Nick
The doctor looks at me with something close to resignation. It’s not the first time I’ve been on his table, and it doubt it will be the last.
My suit is pretty much a loss. The shirt sleeve was entirely cut off at some point. My arm is wrapped in a pressure bandage that I've bled through in two places, and my left leg is stiff from where the seat pinned me.
"Leg first," he says. "You will probably need to get it X-rayed."
"The arm." I counter. I know my leg is fine. If it were broken it would be swollen, not just stiff and tender.
"Nikolai." He is older than me, and has known me since he cut me out of my mother’s womb. That’s the only reason he is getting away with calling me by my full name.
"The arm,Mikhail. Stitch it. I don't have time to fuck about with X-rays for a leg that’s perfectly fine."
He looks at me the way my mother used to look at me when I was small and being difficult about something she knew better about.
"Very well," he says. “But at least let me check it over once we’ve stitched your arm.”
“Fine,” I huff. The sooner I can get out of here the better, and arguing over treatment is only going to prolong everything.
He cuts the bandage off my arm with shears that are not unlike the ones Sadie used on my sleeve an hour ago. How has it only been an hour? It already feels like a lifetime. A lifetime I’ve not been able to get her out of my mind.
“It’s deeper than I’d like.” Mikhail cleans the gash on my arm with a wet cotton ball on the end of some tweezers. I hiss as a fresh round of pain shoots through me, a prickly heat radiating from the wound. The bleeding is much less, at least.
"Your leg was pinned," Mikhail says, injecting something into the skin of my bicep. “I really think at bare minimum you should let me x-ray it.” He pulls apart some plastic wrappers, revealing a sterilized suture kit that makes my insides shrivel.
"It isn't broken,” I grunt, turning my face away from what he is doing. Just the thought of stitches makes me feel physically sick, much less watching them being pulled through my skin.
"You don't know that.” He is working methodically, steadily stitching me back together.
“I can stand on it. I walked from the stretcher to your table without help. It’s fine."
"A hairline fracture will let you walk."
I turn back to face him. His head is tilted back slightly and he is peering through the lower part of his glasses, focused entirely on the job at hand.
"Mikhail."
He ties off the last stitch and drops his face, looking over the top frame of his glasses now and directly into my eyes.
"My father is dying," I say. "He was stable this morning, but he had deteriorated when his doctor called me in the ambulance forty minutes ago. I’m not going to waste time getting an X-ray of a leg I know isn't broken when I need to be with him. Once Iknow more, I’ll come back and you can X-ray every part of me, but until then; no.”
His mouth thins. “Fine, but at least let me do a short physical exam. Then you can go.”
He wraps my arm in a fresh bandage, neat and fast. He has done this kind of work in worse conditions than a well-lit clinic. I sit very still with my eyes forward and I think about a woman in a once white t-shirt with a Sharpie, because thinking about her is easier than thinking about where I’m going next.
BP 130/85. P 96. Conscious. Laceration L upper arm. ? concussion. 2:54 PM.
My pulse has come down since then. Sadie would be pleased.
"Who wrote that on your arm?" Mikhail has finished bandaging and is now flashing a light in my eyes and asking me to follow his finger.
"A woman at the scene."
He nods slowly. “And the dressing?”
“Same.”
His eyes stretch slightly upward, his brows briefly rising in surprise. "She did good work. She was right to query concussion, because you have one. Mild, but you can expect the headache to last a few hours."
