J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [35]
Jane lived in the chute and owned it. As chief of the Trauma Division, she was administratively responsible for everything that went down in those six bays, but she was also trained as both an ED attending and a trauma surgeon, so she was hands-on. On a day-to-day basis, she made calls about who needed to go up one floor to the ORs, and a lot of times she scrubbed in to do the needle-and-thread stuff.
While she waited for her incoming gunshot, she reviewed the charts of the two patients currently being treated and looked over the shoulders of the residents and nurses as they worked. Every member of the trauma team was handpicked by Jane, and when recruiting, she didn’t necessarily go for the Ivy Leaguer types, although she was Harvard-trained herself. What she looked for were the qualities of a good soldier, or, as she liked to call it, the No Shit, Sherlock mental set: smarts, stamina, and separation. Especially the separation. You had to be able to stay tight in a crisis if you were going to W-II the chute.
But that didn’t mean that compassion wasn’t mission-critical in everything they did.
Generally, most trauma patients didn’t need hand-holding or reassurance. They tended to be drugged up or shocked out because they were leaking blood like a sieve or had a body part in a freezer pack or had seventy-five percent of their dermis burned off. What the patients needed were crash carts with well-trained, levelheaded people on the business ends of the paddles.
Their families and loved ones, however, needed kindness and sympathy always, and reassurance when that was possible. Lives were destroyed or resurrected every day in the chute, and it wasn’t just the folks on the gurneys who stopped breathing or started again. The waiting rooms were full of the others who were affected: husbands, wives, parents, children.
Jane knew what it was like to lose someone who was a part of you, and as she went about her clinical work she was very aware of the human side of all the medicine and the technology. She made sure her people were on the same page she was: To work in the chute, you had to be able to do both sides of the job, you needed the battlefield mentality and the bedside manner. As she told her staff, there was always time to hold someone’s hand or listen to their worries or offer a shoulder to cry on, because in the blink of an eye you could be on the other side of that conversation. After all, tragedy didn’t discriminate, so everyone was subject to the same whims of fate. No matter what your skin color was or how much money you had, whether you were gay or straight, or an atheist or a true believer, from where she stood, everyone was equal. And loved by someone, somewhere.
A nurse came up to her. “Dr. Goldberg just called in sick.”
“That flu?”
“Yes, but he got Dr. Harris to cover.”
Bless Goldberg’s heart. “Our man need anything?”
The nurse smiled. “He said his wife was thrilled to see him when she was actually awake. Sarah is cooking him chicken soup and in full fuss mode.”
“Good. He needs some time off. Shame he won’t enjoy it.”
“Yeah. He mentioned she was going to make him watch all the date movies they’ve missed in the last six months on DVD.”
Jane laughed. “That’ll make him sicker. Oh, listen, I want to do grand rounds on the Robinson case. There was nothing else we could have done for him, but I think we need to go over the death anyway.”
“I had a feeling you’d want to do that. I set it up for the day after you get home from your trip.”
Jane gave the nurse’s hand a little squeeze. “You are a star.”