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The ED continued to be a blur of motion and noise, patients coming in faster than they were being discharged, nurses and doctors frantically running around the floor.
For Lauren Bloom, none of that was an issue. Hell, she felt electric, that energy that usually kicked in around hour thirty of a back-to-back shift, when the exhaustion seemingly faded to the background, and her main source of power was electricity.
For many, hour 40 became critical, the exhaustion rapidly coming to the forefront and causing one to crash and burn, but Bloom was hitting her last hour of the double–hour 48 – she felt on top of the world.
“Dr Bloom?”
Lauren snapped her head up from the tablet on the table in front of her, looking up to see Nurse Casey standing there, looking at her in that very specific manner that betrayed that he was concerned and worried.
“What? Is it a patient?” Lauren asked, her voice scratchy. She cleared her voice before asking Casey again.
“You know you’ve been staring at the screen for about ten minutes now, Lauren. The screen is off.”
Lauren looked back at the monitor, noting that Casey was indeed correct. She blinked, forcing her eyes to focus, before rubbing them.
“Right. Right. The tablet must have died, Casey. Sorry, I was just thinking about… that kid in Bay 4. The girl with the collapsed lung from the accident.”
“Bay 4?” Casey frowned, but Lauren didn’t notice.
“Yeah, the twelve-year-old. Grace. Came in a couple of hours ago. The one who should be back down from surgery?”
She handed the dead tablet over to Casey and pushed herself off the counter, ignoring the pins and needles up and down her legs, and ignoring the way that the world seemed to tilt slightly as she got to her feet.
“Lauren, wait,” Casey followed her to Bay 4, pulling back the curtain with a sharp swish.
“Hey, Grace, how are we -”
The words died in Lauren’s throat; the bed was empty.
And not even that, but fully stripped: the mattress was bare, the monitor was off, the ventilator Lauren recalled setting up was pushed in the corner, ready to be used by the next patient.
Except, it shouldn’t have been here, but busy being decontaminated.
What was…
“Where’s Grace? Has my patient been discharged already?” She spun around to face Casey.
Casey took a step back, holding his hands up, palms out, like he was backing away from a very startled animal.
“Lauren, we had a Grace in the ER, but she wasn’t a child, but an elderly lady, coming in from a care home, and you weren’t on her case.”
Lauren laughed, “Please, let’s not with this, Casey. I was literally in this bay. I remember the tube… her mum… the red coat that we had to cut off her.”
Lauren could see it, could feel the bright red wool of the young child’s coat as she had to pull it off her tiny body. She could remember the resistance of the laryngoscope as she guided it into the girl’s throat.
It was real.
She had done the procedure.
“Bay 4 has been empty since the driver of the red truck, whom the police think caused the accident, was sent up to surgery,” Casey said gently.
“Lauren, you asked Max to come down and give you a hand, and then you were knee deep in paperwork for the last half an hour or so. You haven’t moved.”
“No,” Lauren shook her head, the movement making her vision swim, “Me? Sitting down? Casey, now I know you’re making this up. And Grace was here.”
“Check the log, Lauren,” he told her, steering her towards the nearest computer, watching her fingers tremble slightly as she logged in, scrolling through the admissions to the ER since she began her shift nearly two days ago.
She scrolled once. Twice. And then a third time, the only Grace indeed being an elderly lady. No kids named Grace. Hell, no, children who had come in with a collapsed lung.
“But…” Lauren whispered, resting her head against her hand, “I remember it so clearly. I remember her looking into my eyes…”
“Lauren, you’re tired. You’ve been up for what, two days now? Probably a false memory is what Iggy would say.”
“Does somebody need me?” Doctor Frome appeared behind them, both Casey and Lauren jumping up.
“Oh, y’all are jumpy today. I heard my name. Everything alright?”
“I was just about to tell Dr Bloom here to take it easy and go and take a nap – she’s remembering a patient we never treated, at least, not today.”
“Tell me more.”
“I was sure we treated a girl, Grace, today, for a collapsed lung. I remember it all, Iggy.”
“How long have you been awake?”
“Two days now,” Casey butted in, knowing Lauren would downplay it.
“Hmm, it’s probably your brain misfiring, Lauren, trying to fill in the gaps with old cases, or a mix of cases you have already treated. You’re running on fumes, and your brain is creating narratives to keep you going.”
“I am not the patient here,” she snapped.
“Well, you’ll end up being one if you don’t look after yourself. You’re sleep-deprived, Lauren. I would not be surprised if you start remembering more things that never happened.”
Lauren looked back at the empty bag, the memory of Grace now fading fast, the mention of sleep being taken too literally by her body.
“I could have hurt someone,” she whispered so quietly that the two of them didn’t hear.
She could usually function on 48 hours, but that was when she napped and, more or less, had coffee directly infused into her veins.
This shift she had neither.
“I… I didn’t hurt anyone, did I?” she asked out loud, and Casey shook his head.
“I was keeping an eye on you, Lauren. If you’d gone to another patient, I would have pulled you into your favourite supply closet and locked you in there to have a nap,” he told her, and Lauren knew that was true – only Casey would be able to get away with that.
“Well, you’ll get to do that now. I’ll head up to my favourite supply closet, and you can tell Walsh that he gets the joy and glory of being in charge of the ED.”
She nodded at both the men, slowly making her way up, the false memory of Grace as her Bay 4 patient already being forgotten as she reached the cot in the supply closet and let sleep take her, even the beeping of her pager not enough to wake her as it usually did.