Lakeside Hospital Box Set

by Cara Malone

  She took a deep breath and smoothed the front of her navy blue uniform over her painfully empty stomach. She and her partner, Alex, had been working since the early hours of the morning, an extra shift they’d traded for so that Alex and her wife could go away this weekend, and Sarah kept waiting for a break in the day that had not come. Just fifteen minutes to take a breather, get out of the rig, maybe scarf down a sandwich from her favorite deli in downtown Evanston - that was all she needed, but she’d had no such luck. It was just one call after another today, and now Maria needed her.

  Sarah pushed open the ambulance doors and jumped down to the pavement. They were in the ambulance bay outside the city’s best Emergency Department, and from the looks of it, things were just as chaotic inside the hospital as they were everywhere else today.

  “Alex, can you give me a hand?” Sarah called toward the front of the ambulance.

  “On my way!” Her partner, a petite brunette with hazel eyes and an impossibly confident demeanor, jogged around the side of the rig with something puffing out her cheek.

  Sarah narrowed her eyes at Alex as they pulled Maria’s gurney out of the ambulance and popped down the wheels. “Are you eating something?”

  “Snickers,” Alex said, the word coming out slightly muffled around the wad of chocolate and nougat she had squirreled away in her cheek. Even the thought of it made Sarah’s mouth water. Alex swallowed, then smiled obliviously as they wheeled their patient toward the ER. “Found it in my pocket - Megan must have put it there for me.”

  “Must be nice to have such a thoughtful, doting wife,” Sarah said, and although she’d meant to be sarcastic, her words came out a lot more wistful than she expected. She’d known Megan since Alex first started dating her. Megan really was thoughtful and doting, and it was nice.

  Sarah wanted that kind of romance even more than she wanted to lick the melted chocolate remnants from the Snickers wrapper that she imagined Alex must have stuffed into the ambulance’s cupholder. And right at that moment, she wanted that melty chocolate pretty bad.

  “It is,” Alex said with a satisfied smirk. Then she rolled her eyes in Sarah’s direction and said, “There’s another one in the rig for you. Do you really think Megan would snub you like that?”

  “I love your wife,” Sarah said. Her stomach gave another low rumble, which she ignored as the sliding glass ER doors opened for them and they were met by Krys Stevens, one of the residents, and her right-hand woman, a pretty nurse named Veronica.

  “What do we have?” Krys asked.

  “Bed five,” Veronica said at the same time, pointing the way even though Sarah could have found bed five with her eyes closed.

  She’d lost track of how many shifts she’d worked in her last three years as a paramedic, and the vast majority of her runs ended up at Lakeside. She knew this ER like the back of her hand, and she knew Veronica and Krys, too. They were staples around here and even though there were other doctors and nurses in the department with more seniority, everyone knew Krys and Veronica ran the show.

  “Forty-two-year-old female presenting with chest pain, shortness of breath and dizziness,” Sarah reported as the four of them slid the gurney up to bed five and prepared to transfer the woman. “Maria’s a school teacher and she passed out in front of her class.”

  “Well, Maria, that must have given the little ones quite a scare,” Veronica said, smiling down at her. “Don’t worry, you’re in good hands here.”

  Veronica always took the time to make a connection with the patients, and she could always be counted on to provide updates whenever Sarah asked about a particularly scary, interesting or heart-rending case. Veronica put her hand on Maria’s shoulder to comfort her, and her dark brown eyes met Sarah’s across the gurney.

  Krys, meanwhile, was all business, all the time. She was a great doctor, but she wasn’t the type to slow down and learn names when there was a potential heart attack that needed treating. She quickly disentangled Maria from the portable oxygen tank nestled beside her, then barked, “Everybody lift on three.” The four of them got into place and Krys counted off. “One, two, three.”

  They transferred Maria seamlessly to bed five, then Sarah and Alex got the gurney out of the way so Krys and Veronica could work their magic.

  “Can you tell me where it hurts?” Krys asked Maria as she started to run through her physical examination. Veronica was busy pulling leads out of a portable EKG by the bedside to check Maria’s heart rhythm, and now that Sarah had been quickly and abruptly made redundant, she felt another quick rush of hunger.

  The room faded for just a second before coming back, and that Snickers waiting for her in the ambulance was sounding awfully good.

  “You okay?” Alex asked, nudging her. “You look a little pale.”

  “Just hungry is all,” Sarah said. “I missed dinner last night because I was over at Chloe and Ivy’s place late, helping them make origami centerpieces for the reception.”

  Alex snorted. “I can’t wait to see this wedding. I’m telling you, it was a mistake not to call Bridezillas and get a camera crew to follow Chloe around.”

  “She’s not a Bridezilla. It’s going to be beautiful,” Sarah chastised. Poor Chloe had waited years after Ivy proposed for the actual wedding planning to begin, and they’d been beaten to the altar by their other friends not once but twice. “You only marry your best friend and soulmate once. She just wants it to be special.”

  Alex smiled. She’d already had that experience. Her wedding to Megan had been traditional and elegant, a church ceremony followed by a low-key reception catered by one of the brides’ best friends. Sarah thought it had perfectly encapsulated Alex and Megan’s style, and Chloe and Ivy’s wedding would be just as perfect a representation of the two of them.

  Well, the two of them plus two hundred of their friends and family members, and over a thousand origami flowers that Sarah’s fingers were still tender from folding.

  “Should we go get that spare Snickers?” Alex asked. She nodded at Krys and Veronica, who’d made short work of getting Maria’s vital signs and, satisfied that the danger was passed, were now starting on her medical history. “I think they have it under control.”

  Sarah let her eyes linger on Veronica’s fingers as she deftly placed an IV and began administering fluids. It was probably just the hunger-and-origami-based fatigue that lowered her response time and allowed her to stare so bluntly, but she did love to watch that woman work. She was always so self-assured, so in control, and Sarah had never seen her make a mistake.

  “Earth to Sarah,” Alex said, elbowing her again.

  “Huh?” Sarah asked, shaking the cobwebs off her mind. “Yeah, let’s go.”

  They pushed the gurney out of the ER and Alex helped Sarah load it into the ambulance, then Sarah hopped in the back and waited for Alex to come around and get in the front. The radio was already crackling with a new request - this time it was a fall at a nursing home on the other side of the city. When Alex turned around in the driver’s seat, Snickers in hand, Sarah eyed it greedily - who knew when she’d get another chance to eat?

  “Thank you,” she said, practically snatching the candy bar from Alex.

  “Ready to take another call?” Alex asked, nodding at the radio.

  “Yeah,” Sarah started to say. “Oh shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  The chocolate had just touched her tongue when she heard plastic vibrating on metal and looked down. “Maria’s phone - it must have fallen out of her pocket. Give me a minute to run it inside, then we can take that nursing home call.”

  “I’ll radio it in,” Alex said.

  Sarah pouted as she set the Snickers aside - Soon, my precious - and swiped the phone off the floor. She jogged back into the ER and was halfway to bed five before her vision went starry from low blood sugar again.

  Power through it, she told herself. She did a lot of that lately - with two friends who were planning the wedding of the century, anothe
r set of friends who’d just had a baby and relied on Sarah for free babysitting (the kid was stinking adorable so that wasn’t a hard choice to make), and the demands of her job on top of it all, words like sleep, balanced diet and even regular meals weren’t exactly part of her vocabulary these days.

  But her friends needed her and Sarah was more than happy to give all that up for the incredible rush that came with being needed.

  Just give Maria her phone back so she can call her daughter, she told herself. And then there’s a Snickers waiting for you in the rig.

  Sarah never made it to bed five, though. The stars in her vision expanded, blotting out everything in the ER until all she knew was that the world appeared to be tilting sideways. “I’m going down,” she said, or did she just think it?

  The hard, cold floor came closer, but the last thing Sarah felt was a pair of warm hands on her hips, strong arms encircling her. The last things she saw were Veronica’s coppery eyes just inches from her own, streaked through with alarm and… was that a tinge of annoyance?

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  A Note from Cara

  Hello!

  Thank you so much for reading the Lakeside Hospital series – I hope you enjoyed it! The final installment, Mouth to Mouth, will be coming out soon so make sure to preorder your copy today.

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  With love,

  Cara

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