Chapter Two
Dean
“Code blue, room 313. Code blue, room 313.”
“Dr. Alexander, Code black, room 102. Dr. Alexander, code black. Room 102.”
“Code orange! All emergency and on-duty personnel to the emergency doors. Code orange!”
A fifteen-car pile-up in the middle of the city started slamming through the doors of the hospital. People clutching their stomachs and people with broken bones. Those who were unconscious and already throwing up from their concussions. I helped the nurses ready as many rolling gurneys as I could and quickly set up triage. I had a team of nurses scrubbing down operating rooms and readying them in case we needed them. I sent out a mass alert to all of the on-call doctors, telling them we needed their services if they could get to the hospital.
Fifteen cars meant the potential for at least thirty victims.
“Dr. Alexander!”
“Yes, Mary?”
“I have a kid over here not doing too well. He came in throwing up and with a fever, but now he’s on his second seizure.”
“And you didn’t alert me to the first one because?”
“You were stitching up a patient in the corner,” she said. “Come on. Don’t scold me now.”
I jogged alongside the head nurse and quickly approached the boy. His mother was holding him and rocking him, crying and begging him to be okay. He had a large gash that had been stitched up at the side of his head and blood that still coated the brace on his neck. His pulse was low and his eyes were staring off again. Still and lifeless before he blinked and focused on me.
“Nurse, get this boy down to imaging. I want to make sure he doesn’t have any intracranial hemorrhaging,” I said. “And ma’am?”
“Yes?” the mother asked.
“You have to stop rocking your son. He’s got a serious concussion and the movement is only making him worse.”
I didn’t have time to sugarcoat anything. Our hospital was being flooded with more people than I ever would’ve thought from a car accident. But the main culprit of the pile-up on the highway was an overturned party bus, which meant at least seven more people than we’d originally accounted for.
I worked as quickly as I could with those who would stand, speak, and hold their own. I gave them a once-over with ambulances and police at the ready, and if they needed anything that didn’t require surgery or hospital services, they were shipped off to another hospital. Quick stitching was one thing, but I didn’t have the time to prescribe medications with children who were coming into the hospital with severed arteries.
Those who needed medication or needed to be put under a watch could do it elsewhere.
“Help me! Help! Doctor, please!”
I watched a woman fall at me and I quickly opened my arms for her. She was holding her neck and blood was pulsing between her fingers. I picked her up and placed her onto the nearest gurney and spread her fingers to look at the damage. Blood was trickling up her throat and she coughed, spraying it all over my scrubs and my white coat.
There was nothing I could do for her, and it made me sick to my stomach.
“You’re going to be okay,” I said as I tucked a blanket around her shivering body. “I want you to look at me. What’s your name?”
“La-... Lacey.”
“Lacey. What a beautiful name. Tell me, Lacey. Where were you headed to tonight?” I asked.
“My son’s… dance… reci-”
She coughed again, blood falling from her lips onto the white blanket.
“Doctor Alexander-”
“Hold on,” I said.
“But you’re needed-”
“I said hold on!”
I eyed the nurse with a vengeance and she backed off. I turned my eyes back down to the woman in front of me. The woman who maybe had thirty more seconds to live. Something began to vibrate and I looked down at her phone, watching it light up in her pocket. Her trembling hand tried to reach for it and I clamped down onto her wrist, then fished her phone out of her pocket.
‘My boy’.
Her son was calling.
I picked up the phone call and held it to her ear. I gripped her hand tightly, watching as tears rose in the woman’s eyes. Her words were shaky and her tone was empty. Tears dripped down her cheeks as her hand slowly released mine. I could hear her son going on and on about his recital. About how he wasn’t angry that she wasn’t there and that he got it all on tape for her to watch later.
I watched her murmur her last words to her son before her eyes went cold.
‘I love you, baby boy.’
The last words of a woman who’s name I didn’t even know.
“Mom? Mom?”
“Hello there, son. What’s your name?” I asked.
“Where’s my mom?” the boy asked.
“My name is Doctor Dean Alexander. I work at Bellevue Hospital.”
“Is my mom okay?” the boy asked.
I looked down at the woman as a nurse pulled a sheet over her face.
“I think you and your father should come down to the hospital so we can talk about that,” I said.
After thirteen hours of straight work and working five hours over my shift, I slumped against the wall. I was covered in blood and my shoulder was soaked with the tears of those who had lost family members that night. Friends. Daughters. Sons. I hated the color orange.
With a fervent, disgusting passion.
“You should go home.”
“Dr. Fletcher. Thank you for coming in,” I said.
“The second I saw the accident on the news I booked it out of the restaurant,” he said. “But you need to go home. You’re five hours over your shift.”
“I take it you’re the doctor relieving me?” I asked.
“I am. Which is why you’re out of here as of now.”
“I know you were celebrating your twenty-third anniversary. If you want-”
“What I want is for you to go home, Dean. You’ve been here for almost forty-eight hours straight.”
“Welcome to the life of a doctor?”
“You intentionally overwork yourself, Dean. We all know this. You’ve done it ever since-”
“Don’t say it,” I said.
“The point is, you’re done. Go home. Get some sleep. Eat a decent meal. Maybe get out and go find somewhere to spend your time.”
“Or someone to spend my time with?”
“If you want,” he said with a shrug.
“Tell him ‘yes’, Dr. Fletcher!” Mary called out. “That man needs a woman in his life! He wouldn’t work so much if he had a warm body to go home to.”
“She’s not wrong,” Dr. Fletcher said. “Going home to my wife does keep me from working overtime unless it’s necessary.”
“While I love being ganged up on at work because of my lack of a love life, I think I’ll go home and sleep the entire weekend away,” I said.
“Find a woman, Dr. Alexander,” the nurse said. “I’ve known you for three years, and in all that time I don’t think I’ve seen you out on one date.”
“I don’t have the time,” I said.
“You don’t make the time. Especially since-”
“Can we not bring that up every chance we get?” I asked.
“You need to hear it, Dean.”
“No I don’t, Bob.”
“You lost your mother,” he said. “But that was four years ago, Dean. And it was time. We all knew it was.”
“That doesn’t make it hurt any less,” I said.
“She was so riddled with dementia she didn’t even know who she was.”
“I know the facts, Bob. I was there every damn day,” I said. “And what the hell does that have to do with me not dating?”
“You didn’t date when your mother was alive because of the pressure of taking care of her. But you aren’t dating now because her loss impacted you so greatly that you’d rather be alone than risk losing someone again just to find someone to spend your time with.”
“I forget you’ve got multiple doctorates,” I said.
“Medicine and Psychology,” Bob said. “But that’s beside the point. The point is, you can’t let the death of your mother rob you of the joy of finding someone to spend your time with.”
“Look. We all know this hospital works all of us to death. Around the clock schedules and growing malpractice pains discourages people from entering into medical school, which leaves people like us manning the stations understaffed. My only shot at finding someone to even remotely talk to is finding a woman who’s a damn patient. And we all know hospital policy when it comes to that.”
“Yeah. Nurse Hoosier’s learned that lesson the hard way a couple of months ago,” Mary said.
“Wait, is that why I haven’t seen him around here lately?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. Had a tryst with a young woman in the cancer ward,” Bob said. “Her mother found out, reported him, and he was fired on the spot.”
“Does he know the kind of danger he put someone like that in? With her immune system already being-”
“Trust me, you’re not saying anything that hasn’t already been said one thousand times,” Bob said. “My only point was that your life has stalemated since you lost your mother. You come to work, you go home, you sleep, and you repeat it. It’s not healthy for a man your age.”
“A twenty-nine year old overworked doctor addicted to caffeine?” I asked.
“Yep,” Mary said. “So go home and use your weekend wisely. I expect fun stories when you come back in on Monday.”
“Yeah. Fun stories of my dreams,” I said. “See you guys later.”
“Find a woman!” Bob exclaimed.
“Pay attention to yours!” I yelled back with a smile.
“I would if people on party buses weren’t so damn drunk all the time!”
I left the hospital and drove straight to my apartment. I dragged myself up the stairs and opened the door, taking stock of the place I called home. It wasn’t really a home. More like a place I slept on occasion when I wasn’t sleeping in the hospital on my lunch breaks. The bulbs in my living room started to flicker before they died out, leaving a dark hue cast over my old furniture. I’d found it all on a website after I’d rented the place out. I had a simple metal frame my bed sat on and a dresser that housed all my clothes. The three-cushioned couch I found on the side of the road had been professionally cleaned down, so it didn’t look terrible. There was a small wooden shelf that housed a television that rarely got turned on, and I had just enough plates and cups and silverware in my kitchen to feed three people at a time.
There was no use in having anything else.
It wasn’t as if anyone was living here with me.
Or living here, in general.
I shrugged my white coat off and slung it over the arm of the couch. I’d deal with the blood stains on it later. Or I’d toss it and buy myself a new one. I kicked off my shoes and peeled the scrubs off my body, then fell into my years-old bed. My body was already giving out on me. Sinking into the pliable mattress I’d found on a barter-and-trade website in the city. I’d paid four of my scrubs for this thing, and it came with exactly one sheet set.
I hadn’t bothered to buy another one yet.
I pulled the comforter over my body and closed my eyes. The blackout curtains in my bedroom were pulled, blocking out the sun rising over the city. I felt heavy with burden. I felt an ache deep in the marrow of my bones. I’d destroyed a young man’s life today. I’d held him and felt him cry as I told him his mother was gone. I remembered that feeling. That feeling of absolute and utter emptiness when my mother passed away.
I’d done that to a ten-year old boy today.
I closed my eyes and I could still see her funeral. I could still see them lowering my mother into her grave next to my father and my two sisters. It had been a hard life for my mother and I. The car accident that robbed us of my siblings and my father changed us in ways neither of us talked about. It’s what prompted me to move back to the city. It’s what prompted me to switch medical schools. I wanted to be closer to my mother after their deaths. After their funerals.
And when my mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of dementia, I wanted to be close to her to take care of her.
My life had consisted of that for the past six years. Tending to my mother in her nursing home and going to work. During the earlier stages of it, we watched family videos. Images of my sisters and my father and all of us running around outside. Going to the zoo. Celebrating birthdays and opening presents on Christmas. We’d spend hours watching those tapes and eating all of their favorite foods until the two of us could talk about the accident.
Then two years later, the dementia wiped all of it from her memory.
I was a stranger in the night coming to visit her and she was helpless to the disease that ravaged her mind. I thought I’d coped with losing her. With looking at my mother and her not knowing who I was. Coped with no longer having a family and being the last of my bloodline. I came from a long line of only children. My father was an only child. My mother was an only child. My grandparents were only children. I had no one after I buried my mother. No aunts. No uncles. No cousins.
No one.
Just me.
The last of my kind.
I thought I’d coped with it. But the day the nursing home called me and told me my mother had died? It felt like someone had ripped my heart out and stomped on it in the middle of the street. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn't speak. I’d taken two weeks off work just to wrap my mind around things. To rifle through her stuff at the nursing home and bury her with the respect she deserved.
But everyone who would’ve attended her funeral was already dead.
So it was just me, the rain, and her casket that dreary afternoon.
However, feeling that little boy cry into my shoulder brought everything back. All of the pain and the heartache and the emptiness and the loneliness I felt on a regular basis. All of that nasty shit I shoved down into the pit of my stomach and refused to acknowledge came bubbling back to the surface. I felt tears rising to my eyes and I closed them tight. Forced them back at bay as I turned over onto my side in my old, hand-me-down bed that cost me four scrubs and a truck ride.
It had been over a year since I’d lost the last of my family, and it still hurt like it had happened yesterday.
That was why I didn’t like code oranges. Because it reminded me of everything in my life I had lost.
That was why I didn’t like the color orange.
Because it had always been my mother’s favorite color.