Sabrina asked once she reached his side.
The young doctor rattled off a quick assessment of the girl to another nurse, then turned to Sabrina. He started to talk but checked himself instead, and gently took Sabrina by the arm away from the young girl. Once out of earshot, he continued what he started. "How is that man?" Are his wounds life threatening?"
Sabrina shook her head happily, "No, he has a nasty bite wound on his outer arm, but nothing major. I don't think he'll need anything more serious than a skin graft or stitches."
"Excellent. How long did it take you to assess his condition?" The
Doctor was going somewhere with this line of questioning, and she didn't like it.
"A minute maybe."
The Doctor nodded. "And after you realized he'd survive his wound, you continued to treat him anyway?"
Sabrina nodded, "Well yeah. He was in pain, and I knew I could help him."
The Doctor nodded, clearly a little frustrated. "Sabrina we're doing triage right now okay? We quickly assess survivability and seriousness of injury, then move on. We aren't trying to treat anyone, least of all someone with a fairly minor bite wound. I know it's our instinct to help, but right now everyone is in pain, and we need to focus on helping those that have serious life threatening injuries. I'm not trying to be an asshole here, but I could've used your help with that little girl with internal injuries."
Sabrina felt very defeated. "Okay, I'm sorry. I won't do it again."
The Doctor rubbed her shoulders reassuringly, "Sabrina don't apologize for caring about your patients. I get it. This is a rough spot to be in. Just try to focus on looking for the worst case in the room, and assess them fast. If they're minor, steer them to a seat. If it's major, funnel them deeper into the ER, or perform trauma medicine with me as I direct you. You're doing okay."
He was gifted with presence she thought. He had that calming way, and his choice of words was immaculate. She felt like she could take on the world again. "Alright. I got this."
"You got this."
As the two of them shared their reasonably quiet moment amidst the cacophony of the emergency room, more injured and sick were coming in. The hospital was already flooded, and this situation was getting so much worse.
Exactly how much worse neither really knew.
*****
The accident and subsequent violence a mile or so away had nearly ruined the small city hospital. Combined with the incredible number of other accidents and injuries experienced that morning, the wait to be seen was hours upon hours unless you were bleeding out, facing the loss of a limb, or clearly in need of surgery.
Sabrina and Doctor Barry worked together for another hour, checking the incoming patients for their level of medical need, and making quick decisions as to whether or not the person could wait for additional help, or if they needed immediate attention. Over the course of the hour, Sabrina watched six more nurses come in from their day off to help, as well as three doctors. She was very proud. The dedication of the medical community was unquestionable in moments of crisis.
Everyone's stress seemed manageable. With the extra ER nurses, and the number of doctors now on hand, Sabrina was gifted with a moment of respite. She had no patients flooding in, and with Doctor Barry's blessing, she decided to sit in the lobby and sip on a cup of coffee. She'd selected a little hazelnut flavored K-Cup, and even now that she drank her coffee black, it was still pretty yummy.
She'd picked a spot in the lobby far away from the television screen. There were a surprising number of available seats due to the fact that the entire lobby had crowded over to the flat screen mounted on the wall. She watched as she sipped the hot drink as the faces of the sick and injured were plainly in rapture from the news streaming across the network feed. Normally at this time of the day they'd be watching the last of the morning talk shows, or perhaps the noon news. She had no idea what time it was. The face of her watch had been covered in a smear of dried red blood for a very long time.
Curiosity got the better of her, and she walked over to take a spot at the back of the nearly silent crowd. She sat on one of the end tables next to a row of seats. The news anchor looked desperate. She was reading over notes that were being handed to her nearly every second. The poor person running the teleprompter clearly couldn't keep up with the flood of information, and the anchor was in very awkward ground. She was pretty; dark hair and eyes, though she had faint blue rings of fatigue around those eyes, showing how long a morning it had been.
The anchor and a small host of experts talked about how whatever it was that was overtaking Europe and Africa had somehow jumped to Asia, and was now spreading across North America. They even showed a disparaging graphic of a world map that had red dots for every death linked to the strange plague, and subsequent riots and madness that were linked to it. The map was still primarily not red, but when they showed a time lapse comparison of the past twelve hours, the red was spreading at a dramatic rate. Things got strange when one of the experts got into a very brief argument with the anchor.
"Sir I can't condone in the least your odd suggestions here," the anchor said with a frustrated and dismissive tone.
"I don't think the suggestions I've made are odd at all Natalie. If you read the police reports, and the eyewitness reports, and watch some of the public videos, they are staggeringly similar, and until we have the science to back it up, we need to keep our minds open to new and strange possibilities. This is the real world and not a horror movie, this much we all know, but like any intelligent person knows, sometimes life imitates art. The facts are supporting a lot of what I hope to be false. People who are simply bitten are dying. Human bite wounds are rarely fatal if treated with even basic first aid."
"Sir, the idea that the dead are returning to life as murderous, poisonous maniacs is sheer nonsense."
The expert looked sad. "Natalie, I certainly hope so. I don’t think our world can handle that kind of situation."
A guttural scream came from the back of the emergency room that ripped the crowd's trance apart like tissue paper caught in a gale force wind. Sabrina paused her sip of coffee, mouth full of the drink. She listened again as she heard a new series of noises; those of commotion, and of confrontation. She stood and sat her paper cup down on the nondescript, fake wooden magazine table and hurried around to the hallway that led from the lobby to the ER, swallowing her coffee as she went. She walked past the makeshift triage room she had helped set up with Doctor Barry, and headed straight into the heart of the ER core; six trauma rooms around a central nursing hub.
In the middle of the large space were the security guards, clearly wrestling with a pair of patients, or family members. One man was completely naked. Everyone was covered in blood, and she couldn't tell exactly what was going on. The large security officer she'd seen talking quietly with the young woman in a splint, Cabot, had a man wearing some clothes pinned against the edge of the nursing station, the man's arms wrapped around and held firm at his back. The two other security officers were grappling a man completely covered in blood to the floor, and as Sabrina ran around as fast as she could, she was multiple other people writhing around on the floor, either in pain, or trying to escape on the slick, blood soaked floor. In the back of her mind she laughed at the claim that the hospital executives had made that the floor was slip resistant. She wondered if the manufacturer had prepared for situations like this.
Even without an eye for trauma medicine she caught glimpses of several people bitten. She immediately thought of her first patient Matt. He had been bitten too.
"Knock that prick out. Cuff him!" Cabot yelled over his shoulder at his two fellow officers struggled with the person. Sabrina watched as one officer swept a leg backwards powerfully, clearing the subject's leg out from under him, and sending them all crashing to the floor in a strangely well executed martial arts maneuver. The two uniformed men crashed down atop the bloody man, all struggling, and on any other day, with any other person, the weight of the two large men breaking ribs and collar bones alone would've stopped the fight altogether, but not this day. The rules had changed.
The now floored man, IVs still dangling from his arms twisted his head just enough to sink his teeth into the black uniformed shoulder of one of the guards. Sabrina didn't know his name. She saw instantly that there was something profoundly wrong with the man trying to bite everyone. Something had turned his eyes a deathly, pus shade of white, and all reason and soul had left him. The bite caused immediate pain in the guard, and elicited a powerful punch from the wounded man. Sabrina watched as the biter's head rocked back from the pow
erful punch, and saw several of his teeth fall out onto the blood red floor. The other guard slipped a cuff over a blood slickened wrist, and deftly got the other wrist restrained. The bitten guard rolled away, darkening his already black clothes. The cuffed maniac rolled around wildly until an officer sat down firmly on his back, straddling him to hold him still.
The noise of someone flat lining in a trauma suite sent a flurry of bodies through the room as some semblance of control returned. Cabot and the bitten officer were handcuffing the standing aggressor, and Sabrina, struck nearly dumb watched as that man's large white eyes rolled around. He was biting at the air madly, trying to snap at anything living that he sensed or saw. A nurse with more smarts about her than Sabrina slipped a mesh spitting hood over his face, hopefully mitigating the biting threat.
"What-, what happened?" She asked as Cabot walked over near her. She wasn't asking him directly, but he answered.
"They had two die in surgery or something. They wheeled the bodies out, and moved on, and not long after they died, they both sat the fuck up again. Angry. I guess they weren't quite dead. You see their fucking eyes? White as hell. Pure motherloving evil if I ever saw it. They bit a handful people on the arms and back before we got over. Your good Doctor Barry was one of them. He got bitten on the arm."
"Whoa. How many people got bitten before you got them cuffed?"
Cabot did a quick count. "Eight. Ten maybe? They seem okay." Cabot looked at his hands, stained red from someone's blood. Sabrina thought they looked like bear paws.
"You know Cabot, some guy on the news said that bite wounds were fatal. And that the dead folks were coming back to life and attacking people," Sabrina said, turning her gaze upwards from the man's large hands to his big eyes.
"Are there any patients with bite wounds that aren't being directly supervised right now? Because if there are, we need to put them together and observe them away from the other patients. There's no sense risking anymore injuries."
Alone No More Page 6
