“So, what do you guys do in Lauderdale?” Ping asked.
“I’m a marketing consultant.” Sonya said with a smile directed towards Frankie who was sitting across from her. Chase noticed it and kept it to herself. Frankie deserved to be happy and this was the first time Chase had seen her this way with anyone. At first the one night stands came and went after her break-up, but eventually they ended too.
The conversation continued as Janine talked about working for the postal service for the past eight years and Tracey mentioned she was in real estate. Gayle and Ping went on and on about their jobs and found out the three new women were all in their early thirties.
“So Chase, I don’t remember what it is you do.” Tracey said.
“I didn’t really talk about it when we were out there.” Chase shrugged and finished her beer. “I work at a hospital.”
Gayle rolled her eyes and hit Chase’s shoulder with her own. “Don’t let her fool you. Chase is a heart surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital and a member of the Heart Institute Board.”
“Wow.” All three women stopped conversation to stare at Chase. Chase wanted to smack Gayle in the back of her head. She swore she would if Gayle mentioned anything about her being filthy rich. She felt her ears turning red.
“It’s not as glamorous as it sounds, trust me.” Chase smiled and ordered another beer.
“I would’ve never pegged you for a doctor. You look more like a fitness instructor.” Janine laughed. The entire table joined her. Ping couldn’t help throwing in how physically active Chase actually was, minus the Pilates. She failed that exercise after three attempts and took to running and mild weightlifting to keep in shape.
***
Chase and the gang left the next morning, they exchanged phone numbers and email addresses with the other girls with promises to keep in touch. The ride home seemed twice as long as the ride down. Chase called into her voicemail at the hospital and hung up when she heard the recording say she had twenty-five messages. She wasn’t ready to go back into doctor mode. She still had one more day before she need to come back down to Earth.
21
Chase sat at her desk reading the latest medical journal updates while sipping on a cup of coffee. She had just finished a four hour surgery and she still had two more scheduled before her shift was over. Six weeks had gone by since she arrived home from her impromptu vacation. She leaned backed in her chair and stretched her back. She wished she was still rocking with the rolling waves on the offshore fishing boat with a beer in one hand, fishing pole in the other, and nothing on her mind as she watched the tiny fluffy clouds float past the sun in the distance.
She had been at the hospital over eighty hours a week continuously since she returned. Her schedule was a little heavier than normal, but that was a lame excuse. She worked when she was stressed. She worked when she was tired. She worked when she was lost. Lately, she’d been all of the above and then some. Working seemed to be the only thing that kept her mind from racing to an adorable brunette with a killer smile and eyes she couldn’t say no to. Some people turned to alcohol as a crutch, Chase turned to work. She hadn’t necessarily been avoiding her friends, but she was tired of hearing Remy’s name come up in conversation. It wasn’t really Frankie’s fault. Remy was slowly becoming one of her most demanded artists. She was already preparing another showing with Remy as the showcase artist in the coming weeks. The rest of her friends were just curious if Chase had been in contact with her since they seemed to run into her from time to time. That was a huge reason why Chase worked and went home. She hadn’t been to Rainer’s since she’d been home and stayed away from the local bars. Running into her would just be the icing on the proverbial cake and a step she just wasn’t ready for.
Chase’s pager went off at the same time her desk phone rang. The last thing she wanted to deal with was an emergency call when she had a cardiac patient scheduled surgery in forty-five minutes. She reluctantly answered the phone and checked her pager at the same time.
“Hey stranger. You’ve been avoiding my calls. I figured you’d have no choice but to answer this phone.”
“Frankie I’m not avoiding you, I’m avoiding a situation.” She said as she read the message on her pager. “I really have to go. I just got paged to the roof. This can’t be good.”
“Uh huh, so seriously you can have lunch or dinner with me without ‘you know who’ coming up in conversation. I’m your best friend for crying out loud Chase. I know this isn’t easy for you.”
Chase sighed. “Frank, really I have to go. We can talk about this later.” She hung up the phone and clipped the pager to her dark blue scrub pants.
***
As soon as the rooftop doors opened Chase was windblown. The red and white helicopter was sitting in the middle of the pad with the rotors spinning. She assumed this was the emergency she was paged to so she ducked her head and ran over to the open door. She expected to see an elderly person having a heart attack.
“We have a thirty-three year old female stabbing victim.” The flight nurse said as he jumped out and began unloading the stretcher.
“Why was I paged? I’m not a general surgeon.” She yelled over the loud whooshing sound as the rotors began to slow. This was probably a mistake. She was paged when someone in general surgery or trauma should have been paged. She remembered enough of her ER rotation to be able to assess the situation at least.
“She’s been stabbed in the chest and the knife is still in. I believe the blade is possibly lodged in her heart muscle.” He said as pulled the stretcher out with the feet end first.
Chase saw the knife handle surrounded by a bloody white sheet and sticking out of woman’s chest. Her stomach dropped and her adrenaline began to race wildly. This was serious, very serious. If that knife really was embedded in her chest she would more than likely bleed to death as soon as it was removed. No surgeon in the world would be fast enough to save her. Chase had seen some pretty traumatic surgeries during her career, but nothing compared to this moment.
The flight nurse was steadily reading her stats and watching the portable EKG monitor. Her heartbeat was surprisingly stable. Chase wondered if maybe the knife had perhaps missed her heart and arteries all together. It wasn’t until they were rushing the stretcher into the hospital that Chase even looked at her face.
Her eyes were closed and her skin was eerily pale, she appeared almost lifeless, but there was no mistaking the soft features and short brown hair. Chase felt her throat tighten as her own lungs deflated. Remy Sheridan’s delicate body was lying on that stretcher racing down the hall to an almost certain death. She felt a tear slip down her cheek. How was she supposed to save this life? Was this some kind of sick joke God decided to play on her? She needed to pull herself together. They would be in an operating room in a few seconds and she would need to be the award winning cardiac surgeon Chase Leery, not the woman in love with the patient on the table that she couldn’t save.
Chase was thankful the flight nurse had the chief of trauma surgery paged to the operating room along with a few of her own staff members to assist. They began taking x-rays as soon as they slid her from the small stretcher to the operating table. Chase quickly dressed in her surgical dressing and scrubbed in before she walked into the room.
“It doesn’t look good. The knife blade appears to be in the left ventricle and the blade is about two inches long. About three quarters of an inch to possibly an inch of it is embedded. It’s your common garden variety pocket knife. At least it’s not serrated.”
Chase looked at the multiple x-rays. “Is she stable enough to go under?” She asked Harris Porter, the anesthesiologist in the room and a colleague that she had worked with hundreds of times. She trusted him.
He took a deep breath. “She’s stable. You can see her vitals.” He pointed to the beeping and flashing monitors she was connected to. “I can’t say what’s going to happen when you open her up though. She looks pretty beat up. I honestly don’t know if sh
e will remain stable.”
At that statement Chase looked at her, really looked at her body and not just small handle sticking out of her chest. One of her cheeks was bruised and turning purple. When she pulled the sheet back she saw more bruises starting to form along her abdomen. She slid the sheet back up. Reality finally slapped Chase across the face. This wasn’t some accident. Someone beat Remy and apparently tried to kill her. Chase’s jaw tightened so hard her she almost broke her own teeth.
“We have no choice. Someone tried to kill this woman and I’m going to do everything I can to save her life.” She held her anger in check. She had a job to do. The woman on the table couldn’t be Remy Sheridan to her; she had to be another patient that needed her care. Otherwise, she wasn’t sure she could keep it together long enough to even attempt the delicate procedure. She slid the scalpel down her chest and watched the thin line of blood run down. She said a silent prayer as a tiny tear fell from her eye.
22
Chase was sitting at her desk for the second time that day. She picked up the phone and dialed a familiar number. As it rang her mind drifted back to the three and a half hour surgery. The knife was actually positioned in a slight angle with most of the blade in the septum, which is basically a thick muscle wall that separates the ventricles. The first few centimeters of the blade punctured the side of the left ventricle. Chase closed the tiny ventricle tear as fast as she could sew. Then, she sewed the septum tear in two layers and closed her chest. Remy would need a small blood transfusion to make up the lost blood, but she was still alive and in a medicated coma to heal her traumatic injuries.
“Hello stranger. I can’t believe you hung up on me earlier you shit.”
“Frankie, you need to get down here as soon as possible. Come straight to my office; if I’m not in here have the charge nurse page me.”
“What’s wrong Chase?”
“Remy is here. I can’t go into it on the phone. Just hurry, please.”
***
Frankie rushed into the hospital and took the elevator up to the third floor. She had numerous scenarios running through her mind as it raced in all directions. She had never heard fear in Chase’s voice, but the painful heavy sound she just heard was the closest she had ever come to it. Remy wasn’t the kind of person to cause a scene so that couldn’t be the emergency. She prayed something bad hadn’t happened to her. The door was locked when she arrived at Chase’s office.
“Can I help you?” A young black nurse asked.
“I’m looking for Dr. Leery. She said to have her paged if she wasn’t in her office.”
“I’d do it for you but I’m headed the other direction. Go down the hall and take the first right, you will see the nurse’s station. They can call her for you.”
“Thanks.” Frankie said and turned to go in that direction when she saw Chase emerge from the same corner. She immediately noticed the hollow look on her face and the way her shoulders were slumped. Something was definitely wrong.
Chase barely made eye contact with her as she walked by and unlocked her office door. Frankie followed her inside and shut the door. She half expected to see Remy inside passed out on the couch.
“Chase you’re scaring me what’s wrong? Where’s Remy?” She said as she sat in one of the chairs across from the desk.
“She’s up in ICU. She was just moved from recovery. She’s in a medically induced coma. I’m not sure how long we are going to keep her under. I was just down there assessing her vitals and talking to the chief of intensive care.” Chase said as she sat in her swivel chair and wiped a tear that started to form in the corner of her left eye. Damn it she was stronger than this. She dealt with life and sometimes death every day, but she had never felt this empty. When she finished the surgery she had gone straight to the chapel and cried until there were no more tears to cry, then she collected herself put her doctor face back on and went back to work. She wasn’t sure she had the energy to do it all over again with Frankie.
“Oh my god Chase, what happened to her?”
“Someone beat her up pretty good and stabbed her in the chest. The knife stuck into the lower portion of her heart.”
Tears fell from Frankie’s green eyes. She couldn’t form words for a full minute. “ “Why? Oh my god. Is she going to live?”
“Yeah it looks like she’s going to make it, but she just had major open heart surgery and her body has been put through the ringer. That’s why she’s in a coma so she can heal without putting stress on her heart.” Chase said. She held back the fact that they were watching her vitals constantly. If she went into cardiac arrest she’d surely die before anything could be done to help her. Chase handed Frankie the tissue box.
“Did you do the surgery?”
“Yes. Remember when I said I was paged to the roof, I wasn’t joking. They were bringing her in on the helicopter. I didn’t realize it was her until they pushed her into the operating room. Her face was so pale and fragile looking. I honestly thought she would die on the table Frankie. That was the most agonizing three hours of my life. I had her life in my hands. Hell, I literally held her heart in my hands squeezing to keep her from bleeding to death.”
“God Chase, why didn’t someone else do the surgery?”
“I’m the best Frank. That’s why I was paged. I knew there would come a time when the person on the table would be someone I knew. But, that was the hardest surgery I have ever performed. I couldn’t let someone else touch her like that and hold her life in their hands. Even if I wasn’t paged I would’ve surely heard about it and volunteered.” Chase put her head in her hands.
“I love her. I love her so damn much and I may not ever get to tell her. How could someone do this to her? Why did I push her away?” There weren’t many more tears left to cry, but the few that did drop fell heavily. Frankie ran around the desk and pulled Chase into her arms.
“Remy is a very strong woman Chase. She knows you care for her. She told me recently that she had never made love to anyone until you. She will pull through this and you can tell her how you feel if that’s what you want to do.”
“I’m so damn confused. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want the drama. I was tired of the cat and mouse game. I told her to leave me alone. I said I never wanted to see her again. I feel horrible Frankie. I love her and I treated her like shit and now she’s in here struggling for her life. What kind of person does that make me Frankie? I’m no better than the person that did this to her.”
“Oh Chase, don’t say that. You’re an amazing person. You’re a hell of a doctor, you saved her life! No one would blame you for wanting to get out of that situation. You had every right to tell her to stay away from you. You had no way of knowing this would happen to her. No one did.”
“She tried to come to me, to talk to me Frank. I didn’t want to hear it. What if he did this to her because of me?”
“You’re my best friend and I love you to death, but if you really start blaming yourself I’m going to slap you. Some sick son of bitch hurt her, not you.” Frankie said as she stood up and patted Chase on the shoulder. “Have the cops said anything to you?”
Chase gave her half a smile. “No. But, then again they don’t know I know her. The just questioned me about her injuries right after the surgery and took the knife with them.”
“Hopefully, there are finger prints and they can catch this bastard.”
Chase stood and stretched her back. She needed to go splash water on her face for the third or fourth time. “I don’t know how to do this. I have to put my doctor face back on and go check on her. If I let on that I know her or was personally involved with her I could lose my job for treating her.”
“I’m familiar with the policy. I think it’s ridiculous. You’re the best heart surgeon in the southeast. If something happened to my heart you can bet your ass I’d want you operating on me. In fact, I think I’m going to call my attorney and have that put in my medical power of attorney and will and whatever else it needs
to be in.” She smiled.
“Flattery will get you everywhere.” Chase smiled. “When this is all over I am going to need a lot of drinks, very strong ones.”
“I think I will to.”
“Do you want to go with me to see her?”
“Yes. I need to go to the ladies room first and wash my face. I don’t want to scare anyone.”
“I need to go to. I’ve just about scrubbed the skin off my face today.”
***
Remy was laying slightly elevated on a skinny gurney. She had IV lines coming from one arm, an oxygen tube coming from her nose, and a drain line coming from her chest collecting excess blood. Her pale face was sunken in, she looked much older than the vibrant young woman Frankie knew her to be. She had to turn away to gather herself when she first saw her.
“You can talk to her and hold her hand if you want. She can feel you and hear you, it actually helps or so they say.” Chase said as she went around to the monitors and wrote down her stats on a piece of paper she kept in her pocket.
“She looks so sad just laying here.” Frankie sat on the doctor stool and took Remy’s hand in hers. “I guess I was expecting her to look all beat up.”
“Her chest and abdomen are pretty bad. She has a couple fractured ribs, a bruised spleen and her liver looked a little bruised too in the MRI we did. He didn’t touch her face though.”
Chase reached down and grabbed her other hand as she leaned towards her face. She kissed her cheek and whispered in her ear. “Remy, it’s Chase. I’ll be back to check on you later. Frankie is here with you. I love you.”
Secluded Heart Page 13