Eleven
Jenny slid into the office chair at the nurse’s station to finish filling out the never-ending paperwork for her last patient, but looked up as she heard the conversation at the front desk. Normally their ward clerk, Tammy, wasn’t easy to rattle—she could hold her own against the vocal, entitled patients who, nine times out of ten, were either there for something that could have easily waited until they could get into their GP or were intoxicated young males who liked to puff up their chest when they were brave with alcohol—so hearing her somewhat strained tone put her on immediate alert.
‘Jen!’ Tammy called, pressing the button to open the security door across from them to admit someone on the other side.
Jenny didn’t bother to ask any questions as she slid her pen into the pocket of her work trousers and crossed the room to meet whoever was about to come through the door.
She faltered as she recognised Nick, but quickly turned her attention to the young guy he was supporting, one hand clamped over the kid’s arm, which was wrapped in a red cloth. On closer inspection, she realised the cloth was a once-white tea towel now saturated with blood.
‘Get him in here,’ Jenny instructed, indicating an empty bed. She was concerned by the amount of blood and its bright colour.
‘What’s your name, mate?’ she asked the boy, briskly but calmly.
He was leaning heavily into Nick and didn’t seem to hear her.
‘What’s his name?’ she asked Nick.
When there was no immediate response, Jenny looked up to see Nick looking distant.
‘Nick! What’s his name?’
Her tone seemed to snap him back from wherever he’d just been.
‘Dylan,’ he replied.
As Nick helped the semiconscious young man onto the bed, Jenny pulled on a set of gloves and slid on a pair of plastic goggles from a nearby trolley, calling out for the other RN. The guy looked to be in his early twenties and was clammy and pale.
‘What happened?’ she asked, mentally cataloguing the damage.
‘He was cutting meat and got caught in the bandsaw at work.’
Jenny flinched inwardly but focused on what needed to be done. She nodded for Nick to remove the pressure he was still applying and removed the towel to find a torniquet had been applied and the arm was wrapped adequately, if roughly.
‘It didn’t go right through, but close enough,’ Nick told her as she unwrapped the bandage. ‘There was significant bone damage and some arterial bleeding. I packed the wound as best I could to try and stem the blood loss.’
Jenny sent him a quick glance before looking back at the damaged arm, noting that the wound had indeed been expertly packed with gauze, which, along with the tourniquet, was doing a good job of slowing the amount of blood Dylan was losing. A small trickle was still pulsing in the corner of the wound above his wrist and she quickly applied more gauze and pressure. She was worried about the circulation to his hand and the fact he was beginning to lose consciousness. His blood pressure was dropping. The care he’d received at the scene had saved his life so far, but the small amount of blood pumping from the wound worried Jenny more than she cared to admit. He’d definitely hit his radial artery.
‘Where’s the doctor?’ Nick asked from beside her but standing a respectful distance away to avoid getting in the way.
‘We don’t have one full-time here. This is a multipurpose hospital and I’m the resident nurse practitioner.’
Donna, the other registered nurse, had begun gathering the supplies they’d need. She and Donna had developed a solid work partnership over the years and she was glad they were rostered on together today.
Jenny accepted the crystalloids and volume-expanding fluid Donna placed on the tray between them, needing the plasma and saline to replace some of the fluids Dylan had already lost in lieu of the blood bags that their smaller hospital simply didn’t have on hand.
‘Tammy, can you call through for a flight out of here ASAP. I’ll talk to them once you get them on the line,’ she called out to the ward clerk as she and Donna worked to stabilise their patient, keeping a close eye on his stats.
‘Hey, Dylan, can you hear me?’ Jenny asked, eyeing the young man’s drowsy expression and rubbing his other arm to try and stimulate a response. He hadn’t been able to tell her anything coherently since coming in. It was a race against time to get him out of here and into an operating theatre.
It was the smell of the hospital that interrupted the firm hold Nick had had on his emotions since the moment he’d heard the commotion in the kitchen and run in to find Dylan hunched over the bandsaw, screaming in agony.
His training had clicked in automatically—he hadn’t even stopped to think about what he was doing before he’d grabbed one of the kitchen’s well-equipped first-aid kits. The veil of calm that descended upon him blocked out the rest of the commotion. He’d thrown out orders more to keep everyone else busy. Someone called an ambulance while another took the rest of the staff out into the main bar, making more room to work and defuse some of the panic and alarm while Nick focused on saving the kid’s life. There’d been no time to wait for the ambulance—since it would have had to come from Hamwell.
They’d carried Dylan to his car and Nick drove with single-mindedness and determination, barely recalling the short tripto the small, sprawling building on the outskirts of town that housed the local hospital.
He was still operating on adrenalin and training when he walked inside and although he registered that Jenny was there, he hadn’t been able to react—the smell had already started to chip away at his emotions. He hadn’t batted an eye at the blood or the chaos going on around him—even the kid’s sobbing and gut-wrenching groans hadn’t shaken his steely control—but one whiff of that bloody antiseptic, sterile hospital, and it all started crumbling. He remembered the fluorescent lights flashing as he jogged beside the stretcher being wheeled towards the operating theatre, then staring at the dried blood on his hands as he listened to the doctor deliver the news that Richie hadn’t made it.
He stepped away from the edge of Dylan’s bed and let the two nurses work. Their hurried yet measured movements gave him some much-needed comfort and he felt the heavy memories subside as the sounds of the emergency room slowly began to filter in.
