Waters of Lethe, Book 2

61. Eye For An Eye

I had seen this woman before, I thought as I looked down at her pale figure laying in the hospital bed. She was struggling, clearly in respiratory distress, and I was the only one who seemed to notice.

I looked up from the woman, who had to have been in her late eighties, as I tried to find someone to help. It wasn't hard. There were nurses everywhere, going in and out of patient's ICU rooms. We were in the hallway of the intensive care unit, but I didn't have time to wonder why she wasn't in a room. I looked to my left at the nurse's station, where several nurses were staring at computers as they charted and looked at patient's lab values or diagnoses.

"Hey," I said in a loud tone. "Hey!" I yelled when no one looked up. The elderly woman, only a foot away in the bed, sighed. The monitor over the patient's head began to beep . The heart monitor she wore sent a message to the screen above us, telling me that she had gone into asystole. She was flatlining. 

I forgot about calling for help and tugged the thick white blankets away from her body, tossing them on the floor. I immediately began doing chest compressions.

"One, two, three, four..." I whispered to myself, my voice far from steady, as I counted off the compressions to myself so I could keep track. When I reached thirty, I halted, bent down, tilted her head back and put my mouth to hers to breathe in two breaths, then stood and began compressing her chest again. "Someone help me!" I cried. I did two more sets of compressions when, thankfully, she came back to me. The paced beep, beep, beep above our heads let me know that her heart had kicked in again and she was alive.

I turned to a woman in the corner who was on a computer, then stalked up behind her back and put a heavy hand on her shoulder, turning her and her swivel chair to me. "Call a rapid response!" I yelled at her. She nodded and turned to the computer again, then picked up a phone and dialed the operator. 

Before the woman hung the phone up, I heard the monotoned sound, a steady buzzing that told me the patient had flatlined again.

I ran back over and started compressions again, followed by breathing air into her lungs, followed by compressions again.

"Someone call a code, dammit! Forget rapid response!" I yelled over my shoulder to the woman I'd finally gotten to listen to me. When she didn't respond, I looked over my shoulder to find her not paying a bit of attention to me. No one was. I was in the middle of a dozen busy nurses, just me and a dead patient I was trying so badly to revive. I didn't even know if her status was DNR or a full code, and at that moment I didn't care.

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"Call a code!" I breathed out when I woke up, my heart pounding. The first thing that I registered, other than my rapid heartbeat, was that I was shaking like a leaf during a hurricane. My breathing was ragged and my eyes darted around as I tried to convince myself it was only a dream. Only a bad dream. I was still in Egypt, in Cairo, with Alex and Jai.

At remembering them, I looked to my left. Alex was fast asleep beside me, not registering the jolt I sent out when I shot up from my nightmare. I looked over at Jai, who, at first, appeared to be watching me. I looked harder, blinking the sleep out of my eyes, to see that his eyes were shut. His forehead was crinkled, as if he were having a bad dream himself.

As I got up from the bed, I reached up and rubbed the few tears that had trailed down my cheeks. It was four in the morning, so I figured no one was up. I tip toed to the window to look out, gently pulling away the curtains to find out I was right. The street below was empty, with the occasional drunk person stumbling their way home. Turning towards the door, I didn't want to go out to the street below. I needed to get to higher ground.