Page 14 of Shielding Instinct

“Yes.” She turned her attention to the window. Below them, Petra saw a row of emergency vehicles racing forward. Those would be for her.

This felt ridiculous.

Did she feel like she was having a stroke?

What did it feel like to have a stroke?

Her arm was waking up and was painful with pins and needles. Was that what a stroke felt like?

It was the opposite arm to her weird eyeball. Was that important?

“Ladies and gentlemen, one of our passengers is experiencing a medical emergency. Before taxiing to our gate, we will be landing near emergency services so that the professionals can handle the situation. We ask that everyone remain seated with seat belts in place.

We ask that you respect this situation – a human having a challenging experience – and honor that by affording them privacy. Please refrain from taking pictures or videos. Flight attendants strap in for the landing.”

Pictures or videos…

When paramedics show up at the scene of an emergency, one of the first things they did was to cut the patient’s clothes off. They did it to check for unnoticed bleeds or injuries, but also to make the patient’s body accessible to whatever medical intervention might need to take place once they arrive in the emergency department.

Everyone was going to see her like that, lying on a gurney. Just a moment ago, she was going to ask Hawkeye on a date, and now he was going to see her stretched out like that.

Like an emergency.

Like a problem.

It was crazy. Shefeltfine.

This seemed like a movie scene to Petra, like she could get up, have a lunch break, then head back when the director called out, “Places, everybody!”

As the plane landed with a bump and rolled down to what was obviously the emergency area with rescue vehicles’ lights flashing and sirens blaring, Petra could not believe they were there for her.

Forher.

She knew today was destined for the crapper.

And oddly, since this was about to go viral with people sending out videos despite the plea, Petra found herself wondering, “What the hell underwear did I pull on this morning?”

Chapter Six

Hawkeye

Hawkeye was glad Cooper had signaled to him that there was a problem before he met Petra’s gaze, or his reaction wouldn’t have looked the same.

Oddly when he saw that her pupil was blown, his first thought was, “Shit, no, I just met her. We haven’t had time.” He immediately set that thought aside to examine later. Right now, he had to focus on figuring out what had happened to her from the time they were discussing brain wiring until this moment.

Hawkeye had seen blown pupils before. But they had always been in conjunction with a blast trauma or trauma to the head. And it was always treated as a life-or-death emergency, with evacuations by the PJs if necessary.

She’d mentioned a TBI, but it sounded like it had been back in the past, not something that she was healing from right now.

Since those soldiers had always had bilaterally blown pupils, what he saw in Petra didn’t align with his lived experience. But he’d never been around anyone who might be having a stroke. That not one but both attendants came to the same immediate conclusion, told Hawkeye that it wasn’t unreasonable to suspect a stroke even when everything else about Petra seemed fine.

“Would you mind if I took your pulse?” he asked as he pulled his arm around to see the face of his watch with its stopwatch capability.

“Thank you.” She held her hand out to him, but what he wanted was her in his arms. She looked so scared and confused.He just wanted to hold her to his heart and tell her that everything was going to be fine.

But he couldn’t say that truthfully.

Cooper leaned forward and sniffed her hand over before giving Hawkeye the go-ahead. The interesting thing about that exchange was that Reaper, the Cerberus trainer that they were meeting in St. Croix, had been expanding the Cerberus kennels’ scent training to include medical issues. Flu, Covid, and pregnancy were the three that they had focused on first. Pregnancy because that would change the way they treated an injured person during a natural disaster; Covid and flu so they could steer their protectees away from a contagion, or if the dog detected the illness—sometimes days before symptoms showed up—the team could get the client to a doctor in time to get prophylactics on board.

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