Page 24 of Just One Look
Another Saturday
Over the next week,Elizabeth discovered a few things she could do with her extra time.
Pick up dog poop. Having the dog walker “clean up the yard” once a week, when the dog weighed approximately a gazillion pounds? Yeah, no. That fell into the “not nearly often enough” category. Fortunately, surgeons weren’t squeamish, although she seriously wondered why anybody had a dog. Especially a big dog. Most especially agiantdog.
Vacuum. See “gazillion pounds,” above. Also, “hairy.” On Wednesday, she noticed a brush with a business end made of wire-type pins on a shelf in the garage and spent an oddly fascinating half hour discovering how much hair it was possible to remove from a single animal. She could have knitted a blanket out of Webster’s fur after this week, if she were the kind of person who knitted. Which she was not.
Research dog training. The main thing seemed to be consistency, so … fine. Consistency was something she was good at. The brushing time was a good chance to work on “sit” and “down,” at least, with the help of Luka’s muzzle-grab, and Webster might possibly be getting slightly better at those. She still had no clue how to manage the “heel” part, but first things first, right? She’d also worked on “off,” and Webster wasn’t getting on her bed anymore. Which was good, because no matter how much time she had, she wasn’t washing her duvet cover every single night. A dog who shed a bagful of hair every day was one thing. A dog who drooled on your pillow was in a whole different category. Nowadays, Webster curled up as close to the bed as he could get, on the side where she slept, and rested his head on her slippers, and it wasn’t actually terrible to have him there.
Run. She was still in “dinosaur” mode, but she was also still doing it, wasn’t she? This latest time, she hadn’t felt quite as much like she was going to die, so that was progress. Also, maybe she didn’t want to teach Webster to heel, because she could definitely use his help pulling her up those hills.
Not think about Luka Darkovic, because it was pointless.Let’s see, he’d had not just one, buttwogorgeous women with him the last time she’d seen him. See? Pointless.
That last one wasn’t going perfectly.
On Saturday night, she came home in a cold drizzle after her longest shift yet. She’d been at the hospital before six-thirty for rounds, and then the patients had come in one after another, the surgical board constantly changing. Typical Saturday.
No gunshot wounds, not a single one, which was a novelty. An older lady, though, who’d been brought in by ambulance after a fall at home, where she’d hit her head on the corner of a table. She was confused and dizzy and bleeding, and her head hurt badly, but she’d had a sort of tired kindness in her eyes all the same. Her right eye, anyway, because the left pupil had been fixed and dilated, and the CT scan showed a huge crescent-shaped dark area. That would be blood.
Traumatic acute subdural hematoma. Fatal fifty to ninety percent of the time, and the older you were, the more that number edged up to ninety. The patient was a tall, heavy woman who’d never have met Dr. Baxter Wolcott’s standards, but the lines in her face had clearly been carved there by smiling, and she was, somehow, smiling now. For her son, that would be, so he wouldn’t worry. Elizabeth would bet she was a great cook, and that she loved to do it. Whatever the Maori equivalent of collard greens, ham, batter bread, and pecan pie were, that would be what she made, and her happiest moments would be when her children and grandchildren were at her table eating it.
Her son and daughter-in-law had brought her in. The son, a heavyset, fiftyish man with a tribal arm tattoo like a sleeve, who was in shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops despite the chilly day, held his mother’s hand all the way to the double doors leading to surgery, and when Elizabeth looked back, he was still standing there, his hands fallen by his sides, his broad face crumpling.
The scan had looked grim. It hadn’t lied.
When she came out to find the family again an hour later, the son was sitting with his wife in the waiting room, holding her hand the same way he’d held his mother’s. He watched her walk across to him, then stood and waited, weary resignation in every line of his big body.
She told him, using the words she always used, the only ones you had. “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.” Knowing they weren’t enough, but you had no good words for this.
He cried. He covered his face with his hands and said, “Mum.Mum.”His wife held him and said nothing, because sometimes, there was nothing you could say.
She’d saved lives today, too, but somehow, the ones you lost cut a deeper furrow. The lady with her bravery and her smile lines, and then the one this evening. A crash on the Harbour Bridge, the one she could see from her house. A motorcyclist had been sideswiped by a car, slid on the wet pavement, and gone straight under another car. He was still breathing when he came in, somehow. She hadn’t been able to keep him that way, though, even after nearly four hours of effort.
He’d been twenty-one, and by the time his parents made it in, his brain had stopped functioning. The son they’d raised was still there, and he was gone.
Asking about organ donation, then, sitting with them beside the bed where the shell of what had once been a man with a bright future, the focus of their hopes and dreams, remained. His head wrapped in a white bandage to hide the damage, his body silent and still.
These were always the hardest minutes of her job. Skill was easy. Compassion was hard. You had to pull compassion from the spot where your feelings lived, and that spot was tender. How could a parent make that choice for their child? How was it possible? How could they bear that pain?
They said yes. It cost them too much.
Saving lives was a rush, no matter how long you had to stand there to do it, using every bit of your skill and your experience, the reason you’d worked so hard for so many years to acquire it. Losing a patient, though … it still hurt. You felt it and moved on, because if you didn’t feel it, you’d lost your soul, and if you didn’t move on, you’d lost your chance of helping.
In other words … another Saturday.
By the time she got home, which was fourteen hours after she’d left, traffic on the bridge was moving normally again, all the cars full of people traveling busily back and forth, oblivious to what had happened there. Not thinking about how breakable they were, because they’d never stood in an OR, and they hadn’t had a father who’d showed them pictures of what could happen when you rode a motorcycle. When you roller bladed. When you didn’t wear your seatbelt.
She didn’t go running. Not tonight. She thought about trying out that gym, and instead, she dropped to her knees and accepted Webster’s furry embrace.
Today, he didn’t frisk. He stood pressed as close to her as he could get, and she laid her head against his neck, wrapped her fingers through the long black fur, and breathed. And after a while, she walked through the rain, which was coming down harder now, to the garage, where she brushed him. The metal pins rasped their way through the thick coat, clouds of dusky hair drifted down like smoke, and Webster stood and waited.
A quick shower, then, and her warmest PJs, a flannel pair in a pink check. Her period PJs, the ones she wore when Kristoff wasn’t coming over, because the boxy cut and heavy fabric did her body no favors at all. Who was here to see, though, besides the dog? Her mind tried to dwell on that, but she wouldn’t let it. Instead, she added more kibble to Webster’s enormous feeder bottle, then took half-filled boxes of leftovers from the fridge. Butter chicken and basmati rice from Wednesday. Roast duck with shreds of fresh ginger and vegetables from Thursday. Firecracker prawns from Friday. She dumped it all on a plate, stuck it in the microwave, sat on the couch, and turned on the TV.
About ten channels on here max, she’d already discovered, and three of them were sports. Webster settled on the floor with a sigh, laying his head on her stockinged feet, and she pushed buttons on the remote.
A movie. Shirley MacLaine looking grouchy.Steel Magnolias.That was a no. She didn’t need to watch anybody else dying today, especially not so unrealistically beautifully. Dying didn’t tend to be beautiful. A home-improvement show, where cheerful people were putting in countertops in an equally cheerful kitchen, full of wood and light, talking about how the expansion was creating enough room for the whole family to fit around the table, since dinner together was their favorite time of day. Also a no.
Men running down a field, then, their hair streaming with rain, passing a ball behind them without looking, one to the other, then being brought down by their opposite numbers, nobody even seeming to notice that it was raining, that it was windy, that it was cold.
