by Jaime Maddox
Ward smiled her appreciation and pulled a chart, then left to evaluate a child with abdominal pain. When she emerged from the room fifteen minutes later, Frankie was waiting for her. Already summoned from home on his day off because of a sick colleague, he seemed to have a day destined for chaos.
“Hey, Doc, can you do me a favor and see these kids from the camp? It should be a quickie. They’re on their way to a field trip, and I’d hate to see their day ruined.”
“What’s going on?” Ward asked.
“They were attacked by a bat. Didn’t Shayna tell you?”
“She did mention that.” Ward looked around. The campers had disappeared. “None of them looked hurt,” Ward said.
“That’s just it. You can get them out of here quickly, and everyone will be happy, including the hospital board. The woman who owns the camp is a member.”
Ward resigned herself to moving the pushy Marsha Evans and her tribe to the front of the line. She was well schooled in hospital politics and knew this wasn’t a battle worth fighting. She’d need her own favor at some point and wanted Frankie to owe her one. There were terms, though. “Sure, Frankie. But while I’m in there, I need you to find me a surgeon. This kid has appendicitis.” She offered him the chart.
Frankie winced and stared at the chart as if it were poisonous. “How old is the kid?”
“Ten.”
“Not gonna happen, Doc. They won’t operate on a ten-year-old here. We’ll have to transfer him.”
“Fine. He’s not critical. Get me a surgeon somewhere. Anywhere.”
Frankie finally reached for the chart and Ward released it to him, then headed toward the trauma room and the entire population of Camp Shickshinny. The room, equipped with three stretchers and enormous square footage for an ER with only ten beds, seemed suddenly small. It was like walking into the primate building at the zoo. Girls were on and in everything. One of them really was hanging from the overhead OR light.
“Hey, hey! Girls!” she shouted above the roar, forgetting for a moment to be politically correct.
Marsha Evans ignored Ward’s comment and wore a victorious smile. “Dr. Thrasher, thanks for coming straight in.”
At least her tone was more pleasant. “No problem, Ms. Evans. What happened? Someone attacked the girls with a bat?” Ward looked around, confirming her initial impression that none of them seemed to be hurt. From the looks of things, the bat-wielding intruder had met his match.
Marsha looked perplexed. “No, they weren’t attacked with a bat. They were attacked by a bat. You know, like a vampire bat?”
Ward couldn’t control her laughter as she realized what an idiot she was. “Oh. Okay. So what happened?”
“Lillie Spencer,” Marsha yelled, circling the room, scanning it for some sign of the girl. “Lillie! Where’s Lillie?” she shouted to no one in particular. Then, spotting the girl, she yelled even louder. “Oh, there she is! Lillie, come here!”
Ward saw no sign of the girl emerging from the masses, but apparently Marsha was satisfied because she turned her attention to Ward once again. “She awoke this morning with a bat in her hair. A vampire bat,” Marsha emphasized with a wink. “So she says. I can’t find any bite marks, and none of the other girls saw it, but the camp doctor said we’d better get her checked. In fact, he said I should get them all checked.” Marsha rolled her eyes to let Ward know just what she thought of his medical advice.
“Oh, Lillie, good. This is Dr. Thrasher. Tell her what happened.”
Ward looked down at a skinny ten-year-old with red hair and freckles, the twin of the young Jess she’d seen in pictures. A wave of nausea hit her and she fought it down.
“So, I felt something funny. It was in the back of my hair, ’cuz I was sleeping on my stomach. And I thought it was a bug, ’cuz sometimes they get into our cabin.” She swallowed before continuing. “And then, I sat up, ’cuz I hate bugs, and I felt my hair, and it was all soft, but it moved, and then I yelled, and I sort of jumped a little bit, and then I saw it fly up to the top of the ceiling, by where the door is.” Lillie swallowed again, staring intently at Ward, who nodded to indicate she was listening. “And then I just kept screaming, and then everyone woke up, and they were screaming, too, and then Melody, she’s our cabin counselor, she made us leave out of the emergency exit, and then she killed the bat.”
During the duration of her dialogue, Lillie had shrugged, made faces, and patted her head as she demonstrated the bat’s discovery, jumped around, and shrieked. Ward couldn’t help laughing, but Marsha wasn’t amused. Ward put her doctor’s face back on and interviewed her patient. “Did you feel anything like a bite?”
Lillie shook her head emphatically. “No, just like a tickle.”
“How about any blood? In your hair, or on your pillow?” Ward knew that bat bites were often so small they were undetectable and usually left no blood, but she had to ask the questions and go through the motions for the sake of the camp director, who was listening attentively.
“Well,” Lillie said as she ran her hands through her hair. “I do have a scab on my head. But it was from before. It bleeds if I scratch it.”
“No blood today?” Ward asked.
“Nope.”
“And your pillow?”
“I didn’t check my pillow, ’cuz I had to run out of the room, and then when we went back, I forgot.” Her tone was very serious now, matching Ward’s.
“How about if I check you, to be sure?” Ward asked, not because she thought she’d find anything, but because it was her job to look. She scooped Lillie up into her arms and deposited her onto the stretcher, then pulled the otoscope from the wall and used the light and magnification to examine Lillie’s scalp. Other than a crusted lesion, which could have been from anything, the tissue was clear.
“How about you ladies? Any bat bites for you?” Ward asked the girls sitting in a row on the stretcher beside Lillie.
“Well,” a dark-haired girl with matching eyes said. “I did kind of think something was in my hair while I was sleeping, but I was having a dream, so I didn’t wake up.”
Ward chuckled softly but stopped when Marsha scolded the girl. “Eva! Don’t be telling tales!”
“So, Lillie’s scalp looks good,” Ward said.
“Thank God,” Marsha exclaimed. “Can we get the paperwork and get on the road?” she asked, and then as an afterthought, she added a smile.
“Let’s talk in the hallway, Mrs. Evans,” Ward suggested as she nodded in the direction of the door.
When they reached the corridor, Marsha crossed her arms as if preparing to stand her ground against an invading army. Ward braced for the impending confrontation, wondering if the camp doctor had prepared Marsha for what she was going to say, or if she’d left Ward to be the bad guy.
“We need to treat all these girls—and the counselor who was in the room. We need to vaccinate them for rabies.”
“What?” Marsha demanded. “They weren’t even near the bat.”
“You don’t know that, Ms. Evans. Bat bites are often too small to be seen. But they’re deadly. If that bat bit one of these girls, and it gives her rabies, she’ll die. There’s no treatment. Our only chance is to give her the vaccine to prevent it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she exclaimed as she slapped herself in the forehead.
Ward shook her head. “No, I’m afraid I’m not.”
Marsha turned in a circle, cradling her head in both hands, sighing dramatically. “How. Long. Will. This. Take?”
Ward hated to use an excuse like I’m new here, but it was true. She didn’t have an answer. Bat attacks weren’t frequent in her part of the state—except for the wooden kind of bats. Ward could count on one hand the number of times she’d treated rabies, and in those cases, it had taken hours to procure the vaccine and immunoglobulin needed to prevent the virus from taking over the body. That was in the city, though, with only one victim. How long would it take to procure two-dozen doses of both medicatio
ns in this rural area? She was afraid to guess, but the process would be lengthy. Twenty-one patients had to be registered, triaged, and examined by a nurse and then by a physician. And Ward was the only doctor in the ER. On the best of days, it would take hours to get these children treated. Today, with the department already under siege from the region’s tourist population, it would be next to impossible.
“Let me check with Frankie,” she told Marsha. “He’s the nurse in charge.” Frankie would know the protocols and obviously had a relationship with Marsha. Better if the news came from him.
Marsha marched back toward her campers and Ward headed in the opposite direction, looking down at her phone as she walked. She pulled up her favorite ER app and read about rabies. She didn’t treat it often enough to remember details like medication doses, and she wasn’t cocky enough to fake it. She also reviewed the protocol for the vaccine, which she hadn’t forgotten. It was still the same, all these years later. It was good to know she was right, because she was sure Marsha was in the other room Googling the same information. She needed to be prepared for battle, and knowledge was the best weapon. After jotting down the correct doses for both medications, she looked up and saw Frankie talking with a medic who’d just delivered her next patient, a young man sitting upright in the stretcher holding his upper arm and moaning. He was shirtless, and the hollow in his upper arm told her the shoulder was dislocated. It was one of the few orthopedic diagnoses that could be made without an X-ray.
“Did you give him something for pain?” Ward directed her question to the medic.
“Not yet,” he said defensively.
Before Ward could criticize him for torturing the man, Frankie interrupted her. “I was just coming to get you, Doc. I have the surgeon on line three.”
“Okay.” Ward nodded toward the man suffering on the stretcher before her. “Get him an X-ray stat and set him up for sedation so we can pop that shoulder back in,” she said. “And please give him four of morphine before he passes out.” She pulled the phone across the counter and said hello to the pediatric surgeon on the other end. After exchanging credentials, she quickly explained the case. She grinned when he immediately agreed to accept the care of her patient. He didn’t ask any questions about insurance and tests, just the facts about the case. This child needed his help, and he was willing to give it.
Wow, how refreshing, she thought. No haggling, selling her patient, trying to convince him her diagnosis was correct, as was often the case with transfer patients in the mountains. Lately she’d found doctors, especially specialists, reluctant to accept transfers. They were no longer men and women called to help people in need. They were like factory workers, punching a clock and passing the buck. It wasn’t their problem. She’d been dealing with that issue since she started working at Garden, and it was frustrating. This encounter had been different though. Maybe it was an omen. She could only hope.
She looked up to see Frankie waving his hands frantically in front of her face. “Don’t hang up. The clerk needs to talk to admissions with insurance info and then someone will call for a report.” Ah, Ward thought. Maybe not so easy after all. She handed the phone to the unit clerk and turned back to Frankie.
“I have to talk to you about Camp Shickshinny,” she said.
“What’s up?”
Ward handed him her notes. “We need twenty-one doses of RIG and twenty-one doses of vaccine. And of course, all the kids and the counselor need to be signed in, etcetera.”
Frankie laughed. “Ha, Ha. You’re such a comedian.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m not joking. They woke up in a room with a bat, and any one of them could have been bitten in her sleep. We need to treat them all.”
Frankie’s face dropped, and Ward thought the white walls were suddenly darker than his complexion.
“You’re not kidding?”
Ward shook her head for emphasis. “No.”
He looked down at the note she’d given him and then back up to her, even paler now. “I’ll get right on it. And Shayna’s hunting down everything for that shoulder.”
“Super. I’ll go back to work.”
Ward walked into a patient’s room, and when she emerged ten minutes later, she looked for Frankie again but saw no sign of him. She completed transfer orders and talked to the boy with appendicitis about what to expect. Shayna had set up everything for the patient with the injured shoulder, and with the right combination of pain medication for relaxation and brute force for moving bones, Ward popped the shoulder back into the joint. The patient thanked her a hundred times in the two minutes she’d spent explaining how to take care of the arm to prevent future injuries.
She examined and discharged four more patients, and still, she saw no sign of Frankie. She wasn’t surprised; she’d given him a Herculean task. Still, she wished she had some news to report to Marsha Evans, who was pacing the corridor across the way, her phone pressed to her ear as her mouth moved a mile a minute. Soon, she’d come looking for Ward, demanding answers and action, and it would be nice to have something to tell her.
She glanced at the chart rack. The number of patients waiting for her attention had climbed to five, and that didn’t count the twenty-one victims of the terrorist bat. She laughed to herself as she realized how stupid she’d been, then turned at the sound of her name.
A gorgeous woman of her height, with shoulder-length auburn hair and blue eyes, stood before her. A concerned look had replaced the smile that had enchanted Ward the night before, but she couldn’t mistake the fact that this was the woman from the fireworks. The angel who had come and told Ward she’d be fine—that she’d find a woman attractive again, and once again laugh and enjoy a simple pleasure like a fireworks display.
Her eyes, Ward noticed, were darker than she’d thought, and her hair lighter. It was streaked with gold and now pulled back and up, and not a single strand broke free. She’d exchanged the T-shirt and shorts for a suit—navy blue, with a blazer tailored to fit her curves and a skirt equally flattering and hemmed to the knee. Ward’s eyes kept going past the skirt, down Abby’s legs to the tips of her red-painted toes, then back up across the low-heeled sandals, the legs, the butt, the curve of her back, and the narrow shoulders. Finally she met Abby’s eyes, which registered surprise and then seemed to laugh at a joke only the two of them shared.
“Abby?” she asked. Ward’s heart pounded as she spoke, and her stomach did a little somersault
Abby’s appearance in the ER wasn’t unwelcome, and Ward might have laughed, too, if she knew what the hell was going on. She didn’t know why, but she suspected Abby’s appearance here wasn’t a coincidence.
“Ward? You’re Dr. Thrasher?” Abby asked.
Ward pursed her lips and took a step back, even as Abby stepped closer. “Well, not if you say it like that!”
Now Abby laughed out loud, her eyes twinkled, and she stepped forward again, offering her hand in introduction. Her handshake, Ward noticed, was crippling, but her smile was gentle. “I’m Abby Rosen, the CEO.”
Ward shook with what she hoped was an impressive strength. “The CEO?”
“Yes. The CEO. Of the hospital.”
Ward shook her head and bit her bottom lip to control her laughter, but she couldn’t stop the smile. “Well, talk about a small world.”
Abby’s hand still held hers, gently now. “Yes,” she said softly. “I should have known. Not too many strangers show up for my mom’s party.”
“Your mom?”
“Yeah. Judi’s my mom.”
Ward nodded, amazed. “Smaller world, but nice. What a delightful surprise. I didn’t think I’d see you again.” And then Ward grew concerned. “Is everything okay? Are you sick?” Why else would the CEO be in the ER on a holiday weekend?
“No, I’m fine,” Abby said, but Ward detected a shift in her posture, as she seemed to grow taller and her eyes darkened to black.
Suddenly Ward grew alarmed. What was the CEO doing here? Preparing for some battle
, no doubt, and it had to do with her. Which really sucked, considering how much she’d liked Abby and how much she’d thought about her before falling asleep, and then upon waking in the morning and in the shower. Before she’d left for work she’d actually made up her mind to find out who she was, so she could call her. Maybe explore the possibilities that had presented themselves in the explosion of color lighting the night sky.
Well, no need for that now.
“So, how can I help you?” she asked, assuming her own fight stance, standing tall, squaring her shoulders, picking up her chin.
“Shed some light on this bat problem. I had calls from a frantic camp director and another from a frantic nurse. I expect a board member will be next.”
Ward squinted at Abby, studying her, assessing the threat. Surprisingly, she saw none. Abby’s smile was warm, her stance softer.
Abby’s stance didn’t soften Ward. She couldn’t afford to let it. She’d been facing enemies of all sorts since that first day in the ER months earlier, and she knew such battles wouldn’t stop until she was back home, on her own turf. She wasn’t surprised Marsha Evans had pulled rank and called Abby. She could, and it was her job to take care of her campers. But for Frankie to turn too miffed her. The ER was supposed to be a team, and his call to the administrator amounted to treason.
Seeming to sense her angst, Abby grabbed her arm. Ward looked down to where Abby’s manicured thumb, painted a brilliant red, seemed to caress her arm. Their eyes met, and despite the situation, Ward’s belly flopped and a flood of heat surged lower into her abdomen. Wow.
“Relax,” Abby purred. “It’s okay. Everyone’s just panicking, and they called me. It’s my job to help out in a crisis, and I think twenty-one patients on the same bus fits the definition.”
Ward let out a breath. Abby wasn’t looking for a fight. Not yet anyway, the little voice in the back of her head said. While she didn’t have much experience with rabies, she’d gone toe-to-toe with administrators of all kinds, on many occasions. The encounters weren’t always pleasant.