Page 13 of Break For Me
He opens the door. He puts one boot on the gravel and pushes himself out. He sways for a second, his right hand gripping the door frame, his left held against his chest.
His face is the color of a ghost in the moonlight. His eyes are glassy.
He takes two steps and his left knee buckles. He catches himself on the railing. The wood groans. He hauls himself up the steps through pure, irrational defiance.
I follow. I don't know why. He didn't order it.
But the medical bag is in my hand and the door is open. Standing in the dark is just another version of the cage I just left.
The house is a single room. A kitchen at the back. A woodstove radiating enough heat to make the air thick and sweet with the smell of burning oak.
A generator hums under the floor. Two lanterns on a table cast long, jagged shadows.
The patient is on a door.
Someone has ripped a bedroom door off its hinges and laid it across two sawhorses. On the wood, under a stained sheet, lies a man.
He is younger than Rocco. Late twenties. Dark hair matted to his forehead. His skin is the color of old candle wax.
An IV line runs from a bag taped to the wall into his arm. His breathing is shallow. His chest moves in short, erratic jerks.
A man in a flannel shirt stands over him. His hands are calloused in the wrong places for a civilian—field medicine, not office work. He looks at me, and the relief on his face is pathetic.
"He’s been sliding for two hours. Pulse is one-twenty. I’ve pushed the saline, but he’s still cold."
I’m already moving. I set my bag on the table. The snap of the latex gloves is the trigger.
The room disappears. The man who kidnapped me disappears. There is only the field.
I pull back the sheet. Two wounds. The shoulder is a clean through-and-through. Packed well.
The abdomen is the crisis.
The entry is near the umbilicus. The skin is distended. Purple. Hot.
I palpate the area. The muscle is rigid. A "board-like" abdomen.
He groans from a place deep in his gut.
"I need better light," I say. "Boil water. Get me every clean rag in this place."
I look at the medic. "Anesthesia?"
"Ketamine. Ninety minutes worth."
Ninety minutes. To open a belly, find the leak, repair the bowel, and close. In a shack. On a door. With a flannel-clad medic as my assistant.
I have worked with less. I have worked in the back of moving vans with a turkey baster for suction. This is my life now. This is what the world made of me.
I pull on the second glove. I open my instrument roll. The steel gleams under the lantern.
For a second, I feel the old centering. The calm of the OR in Baltimore, before the girl died. My hands become the only truth in the room.
A heavy sound behind me. A body hitting wood.
I turn.
Rocco is on the floor. His back is against the wall. His legs are splayed.
