Branded

“What happened? What the fuck happened?” I cry as a doctor and two nurses rush in and get all of her stats from the paramedics.

“Phina, you need to move away,” one of the nurses I’ve worked with off and on through the years says from behind me.

“Tell me what the fuck happened!” I bark at her.

“Car accident, that’s all we know,” she tells me as she hangs her IV bags on a portable stand and starts moving her stethoscope all around Finnley’s chest.

While the doctor walks to the opposite side of the bed and starts checking her vitals and ordering things from the nurse, I press my cheek to Finnley’s.

“You’re going to be okay, honey. Please, just open your eyes,” I sob.

I can’t stop touching her as the doctor orders me to move back. I smooth her blood-caked hair away from her face, run my hands down her cheeks, throat and chest and breathe a small sigh of relief when I feel her heart beating strongly under my palms. I cradle her head to my chest and squeeze my eyes closed, praying that she’s going to be okay.

The doctor keeps shouting at me to leave and I ignore him until the nurse grabs onto my arms and forcibly pulls me away from my friend. The tears fall steadily down my cheeks as I take a step back and watch them rip open Finnley’s shirt and press heart monitors onto her skin. I hold my hand against my mouth to stop myself from sobbing as everyone barks orders and rushes around her bedside.

I finally notice Brad standing off to the side and he walks over to me.

“What the hell happened?” I ask him as we both stand there staring at Finnley.

“Ran a red light and some guy t-boned her,” Brad explains quietly while the staff works on her.

I tear my eyes away from Finnley long enough to look up at Brad in confusion.

“Finnley wouldn’t run a damn red light. She yells at me if I have the radio up too loud because I won’t be able to concentrate on other motorists and she clears her throat in this really annoying way if I go one mile over the speed limit,” I tell him.

Suddenly, I remember the page DJ got earlier and I realize this was the car accident he had to respond to. Jesus, he must have lost his mind when he got there and saw it was Finnley.

I quickly pull my cell phone out of my scrub pocket and realize I turned the damn thing off before I came down here. I turn it on and immediately see that I have a couple of missed calls from DJ.

“Shit, DJ tried to call me,” I mutter.

“Yeah, he showed up a few minutes after I got there. Calmed her fiancé down and was going to bring him here in his own truck. That guy is one calm motherfucker under pressure,” Brad tells me in awe when we hear Finnley’s weak voice across the room.

“Collin?”

I race to her side and I almost scream in happiness when I see her brown eyes staring back at me.

“What happened? Where’s Collin?” she asks with a scratchy voice as she tries to get up.

I gently press my hands to her chest and ease her back down on the bed.

“You were in an accident, sweetie, and Collin is on his way,” I tell her, grabbing her bloody hand and holding it to my stomach. “Jesus, you took ten years off my life when they wheeled you in here.”

She brings her free hand up to her head and groans. “Fuck, my head hurts.”

I laugh in relief when I hear her curse as the doctor starts asking her some basic questions like her name, what day it is and what all she remembers. As Finnley speaks, more and more of the accident starts coming back to her and I hate that she remembers the sounds. She tells the doctor she just keeps hearing glass breaking, metal crunching and a loud bang. Working in a hospital and listening to patients talk after an accident, that’s their major complaint – that they can’t get the sounds out of their head.

“I tried to stop in time. I saw the light change red and I had plenty of time. I pressed on the break, but it wouldn’t work. I kept pressing it and pressing it, but I couldn’t slow down,” Finnley tells him.

A strange feeling settles in the pit of my stomach, but I push it away, figuring the bump on her head might be messing with her memory a little bit. If she actually pressed on the break, the car would have stopped instead flying through an intersection at top speed. I start thinking about the call I accompanied DJ on the other night with Mrs. Martinez when she spoke about crashing into the front of a Red Lobster. Now that Finnley is alert and seems to be okay, I kind of want to tease her and ask her if she mistook the break for the gas like poor Mrs. Martinez did, but the doctor asks me to step away from the bed to give Finnley a chance to close her eyes and rest for a few minutes.

“She’s stable. The laceration on her head is pretty bad and is going to require some stitches. The nurse is going to put a temporary bandage on her head so we can get her upstairs for an ultrasound and CT scan to check for internal bleeding. Her abdomen is soft and pliable right now, so I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that, but it’s always better to be safe. If everything goes well with the scan, we’ll keep her for observation just to make sure she doesn’t have any swelling on the brain. All in all, I’d say she was pretty lucky. The paramedics out in the field did a great job.”

My heart swells with pride when I hear this. Even though I’m sure it must have killed him on the inside, DJ did what he was trained to do and he probably saved Finnley’s life. I want to kiss the hell out of him right now.

I walk back to Finnley’s side and give her a kiss on the cheek and tell her I’ll wait here for Collin and send him up to the digital scanning area as soon as he gets here. An orderly comes in then and pushes Finnley’s gurney out from the curtain towards the elevators.