The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives by Theresa Brown Page B

better of me. “What’s wrong with it? Do you want me to flush it, check whether it’s OK?” The lines are fairly simple mechanically and there are only a few things that can go wrong with them.
    “No, I don’t want you to check it; it’s not working!” she bursts out, her voice almost shrill. “Would you want a transplant through an IV line that wasn’t working? Or someone messing with it?”
    “No,” I say, shaking my head. Why did I ask her? “So that’s today?”
    “Yes, I’m just dropping my bags off and going down there.”
    “They’re expecting you?”
    “They’d better be,” she says. I nod, smile again.
    “Let me call transport. Since you’re here as a patient, we’ll want you to go down with an escort.” I think for a minute, then explain hesitantly. “We’ll need to send you with your chart, too, so there will probably be a little bit of a wait while we get that together.” I try to sound pleasant, but firm, not like she’s been here for five minutes and I’m already apologizing.
    “Oh, that’s fine,” she says brightly, her mood once again friendly, talkative. “No rush—my cousin’s on her way in and we can clean the room while we wait.” She holds up a grocery bag defiantly and through the thin plastic I see that it contains two large containers of Clorox wipes.
    We go in the room and she puts one of her suitcases on the bed and tells me, without turning around, “I know you’re busy—you just go do your work and I’ll get settled in here.”
    In the hall, Nora, Mr. King’s nurse, puts her hand up to her mouth and loudly whispers as she walks past, “Candace Moore.”
    “Good news travels fast, huh?” I say.
    Breathe,
I tell myself.
Just breathe.
Our bodies can’t make energy without oxygen.

CHAPTER 5
    Surgical Team C
    Needing to clear my head I walk up to the nurses’ station. When people ask why I left teaching English to become a nurse, it must be moments like this that puzzle them. Instead of being here at the hospital, concerned about madly proliferating bacteria and killer drugs, I could be discussing a novel with a group of interested college students. There’s a lot more control in a classroom than in the hospital and no one’s life was on the line as a result of my work in the Tufts University department of English.
    I look up and there’s Peter Coyne at the nurses’ station, his white coat emphasizing the straightness with which he holds himself. He’s tall and athletic-looking, with short-cut gray hair, and immediately he starts joking around with our secretary: “Someone said they tried to page me, but they didn’t have a
Coyne
for the phone.” His smile is irresistible even though the pun is terrible. The secretary laughs and he keeps going: “To
Coyne
a phrase, did someone page me?” At the same time escort arrives back on the floor with Sheila.
    Two of them have brought her, the blond guy from before and a short African-American woman with high cheekbones and long braided hair. They both have lives, hopes, and dreams, but the boundary between their world and mine is another that rarely gets crossed.
    The stretcher is angled away so Sheila doesn’t see me. I look in her direction quickly and see the Argatroban, unhooked on the IV pole, its tubing looped up neatly on one of the pole’s metal hooks. The nurse in radiology hung a bag of normal saline in place of the Argatroban and I see that it’s infusing—I’ll check the orders and make sure the intern put that order in.
    I should go over to Sheila and explain what’s happening, but instead I gesture discreetly toward her room. I want the two escorts to get Sheila into bed without my help because I’d rather talk to her after I’ve checked in with Peter and have solid information to deliver.
    The whole system should probably put more of a premium on giving patients disturbing news quickly. If it were me I would not want to discover that someone else had secret information about whether