The Trauma Bay My Sister Entered

The dispatch radio said eleven minutes out, rollover, single vehicle, County Road 9, and I was already pulling on gloves before the ambulance bay doors opened, because that is what eleven minutes means in a trauma bay on a night with black ice on every county road in three townships. I did not know yet that the next six hours would hand me back the family I had spent five years learning to live without. I only knew the radio, and the cold coming off the loading dock, and the particular quiet that settles over a trauma team right before the doors swing open.

I am Dr. Erin Hartley. I am thirty six years old. I grew up in Caldwell, a town of about four thousand people built around a grain elevator, a Lutheran church, and my father’s hardware store on Main Street, and for the last three years I have been chief of trauma surgery at Caldwell Regional Medical Center, which sits forty minutes outside the town that raised me, close enough that I still see people I knew in high school in the cereal aisle, far enough that for five years I never once had to see my own parents there.

I need to go back to explain how a person ends up thirty six years old and estranged from the family that raised her, because the short version, the version I used to give people at parties when they asked, made it sound simple. I told people my family and I had grown apart. That was a kind, bloodless way of saying that my younger sister told a lie about me cruel enough to end a family, and that our parents believed her over me without ever once calling to ask if it was true.

My sister Kristy is three years younger than I am. We grew up in the same small house on Birch Street, two girls sharing one bathroom and one set of expectations that never quite landed on us the same way. I was the one who knew by the age of nine that I wanted to be a doctor, ever since the afternoon a county extension worker’s hand got caught in an auger out past the Hendricks place and the only doctor in Caldwell, an older man named Dr. Aldridge, drove out there himself and kept that man alive long enough to get him to the hospital in the county seat. I remember standing on our porch watching the ambulance go by with my father, who had helped carry the man to the truck, and asking him what it took to be the kind of person who could do that. My father said it took nerve and ten years of school, and I decided that night, the way only a nine year old can decide something and mean it for the rest of her life, that I was going to be that kind of person.