"Okay." I said, looking at my glove again. It was getting very swollen. "I'm going to do it now."
"Okay."
Wincing in pain, I stripped off the glove, releasing about a cup of blood, which splashed to the floor. I dropped the glove down there with it. Blood continued to pour from the cut, dripping into the puddle the glove had left.
Housekeeping was certainly going to be displeased with me.
"Give me half of them." I told Brett.
With a shaking hand, he did as I said. I took them and swabbed all the blood away from the injury. When it was clear I took a quick look at it before fresh blood could obscure it from my view. It was a neat incision, two inches long, with fatty tissue clearly visible. I didn't see any tendons protruding so probably just some stitches were in order. I flexed my thumb and my index finger to make sure they still worked. They did, but considerable pain and the expellation of a large glut of blood accompanied the action.
"Give me the rest of the swabs." I told Brett.
He did as I asked but made the mistake of taking too good of a look at the wound. He hiccuped once and vomit sprayed from his mouth, splashing the front of his scrubs. He charged off for the nearest bathroom, trailing puke in his wake.
"Fuckin' pussy." I muttered, pressing the clean swabs to the cut and applying as much pressure as I could. Like emergency services workers the world over, a routine part of my job had been handling emergencies and remaining calm during them. As such, I held in contempt any one who did not possess this same ability. Human nature I suppose.
Our supervisor was Mindy Watson, a forty-year-old woman who had worked in central supply since she'd been in high school herself. I went off in search of her, wondering if this was going to affect my chances of getting hired. The gauze I was pushing to the wound slowly turned from white to red but I was no longer dripping on the floor. I had never seen anyone die from this sort of injury, not even a hemophiliac, so my mind was untroubled in that regard.
I found Mindy at the back of the large room. She was sitting at her desk and compiling some lists from the orders that had been sent down.
"Mindy?" I said. "I've had a little accident."
She looked up at me, saw the blood on the gauze, and sighed. "What happened?" She asked, resigned.
"A scalpel got left blade-up in the autoclave." I said. "And my hand found it."
She gave a sour look. "Let me guess." She said. "Brett loaded the autoclave?"
"Well…" I shrugged.
"I see." She nodded. "How bad is it?"
I lifted the gauze for a second to show her, wondering if she was going to get sick like Brett. She didn't. She gave it a quick glance and said, "Well Bill, like I said in your evaluation; when you do something, you always do it well."
I smiled despite the pain. "Thanks." I told her, covering the laceration back up.
"You got the bleeding under control?" She asked.
"It's getting there." I told her. "You might want to send someone to check on Brett though. He, uh, wasn't feeling too well."
"He'll live." Mindy told me, digging through her desk and pulling out a notebook. She called out for another one of the students. When she came over Mindy ordered her to go find some fresh gauze and some roller bandages.
When the student returned Mindy wrapped up my wound as efficiently as I could have done. She then took out a pen. "Start from the beginning and tell me what happened."
It took less than five minutes. She took notes on the conversation and then stashed her notebook away.
"You're covered under the hospital's work comp." She told me. "They'll cover the hospital bill but, unfortunately, since you don't make any salary, there's nothing to compensate you for time off work. You should've dragged yourself to your paid job and pretended you did it there."
"I'll do that next time." I said.
"Anyway," She continued. "Why don't you head up to the ER so they can stitch you up? I'll call your parents for permission to treat and send up the authorization. Then I'll start the reams of paperwork you've just dumped on me."
"Right." I said morosely, thinking about the ER. This was the busiest hospital in the Spokane metropolitan area. It's ER alone dealt with over eighty thousand patients every year. Great. When I'd come here with the stab wound to the abdomen they'd treated me right away of course. But this was not a life-threatening problem. I would not be high on their list of priorities. If I was lucky, they might get around to stitching me up before the ten-hour deadline for suturing a wound expired. The last thing I wanted to do was spend all day and part of the night sitting in the waiting room among the scrotes that this hospital attracted. It was too bad I couldn't go somewhere else to get my stitches. Any of the other hospitals could…
I stopped suddenly at that thought.
"Uh, Mindy?" I said.
"Yeah?" She asked, rummaging through her desk drawer now.
"Do I HAVE to get my stitches here?"
She gave me a puzzled look. "Why would you go somewhere else?" She asked.
I explained about the eighty thousand patients, and the wait, and the deadline. "I think if I went to another hospital, say Holy Family, I would get treated a lot quicker."
"Holy Family?" She asked. "That's clear out in North Spokane. How were you planning to get there?"
"My car." I said. "I can drive myself there."
"Is it a stick-shift?" She asked.
"Oh no." I lied. "Automatic, all the way."
She thought for a minute. "Comp will still cover it." She said. "But I don't know if your parents are gonna go for that. Since you're a minor we have to do whatever your parents say."
"Let me talk to them." I said.
She shrugged and spun her phone around, offering it to me. "Dial nine before the number." She said. "And let me talk to them when you're done."
I called Mom since she was the easiest to get hold of during the workday. I assured her I was all right but that I'd had a little accident at work that was going to require some stitches. After the obligatory mother interrogation as to my health and well being, I told her that, although I was located downtown in the trauma center, I wished to drive to North Spokane to get my stitches.
"Why Billy?" She asked. "What's wrong with getting them where you're at? After all, they treated you pretty good when you had, well, your little fight that time."
"Yeah Mom." I said. "But they're pretty busy here. I could end up waiting for hours."
"Okay." She said. "But why Holy Family? There are other hospitals that aren't so far away."
"Well Mom, I thought maybe it would be nice to go to, uh, well, the hospital where Nina works."
There was a long pause, almost long enough for me to think I'd been disconnected. Finally Mom said, "I think that's a fine idea Billy. Sometimes Fate works in mysterious ways."
"You ain't kidding." I told her.
"What was that?"
"Nothing." I said. "My supervisor wants to talk to you. I'll head over to Holy Family and hopefully I'll be home before dark."
I quickly realized why Mindy had been concerned about the layout of my transmission. I hadn't even made it to the freeway before the gauze on my hand began spouting flowers of red from the action of operating the gearshift. By the time I pulled into the parking lot of the suburban hospital my hand was throbbing and the gauze was stained with my blood.
I locked up my car and, authorization form in good hand, walked up to the emergency room entrance. The automatic doors led me into the emergency waiting area which, I was gratified to see, was not even a quarter full of people. I signed in somewhat clumsily since my right hand was my good hand and was shortly called up to a little room to be triaged. The nurse listened to my story impassively, took my blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and respiratory rate. She examined my wound and then re-wrapped it in fresh bandages. I was then sent me to the waiting room.