Stitches of Life

A Hard Day's Night

"Bailey?" Cristina asked the resident, having reached him first.

"End of the hall." He pointed before turning back to the locker room. I glanced in the direction that he pointed and I could feel my eyebrows raise in surprise at what I saw. Standing at the end of the hall was a short African American woman, she couldn't have been more than five feet tall.

"That's the Nazi?" Cristina muttered, seeming to be just as surprised as I was.

"I thought the Nazi would be a guy." George said as we all headed down the hall, towards Bailey.

"I thought the Nazi would be...the Nazi." The dirty blonde shook her head.

"Maybe it's professional jealousy. Maybe she's brilliant, and they call her Nazi because they're jealous." The tall blonde suggested, smiling. "Maybe she's nice."

"Let me guess. You're the model." Cristina guessed. The tall blonde just shot her a look as we stopped in front of Bailey. She then held her hand out to Bailey, smiling brightly.

"Hi, I'm Isobel Stevens, but everyone calls me Izzie." The blonde introduced herself. Bailey just looked her up and down for a moment, not making any move to shake her hand.

"I have five rules. Memorize them. Rule number one, don't bother sucking up, I already hate you, that's not gonna change. Trauma protocol, phone lists, pagers. Nurses will page you, you answer every page at a run. A run, that's rule number two." We all grabbed our pagers and other things off of the bench before hurrying to follow after her down the hall. "Your first shift starts now and lasts forty-eight hours. You're interns, grunts, nobodies, bottom of the surgical food chain, you run labs, write orders, work every second night till you drop and don't complain! On call rooms. Attendings hog them, sleep when you can, where you can, which brings me to rule number three, if I'm sleeping, don't wake me, unless your patient is actually dying. Rule number four, the dying patient better not be dead when I get there, not only would you have killed someone, you would have also woke me for no good reason, we clear?"

The dirty blonde raised her hand.

"Yes." Bailey looked at her, already seeming to be annoyed.

"You said five rules. That was only four." She pointed out as Bailey's pager began to beep.

"Rule number five. When I move, you move." She looked over her pager before she began to run down the hallway as though there was fire licking at her heels. "Get out of my way!"

We all ran after her and piled into an elevator, taking it up to the top floor. When we stepped outside we found ourselves on the roof, a helicopter already there and unloading a young girl on a stretcher.

"What've we got?" Bailey asked the paramedics.

"Katie Bryce, fifteen-year-old female, new onset seizures, intermittent for the past week, ID lost en route, started grand mal seizing as we descended." The paramedic briefed us as we rolled the girl inside, though she was already seizing up again.

"All right, get her on her side," Bailey instructed once we had gotten her into a trauma room. "Izzie, ten milligrams Diazepam. No, no, the white lead is on the right, righty whitey, smoke over fire, a large bore I.V. don't let the blood haemolyse, let's go!"

Izzie just stood there for a moment, looking like a deer caught in headlights. Shaking my head I pushed her out of the way and injected Katie with the medicine myself and watched as she finally stopped seizing. Just as she did another doctor made his way into the room, this one a tall man wearing dark blue scrubs, showing that he was an attending.

"So I heard we got a wet fish on dry land?" The doctor commented as he began to look over the report the paramedics had supplied for Katie.

"Absolutely Dr. Burke." Bailey nodded.