The Trauma Bay My Sister Entered
I meant it when I said it, and I mean it now, looking back. Whatever history stood behind that name on the intake sheet, the person coming through those doors in nine minutes was a trauma patient with possible internal bleeding, and my job in that moment was not daughter, was not older sister, was chief of trauma surgery, and I was going to do that job exactly the way I had trained fifteen years to do it, by the book, for a stranger and for my own sister in exactly the same way.
The ambulance arrived at 9:53. The doors to the bay opened, and the paramedics wheeled Kristy in on the gurney, and I saw her face for the first time in five years, pale, frightened, a shallow cut above one eyebrow, her left arm braced awkwardly against her side in a way that told me before any scan confirmed it that something in her abdomen was wrong.
She looked at me. For exactly one beat, before the pain and the adrenaline and the fear of the moment pulled her attention away, I watched recognition cross her face, followed by something that looked like disbelief, followed by something that looked almost like relief, which surprised me more than anything else that happened that night.
“Erin,” she said, and then her face twisted and she could not say anything else.
“I’ve got you,” I said, because that is what I say to every patient, and because in that moment it was also true in a way neither of us had expected it to be true again. “Talk to me. Where does it hurt the most.”
I will not walk through every clinical detail of the next several hours, because some of it belongs to Kristy and not to anyone reading this, but I will tell you the shape of it. She had a lacerated spleen and significant internal bleeding from the impact of the steering wheel during the rollover, serious enough that waiting even another hour could have cost her life, not serious enough, with fast surgical intervention, that we could not save both the organ and her life if we moved quickly. I made the call to take her to the operating room myself, with Dr. Whitfield assisting, and I scrubbed in exactly the way I would have for any patient with those injuries, because the alternative, stepping back and letting someone else lead because the patient happened to share my last name, would have meant letting fear make a decision that belonged to skill and speed instead.
While I was scrubbing in, the waiting room doors on the other side of the department swung open, and I heard, for the first time in five years, my father’s voice.
He was demanding to see whoever was in charge. He had driven the forty minutes from Caldwell the moment Kristy’s call came through from the ambulance, not knowing yet, I would learn later, anything about who was waiting for her on the other side of those doors. My mother was beside him, and according to Dana, who was at the front desk when they arrived, my mother went very still and very pale the moment she saw the name on the chief of trauma surgery badge posted on the department’s wall directory, the one that reads Dr. Erin Hartley above a small photograph taken the year I started the job.