The Trauma Bay My Sister Entered
That brings me back to the Thursday night that undid five years of careful distance in the space of about ninety seconds.
It had been a bad week for weather across the whole county, an early cold snap that put a skin of black ice down on every road with a curve or a grade, the kind of ice that does not announce itself until a tire finds it. The call came in at 9:42 at night. Single vehicle rollover, County Road 9, out past the Hendricks place, the same stretch of road, strangely enough, near where the auger accident had happened when I was nine years old. One patient, female, conscious but in significant pain, possible internal injuries, ETA eleven minutes.
I was in the trauma bay before the ambulance doors opened, the way I always am, going through the mental checklist that becomes automatic after enough years of doing this work. My team was assembling around me, my charge nurse Dana pulling up the incoming patient information on the monitor as the paramedics radioed in vitals. I was reaching for the tablet to review the intake information myself when the name on the screen stopped me cold for exactly one second before every year of training I had ever done took over and carried the rest of my body forward without waiting for my mind to catch up.
Kristy Hartley. Thirty three years old. Emergency contact: Ronald Hartley. Relationship: father.
For one second, standing in a trauma bay I had run for three years, under lights I had stood under for hundreds of critical patients, I was not chief of trauma surgery. I was the older sister who had been erased from a family’s kitchen table conversation five years earlier, staring at a name that belonged to the person who had erased her.
“You good?” Dana asked. She had worked beside me long enough to read the half second of stillness in my shoulders that most people would have missed entirely.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Prep bay two. Get anesthesia on standby. What do we have on vitals?”
Dana hesitated, just slightly, the way a good nurse does when she senses something personal crossing into a professional space and is not sure whether to say so out loud. “Doctor Hartley. If you need someone else to take lead on this one, I can page Dr. Whitfield, he’s on call tonight too.”
“No,” I said, snapping my second glove into place. “We do this by the book. Same as every other patient who comes through those doors tonight.”