It was her own version of a threat, one she knew he would not hesitate to slap back on her or Andy if things were not going well. But right now he had nothing to go on, no complaint other than the fact that he did not like being left out of the loop.
Cardiff stood. “I’ll thank you both for your time. You have given me a great deal to think about.” He left the room, closing the door firmly behind him.
Kate and Andy looked at each other from opposite ends of the long table.
“This is going to get messy, isn’t it?” Kate asked.
“Yes. And quickly,” Andy answered, her eyes still on Kate, though also somehow faraway. Distracted.
Kate’s phone buzzed in her pocket, she pulled it out and read the text. Lucy, Ward B. Kate stood. “I have to go. I’ll call the NML when I get a chance, okay?”
“Yes, text me if I don’t answer my phone,” Andy said. “I think I need to talk to Finns, figure out the best way to handle the press conference this afternoon.”
“I’ll be up on Ward B or in the ER if you need me.”
“Okay.”
Kate closed the door quietly behind her and pulled the mask over her face as she ascended the stairs. She wondered how many times she’d been up and down these stairs in the week that they’d been here. They felt familiar already, the time it took to climb them giving her just enough space to clear her head and prepare for the next meeting or crisis or problem.
“Dr. Morrison, I didn’t know you were in the hospital,” Lucy called from down the hall.
“Just got here. What’s up?” Kate asked, wondering what had the nurse so stressed.
“Jim Beckett’s been stable since he checked in. Then about an hour ago, his O2 sats started falling, and he admitted to continued difficulty breathing as well as chest pain.” Lucy handed her the chart as they walked down the hall towards the older man’s room.
“Last films?”
“You saw them this morning,” Lucy answered. Kate hadn’t remembered any change from when he was admitted. She had been cautiously optimistic, but that was gone now. “Send him down for a repeat, ASAP,” she said, quickening her pace.
Lucy started to turn, then stopped. “Wait, you haven’t been checked in, Dr. Morrison. Any elevated temperature, cough, or difficulty breathing?”
“No.”
Lucy pulled out a marker, happy-faced Kate’s shoulder, and then she immediately headed back to the nurse’s station to fill the orders for the patient.
As she walked, Kate scanned the chart quickly, reading the information she already knew. Rebreather mask at one hundred percent oxygen, diuretics and steroids on board. She knew the next step was a ventilator. Kate hadn’t spent too much time with her second Ward B patient, but she had a feeling that the ventilator was going to be a tough sell.
Jim Beckett reclined in an uncomfortable-looking half-sitting position, sucking at the air coming through his mask. Kate took in his pale face, the scared look in his watery blue eyes, and without saying anything, she pulled his mask away. His lips were dusky, a sure sign not enough oxygen was getting in.
“Mr. Beckett, the oxygen therapy isn’t working. We need to put in a tube to help you breathe,” Kate said directly, knowing she didn’t have time for another chest x-ray.
Jim Beckett shook his head. “Don’t want it,” he gasped out.
She’d been up against patients like this before. “What do I need to do to convince you?” she said, hoping to bypass the usual routes.
The man smiled a blue-lipped smile. “Direct…I like that,” he said, his voice barely audible. “Save your breath…no ventilator…unless you can guarantee…that I’ll get off it.”
Kate frowned. “I think you know I can’t. I can guarantee that if your oxygen saturation levels don’t go up soon, then you are going to begin to feel dizzy and the chest pains are going to get worse. Your heart is working too hard to deliver too little oxygen to your body.”
“I know how it works, Doctor…still don’t want it…”
Kate sighed and threw the chart onto the foot of the bed. She found a stool and pulled it up to the railing of the hospital bed and sat down.
“Let’s play a game,” Kate said to the man, surprising him.
“Better not be…a smoking lecture…” he grumbled.
“Nope. I’m guessing I’m about five decades too late for that.”
Another blue-lipped smile. “Six.”
“There you go, then. So, I’m going to try to guess the three words most often used to describe you. And I only get ten words total.”
Kate saw the blue eyes light up. “Seven,” he countered.
“Fine, no problem,” Kate said, shifting in her seat, thinking. “Stubborn,” she guessed.
“Too easy,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter, one down, two to go,” Kate told him. “Smart,” she tried again.
Jim Beckett looked surprised. “I’ll give it to you…though it’s usually…followed by ass.”
Kate had to laugh. She wondered, though, as she caught a glimpse of his monitor, if she had any hope of changing this man’s mind about the ventilator. Kate didn’t want him to know she was frustrated at being unable to talk him into the treatment. As she took the rest of her guesses, mainly variations on stubborn, Kate tried very hard not to picture the tidal wave of fluid and infection that had recently haunted her dreams.
“I give up,” she told him. “What’s the last one?”
“My wife…when she was alive…always called me sweet,” Jim said, the softness in his voice having little to do with his lung capacity.
Kate put her hand out to the man, feeling his racing pulse on the inside of his arm.
“All right then, Mr. Stubborn, Smart, and Sweet, what’s it going to be?”
He shook his head and Kate’s heart sank. “No ventilator.”
“Do you understand that by refusing the ventilator, you are limiting the measures we can take to save your life in the event that you stop breathing or your heart begins to fail?” Kate asked, her hand still touching the man’s warm arm.
“I understand…I’ll sign to that effect.”
Kate sat with him for a moment longer, not saying anything. “Okay,” she said finally and stood up. Jim reached out for her hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“No lecture.”
Kate walked quietly out of the room as he lay back, each forced breath barely strong enough to make it to the next one.
Back at the nurse’s station, Kate asked Lucy about his family. He had two kids living in the States, both of whom had been in phone contact already. Kate then checked on Harris Trenholm and was surprised to find him sleeping, his laptop open, his BlackBerry with its blinking message light on the half table. She checked his vitals—unchanged—and then left again quietly.
An hour later, Kate was winding up her phone call with Dr. Levesque at the NML when the code blue was called for Jim Beckett’s room. She slammed down the phone, instinct pushing her forward, itching to wrap her hands around the flexible tracheal tube. But as Kate entered the room again, Lucy calling out his rapidly dropping vitals, she remembered the man’s refusal.
Kate went right up to the rails of the bed, looked Jim straight in the eye. “Mr. Beckett, your heart isn’t getting enough oxygenated blood. Unless it does, soon, your body is going to shut down. Do you want a ventilator?”
A shake of the man’s head.
“In the event that you stop breathing or your heart stops beating, do you want us to take heroic measures to save your life?”
They were words Kate hated to say, an admission of her failure, or at the very least a directive of passivity and impotence. Two things Kate hated. She took a deep breath and watched Jim’s face carefully. This wasn’t about her.
“No…no measures…”
Kate turned to Lucy. “Could you witness, please, Lucy,” Kate said quietly.
Lucy picked up the chart
, printed in her neat block lettering and passed it over to Kate. She signed, then closed the chart, giving it back to Lucy to take away. They weren’t going to need it. Kate held his hand. With the drugs in his system to try and make him more comfortable, it wasn’t long until Jim was unable to speak. They sat in silence for longer than Kate could account for.
Jim Beckett’s eyes were closed when he died. His last words had been his own directive to let him pass peacefully. As Kate turned off the monitors, pronouncing his time of death, she couldn’t decide if this was a cause for joy or sadness.
Lucy took over with calm efficiency, handing Kate the chart and the forms she needed to fill out and sending her back to the nurse’s station. Kate sat at the desk and phoned Jim Beckett’s two children, managing the daughter’s instant, unchecked grief. The son’s shock came in the form of continuous questioning, but Kate knew he’d never remember the answers.
Finished with the forms, finished with the phone calls, including one to Dr. Doyle, Kate called up the files on the computer. She clicked through x-rays, autopsy results, oxygen levels, viral loads, white cell counts, steroid dosages, and a hundred other factors for the forty-three people who had now tested positive for the virus. The clicking of the mouse became a steady rhythm as facts and files raced across the screen and raced through her head. Kate knew she should phone Andy, should update her on what she’d learned from Dr. Levesque, but instead she continued her obsessive searching.
The phone ringing on the desk behind her jarred Kate out of her half-conscious daze. Lucy picked it up, then looked over at Kate and spoke quietly before putting the receiver back down again.
“Dr. Morrison, Sergeant Wyles is in the ER.”
Kate looked at the nurse, confused. “Does she want to see me?”
“No, I mean she’s being treated in the ER. That was Dr. MacKay, Sergeant Wyles is in the ER, something about a face lac…”
Chapter Thirteen
Kate ran down the hall, halfway down the stairs before she thought clearly. A laceration. Lucy had mentioned a face lac. Not a gunshot, not a bullet, not her heart, not her lungs, not her vital organs. Still, the panic continued until Kate rounded the corner of the curtained-off area and saw Andy sitting on the edge of the gurney, holding gauze to her right temple.
“It’s just a cut,” Andy said instantly, reading Kate’s panic. Kate said nothing, letting her heart rate return to normal as she looked at Andy, injured but whole, sitting in front of her. Blood had dripped onto her collar and Kate noticed that it had already lost the shocking brightness of fresh blood. She stored this fact for a moment as she approached Andy sitting on the bed.
“What happened?” Kate asked, taking the gauze from Andy and lifting it gently. A three-inch laceration cut diagonally from just above her brow line towards her right temple. The edges were slightly jagged and uneven, something sharp enough to break skin, but not sharp enough to do it cleanly.
“Someone was trying to break into my truck in the parking lot,” Andy said quietly. Kate stopped inspecting the wound for a moment to look at her. A suspect? “Who?” Kate asked, also keeping her voice low.
Andy shook her head, frustrated, but Kate held her chin and stopped her from moving.
“I don’t know. It was too dark to see anything. I chased whoever it was into the trees behind the hospital, up into the mountain. I got close but a branch snapped back and caught me here…” She pointed to her temple. “And I lost them.”
“When was this?” Kate asked as she snapped on clean gloves. She touched the edges of the laceration lightly, half thinking about the best way to close the wound, half picturing Andy running full-out through a pitch-black forest after a suspect.
Andy shrugged. “A couple of hours ago, two maybe.”
Kate shook her head but made no comment.
“Ferris and Slater are out there now, but I don’t think they’ll find anything. Too dark.” Kate noticed the way Andy flexed her hand, clenched it around her leg. She hated sitting still right now.
Dr. Eric MacKay pulled back the curtain around the bed. “I thought you’d want to take a look,” he said to Kate.
“Thanks. Do you guys have plastics on call?” She ignored Andy’s glare.
“It’s Hidden Valley, Dr. Morrison. Of course we have plastics on call,” Eric said drily. “Might be another hour before he can get here, though.”
Kate looked at the wound again, Andy’s grey eyes now silently shooting daggers at her. “Could you call him?”
“Sure thing. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Andy waited until he was out of earshot before launching her protest. “Plastics? Seriously?”
“It’s a large, uneven laceration on a highly visible part of your face. So yes, plastics.”
“I don’t care what it looks like, Kate.”
“You’ll notice I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Kate said, still manipulating the jagged edges of torn flesh.
“Can’t you just stitch it up and get me out of here?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to be responsible for more than one horrible scar on your body,” Kate said evenly.
Andy went perfectly still, then she lifted her hand and rested it against Kate’s arm. Kate looked her in the eye.
“You think you’re the only one who irrationally blames themselves for the other’s scar?” Kate asked.
Again, Andy said nothing, staring silently into Kate’s eyes.
“I see it all the time,” Kate continued softly. “I can hear myself refusing to go with Angler out of the hotel room. I can see that man kicking you in the side, punishing you for my refusal. And every time I see that awful scar above your hip, I think about how long it took you to get it looked at because you were taking care of me.”
Andy ran her thumb along Kate’s arm, from her wrist up to her forearm. “You don’t have to carry that, Kate.”
Kate yanked at the sleeve of her gown, pulling it up over her elbow until they could both see the pink scar. “And you don’t have to carry this. But I know that you do.”
Andy looked at Kate, then reached up and touched the scar with her thumb, running it up and over the pink line, lightly at first and then with more pressure. As if she was trying to smooth it away with her touch.
Andy dropped her hand. “Fine. Plastics. How long do I have to sit here?”
“A couple of hours, probably,” Kate responded, pulling down her sleeve again. “Why don’t you give me an update? I haven’t heard anything all day.”
“Sure. I need to check in with Ferris, and then I’ll give you an update. Not here, though.”
“You call Ferris, I’ll find a room.”
A few minutes later, they were in the small suture room with the door closed. Andy had a sterile blue cloth wrapped around her shoulders and neck as Kate used a syringe to irrigate the wound, wanting it clean and ready when the doctor arrived. Andy didn’t wince once, even as Kate probed deeply with the syringe, spraying saline down into the wound.
“How did Ferris and Dr. Din make out this morning at the James Ranch?”
“Apparently, it was pretty straightforward. Nothing to cause Dr. Din any alarm, and Ferris didn’t find anything that could resemble any kind of virus containment device,” Andy said, sitting perfectly still. “The samples are off to Vancouver, but results will take a few days. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of questions about the collection of samples at the press conference.”
Kate stopped. The press conference earlier in the afternoon had completely slipped her mind. She had been sitting in Jim Beckett’s room, holding his hand.
“Shit, I totally forgot,” Kate said.
“Don’t worry about it. You didn’t need to be there. I don’t think you would have liked it much anyway,” Andy added with a small smile.
“Why?”
“You tend to get irritated when people verbally attack me.”
Kate shrugged, put down the syringe and pulled the magnified light over.
“Close your eyes for a minute.” Andy complied and Kate satisfied herself no debris remained in the wound. She flicked the light off again and put a sterile bandage over the laceration, taping it in place. “The media gave you a hard time?”
“The media and then Dr. Doyle. She and I met just after the press conference.”
“What? What’s her issue this time?” Kate could feel her temper flicker in her stomach.
“To be fair, I had just accused her of putting the community in jeopardy and slowing down the testing process by allowing an information leak.”
Kate stopped cleaning up the gauze and saline. “How did she react?”
“Well, she didn’t deny it and proceeded to give me several shockingly lame excuses for her behaviour. When that didn’t work, she threatened to have me thrown out of the hospital.”
Kate looked at Andy, stunned. “And you…”
“As the lead of the PHEM team, I threatened to have her removed as chief of staff at Valley General, to be reinstated once the health crisis has passed, unless she could ensure that all information would be secure,” Andy said succinctly.
Kate blinked. “I bet that went over well. What did she do?”
“I didn’t exactly leave her a choice,” Andy said. “So she’s promised to run all decisions through the team, but I’ll keep an eye on her in case she decides to hide something.”
“You’re not an easy person to lie to,” Kate said as she checked her watch, thinking the plastics consult should be here anytime. She missed the look Andy was giving her.
“And yet you do it all the time,” Andy said softly. Kate looked up, searching Andy’s face, a trace of panic in her chest. “I won’t ask you anymore how you’re doing because I don’t think I can take it if you lie to me one more time.”
The panic multiplied, Kate flinching with its impact. “I lost another patient,” Kate blurted out. “About an hour ago. That’s where I was during the press conference.”
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