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"Isn't it kind of ironic, though?" Princess said. She was leaning against the countertop of the central hub, arms folded and a dreamy look on her face as she gazed through the doors of Trauma Two.
Dana looked over the top of her glasses at what was happening in there—Robby and his crew working on a depressingly standard case of SUV-versus-pedestrian—and then back at Princess. "You just channelling Alanis Morissette now? Or you want to explain the cryptic utterances to the class?"
"Come on, it's obvious," Princess said. "Hot Respiratory Therapist is so hot it makes it hard to catch your breath, but he's a respiratory therapist! That's irony."
Perlah, passing by, nodded and added something in Tagalog that made Princess widen her eyes and say, "See! She agrees with me!"
"The man has a name, how about we try to respect him and use it in the workplace, huh?" Dana adopted her most disapproving tone of voice, although if she was being honest she could understand where Princess was coming from. New hires rarely turned out to be as attractive as Nicky DiGenova. The eyes, the accent, the way his shoulders stretched out a pair of scrubs—he was way too young for her, of course, and she was a respectable married woman, but that didn't mean that Dana didn't have eyes.
"Hey, I'm happy to call him Nicky just so long as he's calling out my name too," Princess said, dimpling, and then at the expression on Dana's face she drooped and said, "Okay, tough room, geez. I'll go check on the guy sleeping it off in West 14."
"Everyone's a joker around here," Dana muttered. She fielded a call from Ortho, with yet another B.S. reason why they couldn't take the guy who'd been boarding down here for three goddamned days, and she told them as much. She pointed out why they were full of it, in clear and sequential detail, and then she offered to go up there and speak to Clark herself, in person, and oh hey, what do you know, someone would be down from Ortho to fetch the patient in fifteen minutes.
Fancy that.
"Thank you very much, I appreciate it," Dana said, as sweetly as she could muster, then hung up forcefully. "Jagoff."
"Excuse me?"
Dana looked up to see a guy standing in front of her, clearly half-startled and half-amused. She didn't recognise him, but he was wearing nurse's scrubs and had a backpack slung over one shoulder.
"Not you, sweetheart," she said, with an apologetic smile. "The joys of being the one where the buck comes to a stop. Can I help you?"
"I'm Joe Al-Tayyib, I'm a locum nurse. I got a call to report here and look for someone called Dana?"
Dana sighed in relief and tapped at her ID badge. "Just your luck, you found her. Am I glad to see you—there was a bachelorette party last night and four of our staff mysteriously called in sick today. No way to put two and two together there. Let me show you where you can put your bag, give you a tour of the place."
Joe was a quick study—conscientious, thorough, didn't have to be shown anything twice. Dana appreciated that in a temp. Sure, she'd cut anyone some slack when they were in a new place. Every hospital worked a little differently, after all (though she'd put her system up against Westbridge's or Presby's any day). But she appreciated the hell out of not having to. Joe listened to what she told him, nodded, and got right to work. Picked up a full patient load and then some, and was great with kids.
Maybe the nitrile glove balloon animals, complete with decorations in Sharpie, were grandstanding a bit, but you did what you had to when dealing with a crying four-year-old.
It meant that Dana didn't discourage Joe too much when there was an unusual lull around five, and he sat down next to her at the hub to chat. In fact, she might even have encouraged him a little—he had a lot of questions about the execs upstairs, and some of the cost-cutting nonsense they'd been doing the last few years, and how they'd responded to COVID. Not that Dana was a gossiper, of course.
But if Joe was that interested in what Trent Norris and Gloria Underwood and the like got up to, or in PTMC's new partnership with Merrick Pharmaceuticals, well, maybe that meant he was considering working here full time. Weighing up his options, giving up the locum work in favour of more regular hours. And based on what Dana had seen so far, she wouldn't mind that at all. They could always use more quality nurses.
"At least it's reassuring to know that the emergency department's in safe hands," Joe said. Even with the beard, it was clear that he dimpled when he smiled.
Dana cocked an eyebrow at him and said, "A little flattery will go a long way, but don't start relying on it either."
Joe laughed. "Noted."
Because God loved to test her, two ambulance rigs rolled up fifteen minutes before the end of Dana's shift. The first one carried a Black woman, late twenties, unconscious at the scene, massive head injuries and a piece of rebar that had penetrated right through her neck; pink froth bubbled up around the edges of the injury, staining the pale masonry dust that coated her. The second gurney that rolled in held a white man, roughly the same age, somehow still conscious and struggling against the paramedics' hold even though embedded in his abdomen—
"Jesus Christ," Dana said, "is that an axe?" You thought you'd seen it all, and then you lived another day in Pittsburgh.
"I'm going to kill that bitch!" the man was shouting even as they took him over to Trauma One. His voice got louder and louder, hoarse and manic and making the ED's usual hubbub fade away as everyone's attention was caught and held by his outburst. The man was straining to get at the woman on the other gurney, his fingers clawed. "You don't know what she is—unclean, unnatural—let me finish what I started—"
Next to her, Joe looked stricken, grey. Dana couldn't blame him. You saw a lot of horrors in this job. Hate crimes were some of the worst.
Robby was marshalling his troops, calling for McKay, King, Santos, "and we need some nurses over here!" The new respiratory therapist, Nicky, came sprinting over from the direction of the elevators, and that seemed to spur Joe into action before Dana had to tell him to hop to it. He joined Nicky in Trauma Two although Dana could tell—even from here, even from the distance provided by the glass—that that wasn't going to be a fight that anyone could win. Experience told her that. The look on Robby's face as he observed Santos at work told her that. Poor woman. Some hurts would always be too big for them to help.
There was a flurry of phone calls—the cops showed up—there was an issue with the dispo paperwork for the patient in South 18—she had to get things in order to hand over to Lena—and out of the corner of her eye, the whole time, Dana was tracking what was going on in Trauma Two. Some kind of argument between Garcia and Nicky, of all people. Not usual for a surgeon and an RT to get into it like that, but maybe one of them was pushing to call it sooner than the other. That could happen.
"Excuse me."
Dana turned to find a tall white woman standing at the desk. "Can I help you, hon?"
"A friend of mine was just brought in here by ambulance." The woman had an accent that said she'd been in America for a while but that hinted at other places before that; the sticker that identified her as a visitor had been slapped crookedly onto an unseasonable leather jacket.
"We have some patients we're working on right now, but we don't have identification for them just yet," Dana said carefully. She wasn't getting the vibe that this woman was here for the guy in Trauma One, but as good as Dana's first impressions were, she was too seasoned a hand to rely on them and nothing else. The last thing any of them needed was ending up in the crosshairs of some biker gang bullshit. "Could you maybe give us a description?"
"Her name is Nakia Fraser," the woman said. "About my height, Black, late twenties, hair in locs. Jeans and a green t-shirt—"
"We do have someone here that matches that description," Dana said, with a quick glance over at Trauma Two. Robby and Joe were standing near the doors now. Joe was talking animatedly, appeared to be pleading some kind of case; Robby was shaking his head, hands coming up to rub at the back of his neck in a gesture that Dana had long since learned was bad news. Patient going south?
"The doctors are working on her now," Dana went on. "We've got a room over here where you can wait until we know more. Some of the doctors might also have some questions for you about her medical history, or what happened—"
"Workplace accident," the woman said grimly. And sure, a work site was a likely place to find a rogue bit of rebar, but there was some undercurrent to the woman's voice that Dana couldn't quite name but that made her think this wasn't an inspirational case of sisters doin' it for themselves in the twenty-first century construction industry. "Can I see her?"
"It's better to give the doctors space to work," Dana said, coming out from behind the desk, gently putting a hand at the woman's elbow and trying to steer her over towards the family room. Did no good for someone to see a friend looking like that. Last memories should be good ones, if you had the chance. "I promise, as soon as we know anything—"
At this point, a couple of things happened all at once. From inside Trauma One came the unmistakable sound of an instrument tray being toppled over—Perlah went running past, hot on the trail of a kid in a tattered Spider-Man outfit who was chanting no no no, no shots—Jack Abbot paused on the way to his locker and did an honest-to-God double-take and said to the woman, "Andy? What the hell are you doing here?"—and Robby opened the door of Trauma Two and said, sounding at the end of his rope, "Jack, thank fuck, little help?"
"Uh," Abbot said with uncharacteristic hesitation as he looked back and forth between Robby and Andy.
Andy nodded her head in the direction of Trauma Two and said, low and urgent, "She's one of us."
"Well, shit," Abbot said. He dumped his backpack underneath the desk. "Okay, come with me. You're going to need to—"
Whatever Abbot thought Andy needed to do was cut off by the doors of Trauma Two closing behind them, and then Lena showed up.
"You're cutting it fine," Dana said.
"I've got two whole minutes," Lena said with a shrug. "I'm going through a stick-it-to-the-man phase, what can I say?"
"Uh huh," said Dana, whose teenage tearaway phase hadn't involved her being a mere two minutes early to work. She read Lena in on the cases that needed the most attention, stressed that it was real important that no one be allowed to use the north restroom until Facilities finally deigned to show up and fix the damn toilet, and then headed for the door, quick march. Benji was making his risotto for dinner tonight, and no way was Dana going to let that grow cold.
Dana needed a lot of coffee to get her through the doors of the ED the next morning, but she walked through them, and every day was a win. Perlah and Princess had beat her in, though, and were already gossiping at the hub with Lena.
"You're looking very fresh and perky for this hour on a Thursday morning," Dana said to Lena as she put on her reading glasses and picked up a tablet.
"You know what they say: night shift keeps you young," Lena said.
"Is that so?" Dana drawled, scrolling through her inbox and deleting a swathe of pointless messages from the general listserv right off the bat. Employee Appreciation Week? Right. Couple of things in there that actually needed a response from her, but nothing super urgent. Good. "How does that work?"
"Because it's weird," Lena said, matter-of-fact.
"Yeah, well," Dana said, but lost her train of thought when she set down the tablet and glanced over to find that Robby was still in Trauma Two. Robby, who hadn't been scheduled to work a double. Robby and, as she saw when she craned her neck, Abbot, Joe, and Andy. She looked up at the board. The row for Trauma One was now clear, but below it was T-2, FRAS, 27, Robinavitch, Joe, Observation. No reason listed for the visit, no labs ordered, and they were using a precious trauma bay for observation? "What the hell happened?"
Lena stooped to retrieve her purse, and Dana realised that Lena hadn't made eye contact with her once since she got here. Not like her. "Like I said, weird."
"I'm all ears," Dana said, because by rights that young woman should have either died down here or bled out on an OR table hours ago.
"Above my pay grade to explain," Lena said, heading for the door already without doing a proper hand-off. "Ask Jack, I need a cigarette."
Dana gaped after her. "You don't even smoke!"
"First time for everything," Lena called back without stopping.
"Fucking hell," Dana said, as if anyone cared.
"But you know what the really wild thing is?" Perlah said.
"Try me," Dana said dryly.
"Turns out Joe the temp nurse and Hot RT? Married," Princess said, eyes shining the way they did when she got hold of some particularly juicy gossip. "Secret husbands! Am I sad that Hot RT is off the market? Sure. But look at Joe, who could blame him?"
"Not me," Perlah said solemnly. "Mashallah."
"Also," Princess went on, "I think that maybe Dr Abbot and that terrifying woman are—"
The phone rang. Five patients incoming from an MVA, three critical and two minor. They were going to need that trauma bay, whatever the hell was going on in there. Dana hurried over to tell Abbot and Robby that they'd have to vacate, go observe somewhere else—but when she opened the door, it was to see that the woman who was lying on the bed was awake and alert and had no sign of injury at all, despite the bloody length of rebar that was now lying on the floor.
"The fuck?" Dana said, startled.
"Uh," Joe said; next to him, Nicky, arms folded, glowered in silence and Andy was, Christ, cleaning blood from the blade of an axe.
"How would you feel," Robby said, "about abetting us in a slight bit of, uh, rule-breaking?"
"Is it a felony?" Dana shot back.
Abbot shrugged. "Eh?"
Dana sighed. "Fine, sure, just make it quick," she said, because call it irony, call it weird, call it an Act of God, call it whatever you wanted, because, "we need the room."