Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [2]
The young cop with closely cropped hair was the first one in.
“Good, good form,” he said, straddling Bob. “I’ll take over the compressions.” He knelt by Bob and pressed the heel of his hand shockingly hard into Bob’s chest. “How long have you been doing CPR?” He placed his hat on the bath mat. His hair was buzz cut so severely that his white scalp beckoned through.
“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes. Don’t break his ribs. He’s a vet and he has to go to work today.” The young cop glanced at her for a moment and the morning light reflected oddly, as if she could see a tidal wave coming in his iris.
The ambulance crew arrived, and only moments later applied the paddles that shocked him into a rag doll dance. When they loaded him into the ambulance, Rocky ran to her car and followed, going through every red light that the ambulance did. When the ER crew gave him further care, she waited for someone to say, “We got him, here he comes!” And she could live her life again just as she had before starting to order socks from Lands’ End. Bob’s refusal to come back into his body left Rocky stunned, frightened—and worried, that he was lost, just beyond her reach. The instinct to try and find him was overwhelming.
She watched, demanded to watch, from outside the room, as they tried again and again to electronically goad his heart into starting. They ventilated him and Rocky felt the rasp of the tube in her own throat, forcing air into her lungs. A nurse came out and said. “He’s had a major heart attack. Does he take any medication? Has he been ill recently?”
“No.”
“How old is he?”
“Forty-two.”
Both the nurse and Rocky looked up as a man dressed in blue cotton scrubs came out of the room where Bob lay stubbornly stiff.
“Are you his wife?”
Rocky was unsteady, unaware of how much time had passed. She looked past his head at a wall clock and saw that two hours had passed since Bob had collapsed. Time had altered while waiting for Bob to come back, waiting for his heart to suddenly throb again. It occurred to her just then that they had been working on him too long.
“Yes, I’m his wife.”
“Would you like to sit down?” He had an earnest face, clear eyes, sandy-haired, with the beginnings of lines around his eyes.
“I don’t want to go far away from him,” Rocky said. She realized her voice was shaking and pressed her lips together to stop the vibration that ran all through her body. She wished the doctor would offer her a blanket. She felt as cold as the time they had stayed out too long cross-country skiing and darkness had slipped in around them when they were still an hour from the car. She was shaking uncontrollably by the time they made it back. This doctor was not going to offer her anything warm.
They sat in two chairs in the hallway. Rocky declined to go to the room called The Family Room because that sounded oddly ominous, and she felt safer in the hallway with the bright lights. The doctor told her everything about Bob’s heart. He explained the blown-out lower left ventricle, what looked like dense scar tissue, and the length of time since any brain activity had been recorded.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
The doctor didn’t blink or back away. “Yes. If we take him off the ventilator now, his heart will cease to beat. There are no further messages coming from his brain to any part of his body.”
The doctor waited for Rocky to respond. It was her turn and she wanted to blast out the fluorescent lighting and hide. She waited out the doctor.
“The cop told me you were doing CPR when he came to the scene. He said you were great, that you were doing everything that you could for Bob.”
“Then why is he dead if I was so damned great? This is supposed to work!”
The doctor tried not to flinch, but he looked worried about the direction that this sort of questioning could go.
“There is a sad little secret about CPR. It doesn