AMA (2/3)
“Can you do it?”
“No. She's bleeding into her chest cavity. We need to get her to a hospital.”
The sirens were loud, screaming in her ears, and she tried to turn away from it only to be held short by hands and pain.
“Sir, what's the patients name?”
“Sophie.”
Eliot glared at him, elbowing him hard in the side. “Nate.”
He blinked, and shook his head forcefully, trying to reclaim control on the situation. “Sophie Baker. I'm her husband, Nate. This is Charlie, my brother.”
“Charlie? Seriously?” Hardison huffed, and a moment later said, “Okay, I've updated your profiles for the Bakers, so you should be good. It's gonna take me a little more time to get Charlie up and running.” He paused, and then asked, voice carefully modulated to hide any concern. If circumstances were different, Nate might have found it amusing. “How's our girl?”
Nate swallowed over the thick lump in his throat, turning away from the nurse. “She's fighting.”
Light burned against her eyelids, pain burned in her side, and voices murmured around her.
“She's got a hemopneumo... I need a decompression over here.”
Items clattered, and the light burned out above her.
The antiseptic smell was setting him on edge. They weren't letting him in to see Sophie - the curtains were drawn, and occasionally they would rustle when someone, sometimes a nurse, sometimes a doctor, stepped out into the hall.
Nate knew something was wrong as soon as the attending physician stepped out and wouldn't look at him. He knew that look. He had the hunched shoulders of a man who had done everything in his power and had failed. Nate knew the look because he had worn it many times himself.
He stood, shrugging off Eliot's hand, ignoring Parker's noise of concern. He pulled out his earbud on the way down the hall. He could hear Eliot behind him, and ignored it, brushing past the doctor and heading for an exit.
He couldn't be here. He couldn't hear it, he couldn't...
He couldn't.
“Mr. Baker!” Eliot caught the doctor by the arm as he tried to follow Nate out the door.
“Doc, I'm Sophie's brother-in-law. Nate... he needs a minute. What's happening?”
The doctor rubbed a hand over his face. It had been a long, busy day. He'd had three codes in his trauma bays today, and he hadn't been ready for another one. His crew was tired, beat down, and there wasn't enough coffee in the world to make the night shift pass any faster.
“She was in rough shape when she got here. She had a hemopneumothorax to her right lung... I'm sorry, that means she had an air leak into her chest cavity, and that she was bleeding into the same area. We decompressed the area, and got her stabilized.”
This was the part he hated.
“We, uh... we lost her-”
Eliot curled his hands into fists at his sides, tensing all over.
“-for awhile, but she's stable, for now. We'll be transferring her up to CCU in a few minutes. One of the nurses will escort you and your family upstairs.”
Parker touched his shoulder, once the doctor had retreated to the nurses station. “Is she okay?”
Eliot took a deep breath, and said roughly, “She's holding on.”
“Where's Nate?”
“I don't know.”