1
VICTORIA
“Ready to close.” The statement, delivered in the distinct accent Victoria Ellis had never shaken in the fifteen years since she’d left Guildford for sunny Los Angeles, was brief, but its impact on the operating room was electric. Held breaths were sighed out, tightly gripped hands relaxed, and the tension that had filled the air for the last several hours eased its grasp the slightest bit.
Victoria paid no attention to any of this. Her full attention remained on the open chest before her, where she’d just finished a grueling double coronary artery bypass graft. The pump that had kept Daniel Jennings’ heart and lungs going while Victoria had created new pathways for his heart’s blood had been withdrawn, and the blood flow was good. The drains had been placed. All that was left to do was to neatly stitch her patient back up and send him off to the ICU to slowly recuperate and learn about his new low-cholesterol lifestyle.
She accepted the needle and stainless-steel filaments she would need from Melissa, the scrub nurse who had been by her side for nearly every procedure the last five years. Hands poised, Victoria took in a deep breath.
Alarms erupted into shrieking life around them.
Shocked, Victoria moved on autopilot as her team was galvanized into action. “Pulmonary embo!” she shouted. “Push Heparin!”
Blood clots were always a risk with bypass surgery. The team she had assembled had had to extract sections of blood vessels from Daniel’s legs in order to create the new arteries. That kind of manipulation, no matter how careful, could still dislodge a clot. Victoria had asked Ashley Proctor, the hospital’s best cardio surgeon next to herself, to head up the harvest. She knew Ashley would have been so very careful.
The alarms honked, the team worked, but Daniel, instead of remaining the bright healthy pink he’d been as the pump was withdrawn, grew pale and gray. The curious brown eyes Victoria had looked into while explaining this exact possible complication to him earlier in the day, remained closed.
Onward they worked, desperately trying to recall Daniel from the brink of death. Victoria could hardly breathe.
It had all gone so perfectly. Beyond her wildest dreams. And yet they were losing him, right at the finish line. Her mind began to flash between now and the memory of a time she desperately wanted to keep well behind her. She needed to take action in order to keep it at bay.
The EKG machine flatlined, its shrill beep piercing her eardrums. “Defib!” she barked. The machine was brought, paddles put in her hands. She pressed them to either side of Daniel’s chest. “Clear!” she called, and waited for everyone to step back before she nodded for Melissa to deliver the shock.
Under the paddles, Daniel jolted, but did not breathe. His heart did not begin to beat.
“Clear!”
Another shock.
Nothing.
The flatline alarm drilled, drilled, drilled into her brain until Victoria knew only the sound of it, and the feel of the paddles in her hands.
“Clear!”
Hands pulled her back, removed the paddles. Victoria turned in anger to face whoever had interrupted her. Ashley. She stood there with sorrow in her brown eyes. “Vic,” she said, slowly, carefully. “You have to call it.”
“I have to do no such thing,” Victoria shot back, grabbing for the paddles.I won’t have this happening again…
Ashley stepped back. “He’s gone, Vic. I’m sorry.”
She could only stand still as Ashley called the time of death, as the rest of the team carefully, respectfully stitched Daniel back together and pulled a sheet over his head. They made the necessary phone calls, reached the necessary people.
Victoria didn’t move. Activity swirled around her, but she only stood, blinking in disbelief, ignoring the memory trying so hard to surface, going over every step of the surgery in her head. She was sure Ashley’s harvest had gone perfectly, her careful attention to detail and strict adherence to known procedure had beenwhyVictoria had asked her to assist in this complex procedure.
And she knew her own grafting had been flawless. She’d taken such care. And she also knew, she kept reminding herself, that these things could still happen. The human body was an intricate machine, no two alike, anything could go wrong.
But she felt that nothing should have gone wrong with this one, and that it would haunt her.
A gentle hand touched her shoulder. “Do you want me to go inform the family?” Ashley asked quietly, sliding her hand down to squeeze Victoria’s. “I can take it off your plate.”
Victoria swallowed hard and squared her shoulders. “No. This was my surgery. That’s my job.”
“You don’t…” Ashley hesitated. “Vic, you don’t look quite right. If you need to take a moment, do it. I can do this for you. Go get something to drink, sit down.”
“I said, I’ll do it.” She shook her hand free of Ashley’s and spun on her heel, pulling the puffy blue surgical bonnet off of her head as she hit the doors of the operating room with her shoulder. In the scrub room, she ripped all of her hideous blue operative gear off and shoved it violently into the bins, unable to bear one more second of having it on her body, rustling and fluttering against her skin. She knew the Jennings family was out there, holding their breath in the waiting room, needing her to come tell them everything was fine, but everything was not fine, and Victoria was not okay with that.
There was a small mirror in the scrub room, affixed to the window over the long sink. She wanted to make sure she was presenting a polished, professional front to the Jennings family when she delivered the devastating news. Dampening her fingers under the tap, Victoria carefully smoothed back any wisps of her wavy dark blonde hair that had escaped her tight bun. Her face looked a bit pale, so she pinched her cheeks to pink them up a bit.
