ᴄᴏᴅᴇ ʙʟᴜᴇ • ᴍ. ꜱʟᴏᴀɴ

𝟎𝟏𝟔. it's the end of the world...

"Linezolid!" Rosa answered faster than anyone else.

"Correct!" Joanna praised. "What do you want?"

"Burke."

"Ok. Go," she said, hurrying the intern away. "A 25-year-old man is admitted to the ICU because of a severe closed head injury from a skiing accident.  He has no other significant injuries.  The most appropriate approach to feeding this patient is?"

"Nasogastric feeds!" Cristina practically shouted.

"Correct! What do you want? Neuro or ortho?"

"Neuro," she said with no hesitation.

"Go find Shepherd," Joanna told her. "A 28-year-old woman is an unrestrained driver in an MVC.  She has stable vital signs and left upper quadrant abdominal tenderness, but no peritoneal signs.  What is the next step in her management?"

"CT scan abdomen/pelvis!" Nicholas answered quickly.

"Good. Go find Dr. Torres, she is the resident in charge of the ortho case," Joanna instructed. "The rest of you, pit."

She then turned to the Chief, and the two of them made their way to his office. "You allow them to choose where they want to be assigned to?" He asked, curious about her teaching technique.

"Yes," Joanna said, quickly adding. "With a few rules of course. I don't let them get stuck on a single specialty, and try to make sure they get an even amount of OR hours."

"They have 30% more OR hours than Bailey's interns."

"I know," Joanna replied with a grin. "I suppose you want to talk to me about yesterday?"

"I just wanted to tell you that you did great," the Chief said. "Any other resident wouldn't have been able to handle the surgery as you did, and even though you didn't do it by the book, you got excellent results."

"I learned that technique in Chicago," Joanna explained. "There was an outbreak, and I ended up scrubbing into a few cases." They stayed in silence for a while before Joanna asked. "Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?"

"No," the Chief said. "Just know that to be achieving those results after the last couple of months you had... it's truly impressive."

"Thank you, Chief."

⋆⋅☆⋅⋆

AT THE PIT, Joanna was trying her best to keep her patient stable, cursing Meredith Grey for taking so damn long to find Burke and cursing the hysterical wife, who just wouldn't shut up. She was usually pretty good at keeping her patients alive ─ considering that was her job, and all ─ but when you had a paramedic with her hand inside of a body cavity, things got a tad more complicated.

When the door of the trauma room finally opened and Burke, Christopher, Rosa, and Meredith entered, Joanna introduced them to the case.

"Aaron Carlson, age 46. Paramedics found him unconscious and bleeding. Mechanisms of injury are unknown, but he has a large sucking chest wound. And a wife with very healthy lungs," Joanna presented without even looking at them as she tried to do a portable x-ray to see what the hell they were dealing with.

"Vitals?" Burke asked.

"Tachycardic in the 140s, BP holding in the 90s."

"How's his respiratory effort?" Christopher asked.

"Absent breast sounds on the right side. Air bubbling on the side of the wound, he's shocky, and getting a little cyanotic."

The patient, Aaron, mumbled to the doctors about his wife in the lobby, clearly in shock and screaming her lungs off, with no indication that she was going to stop.