Page 5 of Crow's Haven
But when I got closer, I saw his skin was gray and his lips were blue. The monitor was right that time. I hit the emergency button,
I remember yelling for someone to bring the crash cart. An unfamiliar tech wheeled it in. He looked barely old enough to shave. There was a new IV bag already hung. A different brand. Label smudged. Had it just been replaced? Where the hell was Carla? I turned around and she was gone.
Dr. Brunell arrived with respiratory in under a minute. They pushed epinephrine. I handed off compressions to another nurse. I was sweating through my scrubs, counting silently in my head.
Twenty minutes later, Dr. Brunell called it. I remember how awful the silence felt after it was all over. We’d been defeated by death again. This time he’d taken one of our smallest and most fragile patients. It was heartbreaking.
I turned the situation over in my mind while I washed my hands in the sink outside. I didn’t miss a dose. I didn’t miscalculate anything. I know all the way down to my bones that I didn’t do anything to cause this situation to go bad. But the hard truth is, he died anyway. And now I’m the one they’re trying to blame.
The corridor feels longer than I remember. No one speaks to me, but heads turn. Conversations come to a stuttering stop. They don’t know the details, but they know my patient died. News spreads fast in a place like this.
I pass Tara, one of the day-shift nurses from Oncology. She offers a brittle smile that’s part sympathy, and part uncertainty. I open my mouth to say something, anything, but nothing comes out.
Then I see my locker. It’s been emptied. A cardboard box sits beneath it with my name scribbled on masking tape. Someone packed it for me. My purple coffee mug. The pediatric badge reel shaped like a cartoon giraffe.
They say it’s administrative leave, but this looks final.
I carry the box through the staff lounge. Carla’s in there. She glances up, eyes wide, then looks away. Guilt flickers over her face, but she doesn’t speak. She could say I’m sorry, or I know you didn’t do anything, or this is insane. She doesn’t. And maybe that silence says everything.
The elevator dings open. A security guard waits inside. I stare at him for half a second too long, and he nods.
“I’m here to escort you to your vehicle,” he says.
Of course he is. I step in beside him. The doors close behind us with a hiss that feels final.
Outside, the guard has to let me out of the parking gate because I had to leave my ID badge with the DON.
“I’ll open it,” the guard says, pressing something on his tablet. The gate arm lifts.
I drive out in silence, the box on my passenger seat rattling with every bump. My fingers grip tighter around the wheel the longer I drive. It’s one of those days where I catch every single red light on the way home.
Suspended pending investigation. Police will be notified if anything turns up. The DON’s words whisper through my mind. This moment seems surreal.
***
My apartment feels too quiet when I open the door. It feels like my whole life just froze. I don’t bother turning on the lights. I drop the box onto the kitchen table with a flat thud. For a moment my feet won’t move. I stare down into the box for a long second before walking away, stripping off my scrubs, and I toss them into the washer and go upstairs to take a long hot shower. As I stand under the shower head, letting the water cascade over my shoulder, I finally have that cry I so richly deserve. Sliding down to my knees, I lean back against the wall and let it all out. It’s a long ugly cry born of grief, frustration, and self-loathing. I sit there in the shower until the water runs cold before climbing out and wrapping up in my favorite robe.
I don’t realize I’m shaking until I go downstairs and try to make myself a cup of coffee. I get the coffee pod loaded alright, but my hand shakes so hard that I keep spilling the water trying to pour it into the coffee maker.
I tell myself to stop this foolishness and get a grip, but my body doesn’t listen. I stumble into the living room and drop down onto the sofa and curl up on my side. I stare at my end table, not really seeing it, because I’m lost in my own internal thoughts. Joshua’s smiling face flashes through my mind. His shark plushie tucked under his chin.
He was just a kid, and now he’s gone. I suck in a breath and press my palms into my eyes until I see stars. It’s not my fault. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t.
I don’t know how long I lay there playing it all out in my mind over and over again. But eventually I get up and grab my laptop. I tell myself it’s just to check the news. Just to see if there’s anything online about the hospital, the investigation, the press calls Brenner mentioned.
I sit cross-legged on the couch, the screen lighting my face like a flashlight under the covers. The home page loads.
There is nothing. No headlines. No press releases. Not even a whisper on the hospital’s website. The only thing trending is some celebrity breakup and an op-ed about staffing ratios. The world hasn’t noticed what happened yet.
I open my emails. There’s an automated, impersonal email from HR. It’s a Notice of Administrative Suspension with my name on it. I don’t bother to read it because I already know what it says. Surprised they haven’t locked me out of the employee portal, I open my charting system. It’ll probably be locked soon, but I still have access for now. My fingers move on autopilot. Joshua Clay. Room 408. Code 7:42 AM.
The notes are all there. My charting’s clean. Timestamps align. Vitals logged. Meds scanned. IV bag changed—wait.
I squint. I didn’t chart the IV bag because I didn’t change it. That means someone else did.
But the record says the bag was scanned under my ID number, fifteen minutes before the code when I was still on my break. The rational part of my brain tells me that no one woulddo that, we have strict protocols in place. Thinking someone would do that intentionally is just paranoid thinking.
But then I remember the IV bag. The brand was different. It wasn’t the standard bags we use. I didn’t think twice about it in the moment. Everything was chaos.
