~ Emma
“Emma, you free?”
I glance up; see Jason leaning on the doorframe. “Yeah,” I say, throwing back the rest of my half-cold coffee. “What’s up?”
“We’ve got an attempted suicide coming in,” he says, talking quickly as we walk from the staff room back to the ER. “ETA in two minutes.”
I glance at my watch, exhaling a sigh of relief when I see I’ve still got two hours left on my shift. As much as I’m dreading tonight and meeting Nick’s parents, I know I can’t afford to be late.
“Do we know how?” I ask, grabbing some gloves and an apron.
“Suspected overdose,” he answers as we wait by the entrance.
The sirens are loud as the ambulance pulls in. I watch the paramedics as they jump out, the two of them pulling the trolley out while somehow maintaining the IV line and facemask on the patient. It’s all done in an expertly coordinated way, as though they’ve done this a thousand times before. Truth be told, they probably have.
The glass doors open automatically as they come rushing towards us, pushing the trolley through as one of the paramedics fires off a list of what they know and what they’ve done. I’m only half listening because I’m too distracted by what’s now lying on the trolley in front of me.
A young woman; maybe my age.
Her pale limbs lie lifeless on the thin mattress as though her attempt is no longer an attempt, but a success. There are old scars on the inside of her forearms, rows of raised and mottled white bumps that suggest this isn’t her first go at doing this. There are fresh ones on the inside of her thighs, suggesting something more and her breathing looks so shallow that I’m not even sure she’s still with us.
The paramedic hands me an IV bag as he says something that I don’t hear. Jason immediately takes over, shouting off a list of instructions to us as we wheel the girl through to the emergency room. I watch as the trolley jolts to a stop, narrowly missing a nurse who runs in front of us. The girl’s arm slips off beside me, hanging to the side in a way that almost looks as though she’s reaching for help.
I go to take her hand, but stop.
I can’t take my eyes off the scars on her arm, following them all the way up until I reach her face. I stare in surprise, at the long brown hair, the high cheekbones that look oddly familiar. A cold chill moves through me, dancing down my spine.
“Emma?”
I blink and the recognition is gone.
“Emma?”
I look up; find Jason staring at me with a questioning look on his face.
“Sorry,” I say shaking my head. “Yes?”
“Check her pupils,” he says, as he hangs the bag I’ve been holding before pushing a syringe of fluid into her IV.
I nod, pulling the penlight from my pocket and shining it into her eyes. They’re tiny pin-pricks, fixed and non-responsive.
And dark blue.
A shudder runs through me and I have to swallow hard, force myself to push whatever is going on inside my head to the back of my mind so I can do my job.
I tell myself to switch to autopilot, listening to Jason’s instructions and following them to the letter, all the while trying to ignore the fact that a woman who can’t be much older than me, fights for her life in front of us.
Or maybe she’s fighting us. Fighting for the right to leave her life.
We finally get her stable and I practically slump against the wall, exhaling a sigh that’s a mix of both relief and confusion. A registrar from upstairs appears in front of me, telling me they’ll take it from here and holding her clipboard out as though to ask if that’s okay. It takes me a second to realise she needs me to sign off on what we’ve done. Sign the patient over to someone else to look after.
That’s it now.
We’ve done our job because we stopped her from dying. Even though a part of me knows it’s not what the patient wanted, and it probably won’t be the last time she tries. But it won’t matter to us anymore, because someone else will look after her now. Someone else will take over and try to fix the things we couldn’t.
Just as I’m signing off on the paperwork, I see Jason walk towards me.
“Everything okay back there?” he asks.
I hand the file to the registrar, smiling at her as I try to work out how I’m supposed to answer Jason’s question.
“Yeah,” I eventually say, glancing at him.
“You sure? You didn’t seem completely…on board?”
I take a deep breath as I look at my watch. “No, I’m good,” I tell him. “Is it cool if I call it a night though?”
Jason stares at me, a questioning look on his face as though he wants to ask me more. I’m silently begging that he doesn’t because even if they’re questions about what happened back there or why I’m so keen to leave now, I don’t know what the answers are going to be. Neither are normal reactions for me. He knows it and I know it.
“Yep,” he eventually says. “Have a good one.”
I nod, walking off even as I register that this is the first time I’ve finished work and Jason hasn’t said ‘You’ve done good today’.
By the time I reach my locker though, the thing that was floating in the back of my brain when I looked into that girl’s eyes is back and it’s screaming at me and forcing me to listen.
I know it’s a long shot and I know it’s completely unprofessional too, but there’s a part of me that cannot ignore it, that’s desperate to know more. Desperate to find out how it all happened so I can do something about it, even if it’s something I have no right to do. No right to know.
I don’t even know if she would’ve been brought here. Maybe it was somewhere else and a part of me hopes that it was so I don’t have to find a way to explain why I’m about to do what I am.
I pull my phone from my pocket and check for messages. There’s a photo from Nick, sent sometime this morning of Oscar curled up against the pillow I was using in his bed. There’s no message, just the cat emoji with the heart eyes. My eyes close as the guilt curls through me.
I leave my phone in my locker and shut the door before heading back out to the nurse’s stand. I find a free computer and the link to patient records. I type in her name and date of birth, which of course I know because they’re twins, before I have a chance to question whether I should be doing this.
A hit comes back and even though I’ve deliberately set out to find these answers, it still surprises me. There’s no way I could possibly have treated her though. Nick told me it happened a year ago and a year ago I wasn’t working in the ER.
My fingers hover over the keyboard, shaking because I’m scared to click on her file and scared not to. I try to rationalise that I’m doing this so I can better understand what Nick went through, so that I can help him deal with it and maybe get some him closure, some peace. Because even though he’s told me some things, I know there’s more to the story. Things he can’t seem to bring himself to talk about.
But the bigger part of me knows that no matter how much I try to convince myself I’m doing this for the right reasons, what I’m really doing is breaking his trust. I’m taking something that’s very private and very personal and I’m invading it. Worst of all, I’m not only doing it behind his back and without his permission, I’m doing it because I can’t stand the secrecy of it any longer.
And I know that’s the worst part about it all. I’m doing this because I’m impatient and I want to know.
My finger hits the enter key, opening the file. My eyes immediately flick to the last treating physician. I see Jason’s name before I quickly scan the record, as though trying to find an explanation without reading too much into it all. But even as I skim the words, skim back over the rest of her files, I feel the breath leave my lungs, the sinking feeling in my gut at all the things I didn’t know before but now do.
The three admissions to the ER.
The brutal things that were done the first time.
The self-inflicted things that were done the second time.
And the final visit on the third time.
“Oh god,” I whisper, my hand covering my mouth as I realise exactly what she went through, what Nick must still be going through now. Even though I’ve been trained in how to deal with trauma, trained in how to face it on a day-to-day basis, I still have to shut down the file and run to the bathroom.
I slam the door of the cubicle shut just in time as I collapse over the toilet, the contents of my stomach violently forcing their way out. My whole body shakes with what I’ve done, with what I’ve read, but most of all with how much I wish I could undo it all.