Letting Go
1574 Words
CHAPTER 5
ROXANNE'S POV
Paramedics were sprinting down the hallways pushing stretchers.
The overhead speakers were crackling with an urgent announcement: “Code Trauma Alpha. Multi-vehicle collision. Four patients inbound. ETA: Four minutes.”
Peter, one of our regular paramedics, was barking out details over the radio chatter as the teams scrambled.
Patient One was Emily Nelson, an 18-year-old college freshman who had been driving.
According to eyewitnesses, she and her boyfriend were having a massive argument while sitting at a red light.
She had looked away from the road for just a split second, accelerated, and broadsided an SUV carrying a mother named Sarah and her young kids.
“She has multiple left rib fractures, a suspected tension pneumothorax, a grade II splenic laceration, and fractures to her right radius and ulna,” Peter shouted over the noise.
“Plus a scalp laceration and a concussion.
She’s conscious, but she keeps frantically asking if Ethan is okay.”
Dr. Miller, the chief of emergency medicine, was standing in the center of the room, coolly assigning trauma teams to different bays.
“Next patient?” he called out.
“Sarah Benson, 34, the mother,” Peter responded. “She was driving her kids to school.”
Right on cue, the ambulance bay doors burst open.
A wave of freezing morning air surged into the room, accompanied by the deafening wail of sirens and shouting voices.
It felt exactly like a war zone.
Sarah’s stretcher rolled past me at a dead sprint. She was terrifyingly pale, covered in cold sweat, and gasping desperately for air.
“Please...” she choked out, her voice barely a whisper. “Please... just save my babies...”
Right behind her came a double pediatric gurney.
I glanced over and saw Leo, a 5-year-old boy with a nasty forehead laceration and a wrist fracture, though he looked relatively stable.
Next to him was Maya, a 9-year-old girl with severe seatbelt bruising across her chest.
She was sobbing, terrified out of her mind, but physically intact.
“Get the kids up to Pediatrics immediately!” Miller barked at a group of nurses.
“Move the mother to Bay Two! Let's start a massive transfusion protocol right now!”
Suddenly, the continuous, high-pitched scream of a heart monitor pierced through the room. Sarah had flatlined.
“She's coding!” a nurse yelled, moving in to start chest compressions.
But as I stepped closer, my eyes darted to Sarah's neck.
Her jugular veins were bulging like thick ropes.
Her trachea was visibly pushed over to the right side of her throat, and her left chest wasn’t rising at all with the bag-mask ventilations.
“Stop compressions right now!” I yelled, stepping directly up to the stretcher, entirely forgetting that I was still in my wrinkled clothes from the day before.
Dr. Miller whipped his head around, looking deeply irritated by the interruption.
“Roxanne? What are you doing? We need perfusion—”
“Look at her neck, “Dr. Miller!” I intercepted, pointing aggressively.
“Jugular distension, tracheal deviation, and a completely silent left chest.
It’s a tension pneumothorax. Doing compressions right now is just forcing blood out of her heart faster!”
Miller’s eyes went wide. The realization hit him instantly.
“Decompress her! Get me a fourteen-gauge needle, now!”
I didn't wait for anyone to hand it to me.
I snapped a pair of sterile gloves onto my hands, mentally calculated the second intercostal space in the midclavicular line, and drove the large-bore needle straight into her chest.
A loud, violent pssshhhh filled the space between us as trapped, high-pressure air hissed out of the chamber.
Almost instantly, her left chest rose naturally. The flatline on the monitor broke, jumping back into a normal, rhythmic sinus tachycardia.
“We've got a pulse,” the tech called out, a collective sigh of relief echoing through the bay. “BP is climbing, ninety over sixty.”
Dr. Miller let out a long breath and looked up at me. “Incredible catch, Roxanne.
Get up to OR Four on the sixth floor and scrub in. You found it, so you're on her team.”
I didn't waste a single second. I ran for the elevators, tore off my civilian clothes, and threw on a pair of hospital scrubs.
I sprinted to the surgical sinks, the harsh iodine soap stinging the tiny cuts on my hands as I scrubbed in at lightning speed.
Through the glass windows of OR Four, I could see the surgical tech prepping Sarah’s abdomen with ChloraPrep.
“Six units of packed red blood cells and four units of FFP are running,” the anesthesiologist announced as I walked through the sterile doors.
“But her blood pressure is dropping again—eighty-five over fifty.
She’s oozing heavily from the pelvic area.”
I stepped up to the table, holding my hands up. “Scalpel,” I said firmly.
I made a swift midline laparotomy incision. The moment the fascia parted, dark blood welled up, threatening to spill over the drapes.
“Suction! Get the cell saver hooked up now!” I ordered.
As I cleared the field, I could see that her retroperitoneal space had ballooned into a massive, terrifying hematoma, fed by the fractures in her shattered pelvis.
“It's an internal iliac bleed,” I noted, my mind operating on pure adrenaline.
“Give me lap sponges. We need to pack this tight to create pressure.”
Just as we started stuffing the space, the anesthesia monitor began to scream again.
“Systolic is down to sixty!” the anesthesiologist called out, panic creeping into his voice.
“She’s throwing clots everywhere—she's in DIC. Her blood isn’t clotting anymore!”
“More sponges!” I yelled, refusing to let go of the pressure I was holding. “Give her platelets! Cryoprecipitate!
Everyone keep pressure on the pack!”
What followed was three solid minutes of absolute hell.
My hands were buried deep inside another human being's abdomen, physically holding her torn blood vessels together, praying that her body would find the strength to clot.
It felt like an eternity.
Slowly, agonizingly, the numbers on the monitor began to tick upward.
“Ninety over fifty-five,” the anesthesiologist finally sighed.
“The bleeding is finally slowing down.”
I took a slow step back from the table, my hands trembling slightly inside my bloody gloves.
“The pelvis is fully packed. Call orthopedic surgery down here to put on an external fixator. We've done everything we can from a general trauma standpoint.”
Sarah was going to make it.
After I washed up and changed back into my normal clothes, I walked downstairs to the main floor.
Dr. Miller caught my eye and gave me a sincere nod of appreciation.
Before heading to my office, I stopped by the pediatric wing to check in on Leo and Maya.
A social worker was sitting with them, coloring, and they looked safe.
On my way back, I paused by the large glass window of the ER waiting room.
Through the glass, I could see two police officers interviewing Emily, the young driver.
“We were just arguing...” she sobbed into her hands, her shoulders shaking violently.
“I didn't mean for any of this to happen... I just looked away for one single second.”
She looked up at the officer, her face pale and tear-stained.
“Is the family going to be okay? Please tell me they're okay.”
Ethan, whose arm was wrapped tightly in a white tensor bandage, sat right next to her, gripping her hand as if it were a lifeline.
I pushed the door open and stepped into the room. “They're going to be fine,” I told them softly, keeping my voice gentle.
“The mother is out of surgery, and the kids are stable.”
The moment the words left my mouth, the sheer relief seemed to drain the remaining strength from their bodies. They collapsed into each other, crying quietly in the middle of the chaotic waiting room.
I turned around, walked back to my quiet office, and sat down at my desk to start writing up Sarah's extensive operative report.
It was terrifying to think about. One careless, angry second at a red light had completely shattered three different families in the blink of an eye.
Meanwhile, my own family—my marriage—had been slowly, quietly breaking apart for two long years.
As I stared at the blinking cursor on my computer screen, it hit me.
Maybe the lesson from today's horrific accident wasn't that arguments have the power to destroy lives.
Maybe the real lesson was that waiting too long to finally end one does the exact same thing.
We had reached the end of the road. It simply wasn't working anymore.
I leaned back in my chair, thinking about last night in the care facility. I thought about the heavy, painful truth in Margaret’s words.
And right then and there, the fog in my mind completely cleared, and I finally made my decision.
I was going to relieve both of us of this exhausting, dragging pain.
The years we spent avoiding the hard, terrifying conversations had completely eaten through the foundation of our marriage, leaving nothing but hollow wood behind.
It was finally time to stop running from the truth.
- Writer
