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A slight buzziness to her vision brings Baran back to the land of the living, accompanied with a momentary cloudiness to her thoughts. She’s associated that buzz with the sound of fog for years. When a neurologist told her years ago that fog doesn’t actually make a sound, Baran had to pause.
The fog doesn’t dissipate.
Everything around her has an oddly bleary quality, like she’s watching through a fishbowl. She’s in… yes. She’s in a patient room. There is a crib, and a few monitors pushed to the side. One of the residents—Baran grasps weakly for a name, she’s been told that she’s good with names, but none come now—has a walkie-talkie pressed to her ear. A clipboard is in her hands.
“No, not dead gone!” She insists, frustrated, into the receiver. “Like, poof, gone! Disappeared gone! Where did she go, Dana?”
Right. Yes. That was the patient for this room: their little baby Jane Doe. Little baby Jane Doe was brought in early, before this utter disaster of a cybersecurity threat.
The other doctor… the name escapes her, now, but the military one, the one that looked at her and knew—he’d found some walkie-talkies in the emergency box. While the ER isn’t large enough to need them internally, the charge nurse took one when she had to run to another department.
Everything has been so chaotic. Everything has been so full of… noise, and commotion, and dread, and heat.
It’s the perfect environment for their youngest, most vulnerable patient to go missing.
“Where’s the baby,” Baran mumbles, distant.
The resident takes her thumb off the radio. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out, Dr. Al, if you’ll just give me three seconds,” she answers, with some trace of sarcasm under her tone. The device suddenly cracks to life, and though Baran recognizes the voice of their charge nurse, the actual words are lost to static.
You know what to do in this situation, Baran reminds herself. Think it through. What is your name?
Her name is Doctor Baran Al-Hashimi.
Where are you?
She is in the Emergency Department of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, or PTMC. Someone had humorously welcomed her to the Pitt, earlier, a nickname that Baran has not decided to adopt. It is a Trauma I Center with advanced care capability and on-call specialists. Largely, she is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
“Oh, screw this!” The resident hisses, almost chuckling the walkie-talkie across the room. “Who’s the nurse for the baby? If we had the monitor working, I could read it from here. Hang on.”
She takes three steps towards Baran, who finds herself stuck quite in place. The last question loops in easily.
Where is your son?
Her son is at school. He will ride the bus home. He will spend the evening at a friend’s house because Maman is working late tonight. The school will call if anything happens to him, and she trusts the friend with his life. There aren’t many people Baran would trust with that.
All of the questions answered, and yet—and yet, the fogginess doesn’t budge. What’s worse, though the answers came, Baran doesn’t feel like they’re quite… real. Lines from a medical journal, perhaps, or even worse: a fairytale. She feels faraway. Not in some strange realm, either. Baran knows right where she is—soul, heart, something—while her physical body stands, inert in PTMC.
Inert in 2026.
Just as the resident would be forced to nudge her aside, her eyes alight on someone behind Baran. “Yo!” She barks, hands to the side. “What the hell, dude?”
Something about the intensity of the jeer makes Baran turn. There, before her, is a man.
She certainly doesn’t recognize a thing about him—not his scrubs, not his gray hair, not his nose ring. All she knows is that he is a man, a visitor to the maternity ward at Dasht-e-Barchi, and visitors are not allowed.
“You can’t be here,” Dr. Al-Hashimi commands, her voice thunderously intent. The man’s face twitches, confused, and starts to take another step. He’s not listening. What’s more, there is someone—a woman, a midwife perhaps—behind him.
She’s overcome by heat: a burning fire so strong that she can no longer feel her fingertips. Despite the blurriness, despite the fog, Baran knows she must act. Her hands go up. Though she keeps him at arms’ length, her grip is firm on both of his shoulders. The man looks at both her hands, bewildered.
“You have to leave right now.” Firmly, she takes one step forward, and she pushes the man back into the doorframe.
That is about when she sees the others.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
It’s a bellowing, furious call from down the hall. Within seconds, another woman—the charge nurse—at the maternity ward? Everything momentarily flickers before Baran’s eyes. She blinks several times.
As she does, the charge nurse has already pushed her back a few steps. She nearly collides with the resident, who catches her by the elbow.
“Thank you, Dr. Santos,” she mutters on instinct, and the words flicker like electricity over her tongue.
Before her is the man—the nurse, the scrubs, she recognizes the scrubs—and the charge nurse, who eyes Baran like a charging animal.
Dana. Nurse Dana. Baran’s worked with her for several hours, at this point. A competent, strong, protective charge nurse at PTMC. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Not Kabul. Kabul is a long ways away. Kabul is a long time away.
“I know you’re not putting your hands on my nurses!” Dana fumes, still between Baran and… Jesse. “What, you think this is the eighties? You think, just ‘cause you’re a doctor, you can do whatever you want to ‘em? Not in my ER, Dr. Al-Hashimi, not by a longshot. I see you do that again, and I’m goin’ straight to the board.”
There is a long, painful silence. Some of the fogginess starts to bleed away from Baran’s mind, replaced by a consuming lethargy. Replaced by a looming horror… and heaps and heaps of shame.
“I… I…”
Behind her, Santos comes to an unexpected rescue. “Jesse. Um, so, the baby is… do you know where the baby is?”
“I just came from updating the board,” he returns, still in a rush. “Sorry. Pedes finally backed down, said they would take her.”
“Well…” Santos’ laugh is long, forced, and deeply awkward. “Glad she didn’t wander out AMA, huh?”
Nobody in the room laughs. Dana has not broken eye contact with Baran. Baran is not often the first one to break eye contact, but now, she finds it difficult to look up from the floor. The back of her neck is starting to prickle with sweat.
They’re waiting on you, Baran reminds herself, in a gentler tone than she expects. They’re waiting on you to make the decision.
“Good,” Baran repeats. “Excellent. Thank you for updating the board, Jesse. Dr. Santos,” she says, “Could you give report on your current patients? We may need to assign you another, with Baby Jane Doe no longer in our care. And thank you, Dana, for coming so quickly when called.”
It is not a defusement of the situation by any means, but it is a means of escape. Santos practically flees for the door. Though Baran is close behind, she keeps her strides measured. Dana does not move while Baran passes by, and it’s with a gentle nudge that Baran takes her leave.
***
Baran sits outside in the ambulance bay.
She doesn’t have time to sit outside. She doesn’t have time for any of this. However, she sits with a miniature plastic bottle of water in her hands. Next to her, face down, is her phone. Another message to the neurologist’s office won’t do anything, but Baran needed something to not quite feel so helpless.
The first day, it had to be said, is not going very well.
She had come in with such enthusiasm. This position had seemed perfect. A test run, of course, to see how she liked being outside the VA. But the administration had been so receptive to her ideas, had encouraged her at every turn, had even managed to implement trial studies on her first day. They had sensed a bright future in her, had crowed and raved about her resume.
Then.
The shocks and tragedies had been something she could take in stride. She is trained in cybersecurity threats, after all. 4th of July was incredibly busy, but this was the ER. She’d expected busy.
She could deal with the inter-personal issues. Dr. Robby is stubborn and old-fashioned, but Baran has deal with far, far worse. His bullishness is endearing, in its own way. What’s more, he’s a strong patient advocate. That’s rare with doctors. Doctors and nurses alike can suffer from burnout or compassion fatigue, but Baran has meant many doctors who never gave a damn about patients to begin with.
Suffice to say, it is easy to understand why everyone loves him, and why there might be some… hesitancies at his departure. Nothing that she couldn’t deal with.
He is the one person she really doesn’t want to talk to right now, and to fit with how the day is going, he is the person who walks out of the ambulance bay doors.
“Both attendings shouldn’t be out here,” Baran says when he approaches. She knows it’s unnecessarily stiff. “You should go back inside.”
“Dr. Abbot’s still in there, holding down the fort. I imagine if they start eating each other, we’ll smell the meat cooking out here.”
Baran’s lips twitch, despite herself, but it doesn’t shake the heavy ball of dread from her chest. Robby sits next to her on the curb. It is hard not to feel like she’s been dragged in front of the principal to explain her wrongdoings.
“You put your hands on one of my nurses,” he says, almost apologetically.
His nurses. Dana’s nurses. Baran isn’t sure whether she ever had a chance here. “I did,” she answers. Thus, we have to have a talk about it. Thus, why I’m out here. Thus, thus, thus.
“Is he alright?”
Of course he can’t be hurt, but—well, an attending putting your hands on you was never a great feeling. Baran had had her wrist literally slapped once. In med school, on a surgery rotation, when she reached for the wrong tool. It’d felt humiliating more than painful.
“He’s fine,” Robby says. “Jesse seemed confused about what I was talking about when I asked.”
“That’s… something, I guess.” She takes a deep breath. Obviously, it won’t happen again lingers on her lips, but the words make her stomach turn. What can she promise? “I… assume you have something more to say.”
I never want you in my ER, you’re a terrible doctor, I’m reporting you to the board, you cold bitch.
“Dr. Santos said you looked… hazy. Like you weren’t really sure what was going on. And I gotta say, telling a nurse ‘you can’t be here’ for one of his own patients is sort of the opposite of what we do here,” Dr. Robby elaborates. “Somethin’ you wanted to talk about?”
Ah.
“She’s a good doctor,” Baran murmurs, and Robby hums in agreement. He doesn’t continue.
The ball is in her court again. She fixes her gaze on an oil puddle in the ambulance bay, watches how the sunlight catches against the rainbow ripples. Compulsively, she scratches her fingernail against the ridges of the bottlecap.
Where to start? She could start with Kabul. Baran can talk about it. The VA had put her on Prolonged Exposure therapy, which mostly involved talking about it. Over, and over, and over, until the words trailed easily off her tongue. It helped remove the sting from it. She appreciated it—mostly because there was nobody else she could talk to about it. Nobody else seemed to understand the true magnitude of it, how it felt to be there.
She doesn’t think Robby will understand. Jack might, but she isn’t sure whether she wants to run that risk. Instead, she skips ahead.
“I was diagnosed with PTSD back in 2020,” she says. “They put me in therapy, but that didn’t help with the absence seizures. They thought I had epilepsy.”
No family history of epilepsy. While an adult could have onset epilepsy, she was nowhere near the at-risk ages for it. She suffered from a mild case of tinnitus, but she hadn’t received any brain damage during the massacre itself.
Eventually, a brain scan had confirmed a different diagnosis entirely.
“Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures. PNES.” Baran’s lips split in a small, wry smile. “It’s… all in my head.”
Having a name, at the time, didn’t help. Having a name didn’t prevent her from simply disappearing, ten or fifteen times a day. Each absence seizure would only last a matter of seconds, but her return would be foggy. She would be confused, she would need a moment to remember where she was.
Once, it happened when her son was having a bath.
Baran can feel her own intestines squirm.
“I haven’t had an attack in two years.”
“And how many have you had today?”
Why not? Baran finds it hard to believe that she could dig the hole any deeper. “Three,” she admits.
It’s where she expects the lecture to come in. You should have told me earlier or it’s irresponsible that you didn’t disclose this to me or you think you can run an ER with stress-induced absence seizures? Those are all the same problems she’s asked herself in the past few minutes, and none of them feel like they have easy answers. There’s a small burn forming on the inside of her fingers, from where she fidgets with the bottle top.
“You okay?” Robby asks, eventually.
Baran can’t help it. She laughs. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Treat me like a patient. I’d rather be your resident than your patient, and I’d rather be your attending than your resident.”
Maybe it’s unfair. Robby has asked plenty of others if they’re okay. Nobody really seems to be okay, today. She doesn’t correct herself. Instead she adds, almost in defense, “I have an appointment with my neurologist. They can adjust my medications, increase the frequency of my therapy appointments.”
The thought isn’t that appealing. It feels like a relapse. Going back to those days where she had to revolve so much of her life around recovery. God, it felt good when she just didn’t have to spend so much time on getting better.
“You don’t have to defend yourself to me, Dr. Al-Hashimi,” Robby offers. “Nobody’s questioning whether you’re fit for duty.”
“And why aren’t you? I put my hands on a nurse. I forgot where I was. I thought I was back in… Kabul! Six years ago. Any competent doctor would require me to prove that I’m fit to work in a high-stress environment, I… I…”
There are tears pricking the corners of her eyes.
The shame isn’t over, it seems. While crying in front of a resident and a charge nurse is embarrassing, crying in front of the man you’re meant to replace is soul-crushing. Baran swallows everything back.
Maybe she should ask that question to herself. What if it happened again? Happened worse? Happened in front of a patient? What if she… she…
“Maybe I can’t do this,” she confesses, voice small. The oil puddle grows blurry.
It seems unwise to say this in front of the man she’s meant to replace. The man who’s meant to leave tonight, actually. Inconvenient is a small word for it. Dr. Robby would have to postpone his trip, which would lead to outright enmity. Baran’s seen the roster—there’s no way they could cover his absence without a dedicated replacement. And yet, he cares about this hospital, so if he sees what Baran is seeing right now—
“How long do they last? Your absence seizures?”
What does that matter? Baran affords herself a small sniff. The prickling subsides. “A-A minute, at most.”
“So… three minutes in total you were out? Maximum?”
“Sure.”
“And how does that fit into your efficiency model?”
Robby has a flair for the ridiculous. She smiles, if only in shock. Of course three minutes is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Three minutes fits into… well, humanity. People need a second or two to themselves. They need to chat with coworkers, they need to sit.
No, it’s not the three minutes of seizure that she’s concerned about. The first two… she doubts that anyone noticed. It isn’t as if the seizures have happened while she’s doing something. When she’s doing something critical, her mind seems to recognize that she hasn’t the time to think of anything else.
“I put my hands on a nurse,” she points out. Then— “I’m going to have to apologize to Dana.”
“Yeah, you’re not her favorite right now. Was it… vivid?”
Was it a flashback was the real question, to which Baran knows the answer. She suffered from a few flashbacks when she first returned to the VA, and she loathes the idea that they might happen again, but. There has always been a definite difference between them and her absence seizures, even the particularly severe ones.
“No,” she answers. “It wasn’t vivid. Everything was just… a little dim. It was triggered from the chaos, I think. And the missing baby. Confluence of things.”
Back there, in Kabul… Baran doesn’t let herself think of it. The counting, checking against the rosters. Making sure that they hadn’t left with a baby, not knowing what to do if they did. She has been sensitive to pediatric cases ever since.
If it weren’t so many things at once, she thinks, she would have snapped to. Nurse Jesse coming up behind her had startled an already shaken person, had triggered a reflex that she couldn’t prepare for. While it’d been awkward, yes, and uncomfortable…
It could be apologized for. It could be prepared for.
Robby hums a considerate tune. They sit in silence for a second—not friendly, maybe, but not awkward. When Robby leans his hands back on the asphalt, she hears his back crack. Relaxing. She doesn’t understand how he can possibly be so calm, when it’s his sabbatical on the line. It would be a massive inconvenience for everyone. Administration would hate it. Administration might even forbid it.
“You identified a problem,” Robby answers in a soft tone. “You’re getting help for it. In the meantime, you’re a damn good ER doctor. You go back in there, you apologize, and then we all move along with their lives.”
The way he says it, it makes it seem so… so easy. So simple. Just talking to the team. Baran prefers plans. She prefers contingencies. Most of all, she cannot tolerate errors or unknown. Right now, the fact that her brain occasionally goes away is the biggest unknown.
“Nobody died.”
Dr. Al-Hashimi has to snort at the bluntness. “Is that our threshold, Robby?”
“Kind of, yeah. Sometimes it feels like the only thing that matters.”
“That’s a terrible way to view patient care.”
From her periphery, she sees Robby grin. “See? You’re already a better ER doc than me.”
She does have several problems with how Robby runs things. It’s something she’s seen a lot of in the VA. People who have been there for so long, they don’t understand that—for most—it might be their first time in the ER. It might be their first time in the healthcare system, full stop. They’re lost, confused, frightened. An ER doctor who has seen it a thousand times and a patient who has never seen it at all.
Not incompetent by any means, but… improvements can be made. She can help make them. And perhaps, when he returns from his sabbatical, he’d be more willing to change. This could help everyone.
All of this will only happen if she continues to do her job.
She finally raises the bottle of water to her lips. The water is cool and refreshing, and chases some of the clouds away from her mind. Regardless of what she does next, she still has a shift to finish. They need her help, and Baran refuses to shrink from that responsibility.
“Word of advice, though? Explain to Dana everything you told me. She can work around it, but only if she thinks you’re not going to beat up her nurses when her back is turned.”
Baran snorts. She had already been planning to. Goodness knows she didn’t want to come to Dana and say yes, I can’t tell you why, but I promise you that I don’t have a personal grudge against Jesse. For that matter, she wants to tell Dr. Abbot, too. It might be presumptuous to say that he came back with some form of PTSD, but he’s the closest person who might understand.
A plan. Contingencies. Safety nets. She takes a deep breath, and stands up from the curb. Robby takes a moment to join her, but eventually, they’re on their own feet yet again.
“Thank you,” she says, and she means it. “This helped.”
“Hey, you’re the one taking this wheel,” Robby answers, with a wave of his fingers towards the ER. “You deserve one of my kidneys.”
It isn’t that bad, she wants to say, but that’s not entirely true. It is bad. It’s hectic, and chaos, and triggered a relapse to something she had under control. While Baran is determined to improve it, she can’t say that the long road ahead of her is filled with sunshine.
And yet, there is that determination. Some of it comes from within, sure. But some of it…
“It’s a good place.” No, that isn’t quite right either. Instead, she amends with the truth. “Good people.”
Baran stares at the ‘EMERGENCY’ sign thoughtfully. Just behind the sliding glass doors, more chaos awaits. More problems—more obstacles. She can see everyone scurrying to and fro, some arguing with others, and even a few laughs being shared.
The idea of backing out, of not providing help to these brilliant, talented, kind, determined people…
Well. It’s cold.
She’ll fix this. She will.
Robby stands by her side, arms crossed against his chest. When he speaks, there’s a strange hitch to his voice.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “They are.”