Page 1 of Falling for the Hot Billionaire

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Justine

“Doctor Fouler, you have to know that this is your job.” This was no longer a friendly reminder.

“I don't need a nurse to tell me my job, Justine.” He snapped at me and since this was the third patient I’d had to give bad news to today, I was coming to realize rather quickly that Dr. Fouler, who was a new doctor in the hospital since about a week ago, was not very good under pressure. He had lost several patients, which wasn't unheard of since we worked in the emergency room, but he did not take it very well.

I kept reminding myself that I didn't take it very well in the beginning either. It was something that sort of numbs you after a while, so much death and empty faces, searching mine to find some answer that I did not have. Beyond the grueling hours that led to no sleep for days, that was the worst part of the job. It was the part I hated the most.

There was no point in fighting him, the young doctor would hopefully figure it out after a while, and I was going to have to follow my experience and find that dead place inside of me that I went to every time I had to tell someone bad news about someone they loved. It never got any easier, even if I liked to think that it had. I had just stopped reacting as maybe any human would. I had to compartmentalize and push it way down deep.

This time it was a wife, and I didn't have to tell her that her husband was dead, just that there was uncertainty around every corner. I didn't know if he was going to survive, nobody did, and they were giving him about a 50/50 chance. He was some billionaire from the city. Other people knew who he was, but I didn't. He was getting the best of everything. The problem was, even if he did wake up from the coma that he was in, there was no telling what sort of brain activity he was going to have.

The patient’s car had gone over the guardrails of a bridge and into the twenty-foot-deep river. It was enough to submerge the car, and he was found unresponsive and underwater. He was brought back to life, was now breathing on his own, and his heart was good, but there was a lot of uncertainty for him in the next few months. I had to go tell his wife that.

I'm not saying it would have been easier if he was dead, and that was the worst outcome, but this was horrible in its own way, because there was all this unknowing. When a patient is dead, that’s that. In this case, everyone was just going to have to wait, pray to whatever God they believed in, and hope. That was hard.

Dr. Fouler was already on his way to take the next patient, and I was left to take care of the bad part. I was a nurse and I saw a lot of horrible things, lost people every day, but it never got easier. Telling the patient's family that something had gone awry, and all their hope that they had was meaningless and crushed was definitely one of my least favorite things to do.

I took a deep breath and started toward the room. She needed to know and even though I hated to do it, I knew it had to be done. Half of my job as a nurse was obligation. Someone had to help, and it might as well be me.

The wife was standing over his bed nervously, looking back and forth from him to all of the machines that were hooked up to him at the moment, keeping him alive. They hadn’t known how long he was going to be in the coma, so the doctor decided to put him on a ventilator and if she had never seen it before, it had to be jarring. The man was in his late 30s, athletic, from what his file said, and he had no ailments. He had not looked like this when he first came in. I saw him a couple of times when he first came in unconscious, but now it was worse, with two lines and tubes going into his body, and the wife looked overwhelmed by all of it. I couldn’t blame her. It had to be a lot.

I moved toward her and said her name several times before she finally looked up. I didn't think she actually heard me, and I thought that she must just be so lost in thought with everything that was going on, so distraught. When I did things like this, I always tried to put myself in their position. It wasn't a good position she was in. I knew that and I wanted to handle it well. She was going to remember this conversation for a long time, maybe forever. I walked into it knowing that and hopefully I would be able to honor such a momentous occasion.

“Is the doctor going to be in soon? I'd really like to speak to him. He just took off in the middle of our conversation, and I didn’t even get to ask him anything. I have so many questions,” the woman told me, her face a mix of emotions.

“Dr. Fouler is in the middle of a consultation that he needed to be in. I have come to speak to you about your husband, and you can direct any of your questions to me.”

“Husband,” she scoffed. “We haven't even been married six months, and he is already on death’s door. This is not how it was supposed to go.”

Her tone of her own self-pity threw me off, but I tried not to judge her too harshly because I knew that everybody dealt with things differently.

“Well, he isn’t quite on death’s door. I wouldn’t put it like that. There is a good chance that he will overcome this and live. However, he was underwater for quite some time, so there could be brain damage...” I started. She didn't let me say much more before she told me to give it to her straight.

“That's what I'm trying to do. He possibly has damage to his brain, but we won't know until he wakes up. His survival chance is good. How he comes out of it though, is another issue.”

“He's going to wake up?” The wife looked over at me with surprise, and I honestly couldn't tell if she was happy about the new information or not. She definitely wasn't jumping up for joy about it. Once again, everyone reacted differently.

“Very good chance of it.”

She wrinkled her petite nose and pushed her blonde hair back, taking a calming breath. “What are his odds?”

I got the feeling that she didn't want them to be very good, and I tried not to feel anything about it. There was just something about the way she was looking at me, the questions she was asking. I gave them to her and she nodded, acknowledging that he wasn’t gone.

Next, she wanted to know if he would be able to work again. Not walk, not speak, not use his brain, she wanted to know if he could work, and I found that to be as distasteful as anything else I could think of. She was rubbing me the wrong way at every turn.

“I don't know. It just depends on what he does. Like I said before, it depends on if he has brain damage or not, and if so, how bad it is.”

“He is a billionaire; I don't know how exactly he makes his money. I just know that he makes a lot of it,” she said.

“Well, if he has that sort of money, then I don't see why he needs to work in the first place.” I probably should have popped off with that, but I couldn't understand why she was even worried about it. Her priorities were seriously messed up.

“He made all of that before we got married and none of it counts.”

“Counts?” I wasn’t following.

“Yeah, he has an heir that will get everything if something happens to him. I signed a prenup, so everything before me doesn’t count,” Monica said simply.

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