Page 8 of Seduction
He looked up again and narrowed his eyes at me.Is he staring at my mouth?I felt something emanating from him but was sure it wasn’t desire.No way, not desire.
Dr. Sparrow cleared his throat. “Your assistance will not be needed either. Look in on my patients instead. You can do that, can’t you?” He sounded as if he was trying to talk down to me.
Stacy went back to taping the patient’s eyes closed.
Since I didn’t want to cry in front of him or any of the others in the room, I easily conceded. Still fully prepped for surgery, I raced down the corridor. Curious onlookers watched me. I knew I looked distressed. In all my years in the program, I had never felt so humiliated.
I stormed into the on-call room then plopped down on a bench and clutched my thighs. Dr. Sparrow was a supreme dick. Suddenly, I knew why I had been attracted to him. My picker was shit. It was as if I always fell for the one asshole in the room who was waiting to disrespect me.Fuck him!
“Fuck who?” someone asked.
I whipped around. I hadn’t noticed Kevin Chen on the opposite side of the room, digging into his locker.
“I said that out loud?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yep.”
I rolled my eyes, still steaming mad. But I was not going to complain about Sparrow and give the rude doctor the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten to me.
“Fuck no one. I was just blowing off some steam.”
“All righty then,” Kevin said.
I shot to my feet. The doctor had sent me on rounds, and that was exactly what I was going to do.
* * *
I wasat the bedside of my fourth patient. His name was Trey Sharp, and he was thirty-seven years old and had fallen off a twenty-foot-tall scaffold while working at a construction site. He was six hours and forty-two minutes post-op on a surgery to stop a subarachnoid hemorrhage. As I read the chart, I noticed that it had been two hours since the last time his vitals were checked. I would’ve ordered that his vitals be checked every half hour. The hospital was going through a severe nurse shortage, which had been the case at the hospital where I attended medical school as well. It didn’t take long to learn that nurse staffing was where hospitals skimped, yet their role in a patient’s care program was just as vital as a surgeon’s.
I was certainly capable of fulfilling the order and taking the vitals myself and was about to do it until I noticed something else. Mr. Sharp’s body was extra tense, and his mouth was caught open. I checked his hands. His fists were curled up. He was seizing.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
I hit the emergency button and called for a nurse, asking for an intravenous dose of benzodiazepine. Lucy, one of the nurses, was in the room in a matter of seconds, and I administered the seizure-halting medication, which did its job immediately.
Next I called down to imaging and let them know my patient’s history and told them he needed a CT scan, stat. Since an orderly wasn’t immediately available to take our patient, who was groggy but finally awake, downstairs, Lucy and I rolled him to imaging.
After dropping off Mr. Sharp, I resumed my rounds but told the technician to contact me as soon as the results were ready to be looked at. I also asked that a copy be sent to Dr. Sparrow, even though he was still in surgery.
More patients were happy to see me and hear their plans of care. I was just about to forgo rushing down to the nurses’ call station, where I’d heard there were an assortment of cold beignets from Bernard’s Bakery, when I got the page from imaging. I was sent a code indicating that I should get downstairs fast. When I arrived at imaging and examined the results, I knew care couldn’t be delayed. The guy needed to get into the OR and fast.
I contacted Deb and quickly gave her the rundown.
“But you’re supposed to be scrubbed in on the craniectomy.”
“He said he didn’t need me and sent me on rounds.”
She paused then grunted. “It’s an intracerebral hemorrhage?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Get Sparrow to sign off before you go into the OR.”
I suppressed a gasp. “Sparrow?”
“Yes. Sparrow. Do you have a problem with him or something?”
“No,” I said as relaxed as I could.
