Page 16 of Paging Dr. Breakup
Enter Deirdre. While Mav pulled an impromptu twenty-four-hour shift, she had cleaned the lodge, fixed breakfast for the couple, knocked a few repairs off the lodge business’s to-do list, and took the sled dogs out for two slushy, yappy trots.
All of that extra work meant Deirdre had to bail on Saturday’s first fake-date with Calvin. Rescheduling to Sunday was a bust as well, as she had to pinch hit in med-surg for the Sunday night shift when two nurses called out sick.
Deirdre took pride in the care this critical access hospital provided, but having a small but dedicated staff meant that the healthcare delivery system strained under the weight of even one unanticipated absence. At the end of the day, patient safety came first. What Deirdre wished was to snap her fingers andpoof, there would appear a bunch of extra nurses and nursing assistants. Harsh reality meant that regardless of ongoing recruiting efforts and generous incentives, rural areas everywhere had a steep hill to climb to find enough staff.
This Monday hit harder than usual, what with her job, the lodge, and sorting out the mineral rights for the property so Randy couldn’t try again to access their land. She and Mav had more paperwork to review and an upcoming meeting with an attorney.
Somewhere in all of these activities, she needed to pretend to date Calvin while trying to avoid feelings and not dealing with her past. Everything dragged at her like a lead radiology apron on weary shoulders.
There wasn’t enough caffeine to get through this day. Here she was at three o’clock, heading to the cafeteria to consider another cup. She tugged on the sleeves of her gray blazer and smoothed the matching gray pants and rosé wine-colored shirt, hoping she still appeared professional instead of flat-out haggard.
Last weekend illustrated exactly why she hadn’t entertained the idea of a real relationship. See? She couldn’t even get a fake relationship off the ground.
But she didn’t want it to get off the ground.
Damn it all, a small part of her had looked forward to dinner with Calvin.
Deirdre peered out the glass wall in the main entrance. A snow squall swirled, the pine and scrub-filled hills in the distance no longer visible. Typical for late March in Alaska’s interior. One minute sun and the next minute a whiteout. She had worn her mud boots to work, not her snow boots. Either would get her home well enough, but it was hard to plan attire for every weather possibility.
“Trauma alert, ED. Trauma alert, ED. Trauma alert, ED.” The voice blaring over the intercom startled her.
Deirdre spun and hurried to the ED. She wasn’t required to attend trauma alerts or codes, but oftentimes these events could use an extra set of hands.
Arriving in the emergency department, she skidded to a halt.
The raised voices in trauma room one didn’t catch her attention. The Velcro rip of a blood pressure cuff, an unidentified metal clank, and rumbling wheels of rolling equipment didn’t, either.
But the trail of thick, bloody gurney tracks on the floor leading from the EMS entrance into the trauma bay triggered a mental switch that took her from surprised to laser-focused in a split second.
She snagged a pair of gloves from the box hanging on the wall outside the trauma room, stepped over a fresh red puddle on the floor, and stopped short. Mav and Louise had just finished offloading their patient. Both the seasoned EMTs expressions were lip-tightened and grim.
Nurses Amberlyn and Clyde both had their jaws dropped, even as they scrambled to hook up leads and obtain vitals.
Deirdre’s neck prickled.
Leaning over the patient—or rather climbing on top of—was Calvin, his bloody, gloved hands pressed against the upper thigh of the patient. Deirdre peeked and gasped.
“Hi, Deirdre,” the patient said with a weak wave.
Tuli?
What the hell had happened?
Good God, blood was everywhere.
When Mav loosened the field tourniquet and Calvin moved his hand for a moment, a bright red spray fountained straight up from Tuli’s bare thigh and splattered his thermal shirt and what remained of his thin snow pants and thermal base layer. As someone who hailed from the local Athabascan native population, Tuli’s complexion normally had a warm tone.
Right about now, he was whiter than the one small remaining unstained portion of the hospital sheet beneath him.
Calvin caught Deirdre’s eye. His intense, almost blank stare with the raised brows made her knees knock together. It took a lot to rattle the EMTs and the nurses. It took far more than that to rattle a doc from a Seattle tertiary center’s ED. He’d seen it all.
This situation was bad. Very bad.
“What the heck happened?” she said.
Mav shrugged. “Leave it to Tuli, but he decided to snowmachine his body directly into a broken tree branch.”
“What?”
