Therapy (41 page)

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I HAD JUST finished my trauma ICU rounds. The overhead call came through for an incoming trauma, while I was sneaking in a Snickers candy bar and leaning with my back against the cool wall of the staff lounge. “Trauma One. Trauma One. ETA five minutes.” Savoring the sweetness of my first mouth-watering bite, I learned that the paramedics were en route and they were transporting a fifteen-year-old girl. She had been ejected from her family’s car after a head-on collision
with an 18-wheeler
on the Henry Hudson Parkway.
God,
that made my stomach plunge
,
while burning bits of chocolate-nougat-caramel bile teased the back of my throat. In this job
,
you never knew what was going to come through those emergency room doors
:
gunshot wounds, stabbings, motor vehicle collisions, but the worst, was when any of them had anything to do with kids.

Shoving one more bite of candy into my mouth, I tossed the rest of the unfinished chocolate bar into the trash, rushed out, and sprinted down the corridor. Icy blasts of sterilized air mingled with the dark bitter smells of disinfectant and hospital food, permeated around me—through me.

I was running through a crowd of people toward the trauma bay to scrub up, when a stunningly gorgeous woman stepped in front of me, tripping me and almost hurling me into the wall. She grabbed my arm with icy cold hands and yanked me to a stop just before I landed.

“You know,” she whispered in my ear, digging her perfectly manicured fingers into my skin, “he says my pussy is
perfect
. He calls me his ‘Triple P.’
Perfect Piece of Pussy
.”

Oh, crap. Did the Freud Squad lose another patient?

“Excuse me?” I laughed, a bit out of breath, thinking she must have me confused with someone else. Either that, or someone left a bag of
nympho-crazy-women
open on the wrong floor of the hospital.

“Your husband,” she explains, “after I ride him hard and fast. It’s what he says. ‘Triple P is what he calls me.” She smiled triumphantly through blood red lipstick, and sashayed away on a pair of loud, deep-red clicking heels that were the exact shade that was smeared heavily across her lips.

“I believe you have the wrong person, Miss,” I called after her, standing straighter, one hand dropping over my stomach.

The stunning woman pivoted on the balls of her feet, flinging a handful of golden bouncy curls over a shoulder as if she was starring in one of those perfect hair dye commercials. The hospital corridors spiraled out behind her; bright florescent lights casting blurs of bleeding rainbows inside my tired eyes. “Oh, I don’t think so, Doctor
Samantha
Matthews. No, I don’t think so at all. He,
David
, even showed me a picture of you.”

She knew my name.
And my husband’s
.

Was my I.D. badge showing?

No, it was inside my scrubs
.

Behind the woman at the other end of the hall, over the loud hiss and clink of the emergency room doors, chaos erupted with the incoming rush of EMTs rolling in the injured girl, and for a moment, a brief one that
I am still so ashamed of
, I froze in complete and utter anguish. Rusty metallic smells hit my senses so forcefully that I stumbled back a step, caught off guard. The blonde haired woman smiled widely, winked, and then my vision caught the body of the fifteen-year-old trauma patient rolling towards me. I was on the move, trying my best to detach and store the hurt and anger for later.
This bleeding fifteen-year-old needed me more
. I barely had time to snap on a pair of latex gloves.

My stomach twisted, tightening every organ on its way up to my throat, filling it with a pool of vomit. I had to gag before swallowing it back down.
Detach. Just do your job
.
Focus, before your knees buckle
.

The patient flailed about on the gurney, covered from head to toe with blood, as panting paramedics screamed the rundown of what had happened. Deep crimson gauze was wrapped around the patient’s thigh, head, and midsection, and I had to work fast and stay sharp if I was going to save the child’s life.
Dear God, please, please help me save this child. Let me forget about David for a minute. Let me do my job
.

Removing the dressings, I started going through my checklist and barking out orders. Thankfully,
Samantha Matthews, the sideswiped wife,
disappeared, and Doctor Samantha Matthews, head trauma surgeon, took over.

Despite the thousands of hours of surgical training, horrifying years as a military surgeon overseas, and even all the brainwashing I endured in my early medical career, I still struggled with all of the human emotions that go along with harsh trauma. You don’t get desensitized to it, not when it’s a kid lying on the table, fighting for her life. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Yet, as I always do, I try my hardest to project confidence, grace, strength, and complete control in front of my trauma team. Mentally, as my hands crawled along the poorly bandaged girl, I felt all of her injuries with the tips of my fingers.

Holy shit, under the bandages, the kid was ripped to shreds
. It was as if her skin, the entirety of it, split down her center on impact. The stark white of her bones stood out against the angry red of her torn flesh. The deafening sound of my pulse rushed through my ears, engulfing my entire universe into one focal pinpoint. Exact. Simple. Save the life.

Immediately, I shoved my index finger into the bloodiest laceration on her thigh, plugging up the source of the most lethal area of the hemorrhage.

“Let’s secure an airway!” I turned my attention to one of the trauma nurses. “I need an IV, an operating room…and get me two units of O-negative.”

“Vitals!”

“Eighty-two over fifty-two! Heart rate one twenty!”

“Let’s go. Let’s go,” I barked, and within minutes, my trauma team flew into the operating room, rolling in the patient with my fingers still deep inside her leg. The child’s femoral artery was completely severed. In a matter of minutes, she could be dead, so I needed to work fast.

My team worked like one fluid person, perfect, and precise. No one noticed my bones were warring with gravity to move, or that my muscles were braided with thousand pound weights that were trying to pull me through the floor.

Within a few hours, I meticulously repaired whatever damage I could, dressed her wounds, and in my head, said a tiny prayer for the girl. Praising my flawless operating staff, I trudged out of the operating room, and headed straight to the sink to scrub the mess of blood and fluids from my body.

Emotionally exhausted, I made my way back to my office where I’d left the small lamp on, and the door wide open. The outside sky had turned almost black with the moonless night, and only one street lamp shone through my small window.

I’d done my best to save that girl’s life. She was finally in stable condition in ICU, after four hours of intense surgery, and piecing her back together. But there was no family for her to be comforted by, because they were all down in the morgue. There wasn’t any family to inform of the surgery or condition of the patient, because they all perished in the crash.

With my adrenaline rush depleted, my body crashed, and I collapsed heavily into the chair behind my desk. I was beyond exhausted, and I still had two hours left of my shift. Dropping my gaze, I noticed a stark white envelope lying in the middle of the desktop, with my name written in bold red letters across the top. I could’ve left it there, unopened and untouched, and then my story would have been so very different, but I didn’t. The tiny slip of a paper, a small tear in the flap, and life could change completely. Endings and beginnings were meshed together, and formed circles like the little hamster wheels I never knew I ran in. My bones turned rubbery as I opened it, hesitantly, and fumbling. Unfolding the letter that was hidden inside, written on elegant pale pink stationary, I leaned my head back against the cold leather of the chair and read the words that would change my entire
fucking
life.

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Perfectly Damaged

Copyright © 2014 E.L. Montes

“
When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful
.”

– Barbara Bloom

PROLOGUE

Eight Months Earlier

I’M NOT SURE how I got here. It’s dark and chilly outside. The moon’s light casting down around me is all I have to guide me through. I’m lost and afraid, trembling as the thundering rain assaults my body with every move I make. The faster I run, the harder the heavy drops stab my skin. But I continue to plunge my bare feet into the cold, muddy ground as I try to get away.

I can hear someone calling my name. It’s a familiar voice, but I can’t stop. My heart spirals out of control as I force one foot in front of the other. I have to run faster, get away from that person, get away from that voice. A scream tears up out of my throat, and I force myself to sprint through the graveyard. I lose my footing, slipping and falling in front of a tombstone. My body’s covered in thick, heavy mud as I try to bring myself up. My hair is soaked, drenched and hanging over my face like a drape. Swiftly brushing the dark strands aside, I look up. My heartbeat drives full force before it comes to a screeching halt as I read the carving along the monument: RIP Brooke McDaniel.

“
NO!” I scream at the top of my lungs.

No. No. No.

My body jerks up as I gasp for air. Skin damp with sweat, knuckles white, fisting the bed sheets, my chest heaves as I try to calm my breathing. It takes me a few seconds to collect myself.

A dream. Just a dream. About what?

In a complete daze, my mind struggles to remember. Darkness. Thunder. Mud. Running. And then…Brooke! Snatching my phone from the nightstand, I jump out of bed and run to her room. I place a shaky hand on the knob, but that’s as far as I can go. I’m stuck. I know what I’ll find on the other side, and it frightens me. After a few breaths, I find the courage to open it. And it’s just as I expected:
nothing
.

Filled with all the things that defined her, her room is exactly the same as she left it. My eyes sweep across her large bookshelf, which is overflowing with hundreds of books. I fight back a sob as my gaze rests on the sitting area where she spent countless hours immersed in a story. I shiver, taking in the now-faded posters of her favorite bands pinned all over her pale yellow walls. Her favorite book quotes, stenciled on the wall over the headboard of her bed, bring back memories of days we spent endlessly talking about them and the authors who created them. Pink, purple, and yellow paint her room; colors that blend together in a beautiful and sophisticated décor that only Brooke could design. Picture frames filled with images of us, Mom, Dad, and Charlie cover her desk. All of these items are valuable to
me
. All of them mean something to
me
. But all they are…is exactly that. Tangible items, filling a room that feels nothing short of vacant.

Chin down, shoulders slumped, and heart breaking, I can’t control the warm tears running down my heated cheeks. I’m praying, hoping this time it’ll be different. But it’s useless. Allowing the pain to overtake every nerve for just this moment, I hesitantly tread over to her bed, jump on top of the plush surface, and wrap myself securely in the comforter. She loved this stupid purple quilt. I remember the day she barged into my room with the soft lilac fabric in her hand, smiling brightly at the deal she managed to score at the mall. Her wide green eyes were filled with pride, her perfectly plump pink lips curled into a beautiful smile.

Why do I torture myself? Why do I allow myself to feel this pain?

I feel absent without her in my life. I need her back to feel whole again. I need her to bounce into the room with her passionate, wholehearted persona and bring light to my storm, the way she always used to. But that’s not going to happen. Brooke isn’t going to barge through that door.

And as much as I know this will do nothing but worsen the agonizing pain, I grab my phone and speed-dial Brooke’s number. It rings. I bring the cell to my ear.

“Hi, this is Brooke! Leave a message after the beep.” Her lively voice leaps through the speaker, followed by a long beep.

Again... “Hi, this is Brooke! Leave a message after the beep.”

BEEEEEP.

Again... “Hi, this is Brooke! Leave a message after the beep.”

AGAIN.

I torture myself over and over until I’m exhausted. Exhausted by crying, by feeling alone, and by being lost. I listen to my sister’s voicemail until there’s nothing left in me. Nothing, until the dullness of the early morning hours creeps in and I can’t keep my heavy lids open any longer. As I drift into my short coma, I wish, as I have many nights before, that I won’t wake, that I’ll vanish in my sleep because it’s the only way to just forget.

To never again…
feel
.