Emergency Room by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online

People stopped her continually. The ugly pink blotch of a jacket that she had to wear was a badge of safety and help.
    She fixed an ice pack for a waiting patient whose knee was wrenched and received a teary thank you. She found a blanket for a woman who was shivering and a Spanish interpreter for a large family desperately worried about their uncle. From the Pediatric ER she borrowed a box of sad, stubby old crayons and some discarded computer paper for the two little girls at the children’s table.
    Armed guards sauntered around. They seemed only half there, as if they’d already had a long day and were now sleeping on their feet. Diana should have felt comforted by so much police presence, but instead she was more afraid. Why did the ER need so many? What kind of things happened out here in the Waiting Room anyhow?
    She stood between Knika and Barbie, studying her latest form and trying to decide how to handle it. The med radio blared.
    “Emergency Room, go ahead.” Barbie continued filling out the form for the child with a sore throat while she listened to the med radio.
    The patch was very loud. “Uh, yes, we’re en route to your facility with three GSWs. A one-eight female…”
    Diana swung around and stared at the telephone. Gunshot wounds? A one-eight female? I’m a one-eight female!
    She listened to the recitation of blood pressure and pulse of a one-eight female, a one-four male, and a one-nine male.
    Was this a street gang? Some horrible family shooting each other? Teenagers busily buying and selling drugs? Lunatics sniping off tall buildings?
    Security promptly got on the PA system. “All visitors please report to the Waiting Room. No visitors may remain in the treatment areas. Until further notice, there will be no visiting of patients. Repeat. No visiting of patients by anybody.”
    The simmering rage in the Waiting Room picked up. Not only did this mean everybody had to wait even longer, but you couldn’t go in with your relatives while they got treated. An old man who didn’t speak English had his middle-aged daughter with him to interpret — tough. She stayed in the Waiting Room, he went in alone.
    Guards ushered angry arguing family members and friends back to the Waiting Room. “We got gunshot wounds coming in,” explained the guards. “Hospital rules. No visitors in back when we got gunshot wounds.” They yanked gloves over their hands and waited for the ambulances.
    Diana dropped her insurance sheet right back into the box. Let somebody else do it. She was not about to miss out on three GSWs.

Trauma Room 6:38 p.m.
    T HERE WERE SO MANY revolving red lights that the ambulance bay looked like the Fourth of July.
    The first ambulance backed up to the hospital doors and attendants lifted out the stretcher.
    Triage teams were yanking on disposable gloves and over these, surgical gloves. Techs had finished tying clear plastic shoulder-to-floor aprons over the doctors’ and nurses’ clothes. The stretcher was so quickly surrounded by medical personnel that Diana could not see the patient, only the green cotton scrubs of the staff.
    The second ambulance backed in.
    In the moment before the patient was surrounded by the people who would try to save her life, Diana recognized her. A girl from college. She was in Diana’s sociology lecture!
    Diana cried out, unable to stop her horror from surfacing. Nobody heard; there was too much racket. Sirens, police running in, police around the stretchers as much as doctors, walkie-talkies screaming staticky conversations, blood-gas technicians and specialists converging.
    The patients were quickly slid off their ambulance stretchers and onto hospital beds. The ambulance attendants yanked their stretchers back out of the way and stood in the halls where they struggled with their own paperwork and made traffic impossible.
    The sheets on which the girl had been lying were saturated with blood.
    It was not possible. You did not attend college — certainly not