Sommer looked over at the new gal who stared back wide-eyed.
Sommer pulled the curtain back in place. “We can’t leave him lying in someone else’s blood. He’ll need a bath once he’s on the bed.” She stood over the scene, assessing. The man wasn’t tall, but he was unwieldy—more than three hundred pounds for sure.
At university, Sommer’s mentor had hammered home the importance of lifting heavy. Not only could she do a better job of the chest compressions, but regular strenuous exercise would mitigate a lot of the wear and tear that hurt nurses' bodies. Sommer could do a clean single deadlift of 250 pounds, and she could hold it there for a count of thirty. Was that enough in this situation?
She wasn’t going to lift him; the hospital liability would be through the roof. So that question was purely hypothetical.
“I’m Sommer. What’s your name?”
“Darlene.” She looked young, and though she held her body confidently, there was a glimmer of panic in her eyes.
Rightly so. This was going to be a bit of a trick.
Darlene was no willow branch. She had a country-gal feel, the kind of woman who had done farm chores or at least had to grapple large bags of dog food from her car into the house. Sommer looked her in the eye. “What we do in these circumstances is—”
“Our best,” Darlene said it like a kindergarten teacher encouraging her students. It was too wide-eyed and bushy-tailed of a response.
“Sure. That. I was thinkingimprovise. RRT is going to be a while. We need to stabilize his neck and roll him onto a backboard. That will at least move things along when the team gets here, and it will get him out of the biohazard and off the cold floor.”
“Oh,” Darlene stood up. “I’ll go get what we need from the trauma closet. You can stay?”
She didn’t wait for an answer and took off in a rush.
“Hi,” Sommer said to the unconscious man. “Sorry for your troubles.”
Sommer remembered a technique she’d seen the occupational therapists practice in their dorm room and tried to imagine whether it would work here.
She wondered if, in an extreme emergency with no help to be had, she could remember how to do it.
The student had grabbed the top sheet from the bed and shook it out. “And lay it like this.” She’d placed it so the length went across the bed and draped down near the patient. “Then, just like we’re changing a sheet, we roll him onto his side, tuck the sheet under him, and we roll him back the other way.”
Sommer had been dubious as she watched. The person who had volunteered as their pretend patient was pretty big.
She looked down at the patient. Not this guy big, but close.
Her friend had been dubious but enthusiastic in attempting the maneuver. “Once he’s on the sheet, we push him up as close to the bed as we can, and then you climb onto the bed kneeling on the top sheet, using your weight to hold it in place.”
Her fellow student climbed up on the bed.
“I take the top end of the sheet, and I hand it to you.”
Seemed easy enough.
“Then, I climb up beside you. Now we’re both kneeling on the sheet. We hand-over-hand gather the sheet, and as we do that, the patient is in the fold of the sheet and moves up as we shorten the length of fabric. We aren’t taking on his whole weight because of the sheet.”
Sommer had crossed her arms over her chest. It was a ridiculous plan. “Are you just making this up in your head?” Sommer had asked. “I don’t think we’re ever supposed to do that.”
“No negativity or you’ll be asked to leave,” her friend said before turning back to her fellow student. “Once we have some part of his body on the bed, we just pull him on, then we adjust.”
The two students had been shoulder to shoulder, grasping the sheet.
“What if he’s dropping?” Sommer was fascinated. And their Guinea pig was brave as hell.
“No negativity,” her friend said sternly.
“It’s a good question,” the Guinea pig called out.
“If he’s dropping, we try to ease him down gently. It’s not that far, and we have control of his head.” She adjusted her hands on the sheet. “Okay, so here we go. On three. One. Two. Three.”
