"Really?" She looked both relieved and slightly disappointed that her preparation had been unnecessary.
"Really. You're the seventh person tonight with these exact symptoms. There's definitely something making the rounds."
That was the truth. In the past four hours, we'd seen a parade of patients with varying degrees of what was almost certainly norovirus — the cruise ship special, as we called it. Highly contagious, completely miserable, and absolutely nothing you wanted to take home in a plastic bag.
I spent the next few minutes explaining the treatment plan — IV fluids for dehydration, anti-nausea medication, and the universal ER discharge instructions of "rest, clear liquids, and come back if you get worse." By the time I finished getting her situated, Chloe had appeared in the doorway again.
"Room 12 is asking again if we can test their... contribution...for the specific strain," she said, her voice carefully neutral.
I closed my eyes briefly. "Tell them we'll handle all the necessary testing and they can dispose of their sample at home. Where it belongs."
"Copy that."
This was the reality of emergency nursing that nobody talked about — the weird, gross, and occasionally touching ways that people tried to help with their own care. The patient who brought in the tick that bit them, carefully preserved in a jewelry box. The parent who photographed their child's rash from seventeen different angles. The guy who'd written down every single thing he'd eaten in the past week, organized by meal and color-coded by digestive symptoms.
They all wanted to help. They all wanted to make sure we had everything we needed to fix them. And part of my job was accepting that desire to help while gently redirecting it into more useful channels.
"How are you holding up?" I asked Chloe as we restocked the room for the next patient.
"I'm starting to think I should have gone into pediatrics," she said. "Kids might puke on you, but at least they don't bring it in containers."
"Wait until you meet your first frequent flyer who knows more medical terminology than some residents and has seventeen theories about what's wrong with them, all involving rare tropical diseases they definitely don't have."
"Looking forward to it," she said dryly.
The next two hours passed in a blur of IV starts, discharge instructions, and the gentle art of convincing people that they probably didn't need a CT scan for their stomach bug. By one-thirty, the GI rush had finally started to slow, leaving the department in that strange, quiet lull that made you either grateful for the break or suspicious that something worse was about to happen.
I was catching up on charting when the lights flickered.
Just once, a brief flutter that made everyone look up from whatever they were doing. The computers didn't even restart. But in a hospital, any electrical anomaly got immediate attention.
"That's not ominous at all," Carly muttered from the charge desk.
I was about to make a joke about the building being older than some of our patients when Doug came storming out of the supply area, looking genuinely annoyed.
"The ortho room is locked," he announced. "The electronic lock is completely dead. I can't get in there at all."
Carly looked up sharply. "Are you kidding me?"
"Do I look like I'm kidding? We've got no access to cervical collars, splints, backboards — nothing. And before you ask, yes, I tried the manual override. The whole system is fried."
The charge desk went quiet. In an ER, especially one this close to a major interstate, being without orthopedic supplies wasn't just inconvenient — it was potentially dangerous. Any trauma that came through those doors would need immediate spinal immobilization, and all our equipment was locked behind a door that had apparently been defeated by a thirty-second power flicker.
"What's maintenance saying?" Carly asked, already reaching for the phone.
"On call. Could be an hour before they get here."
Carly weighed the options for about ten seconds. "I'm calling 911. This is a facility emergency."
I watched her make the call, explaining the situation to dispatch with the calm professionalism that made her such a good charge nurse. As she hung up, she turned to the rest of us.
"Fire department's responding for forcible entry. Should be here in a few minutes."
Something fluttered in my chest — a mix of anticipation and nervousnessthat I tried to push down. There were multiple fire stations in the city. It probably wouldn't be Station 2. It definitely wouldn't be Engine 18.
But ten minutes later, when I heard the diesel rumble of a fire engine outside and looked through the windows to see the familiar black and red of Summit County Fire Rescue, I knew exactly which crew had responded.
And when the crew walked through the ER doors — not in full turnout gear but in their dark station pants and department t-shirts, carrying the tools they'd need for a simple forcible entry — I felt my heart do something complicated in my chest.
