by Dianne Drake
“He never told me that.”
“Probably because it’s not one of the best moments in his life.”
“Well, I know how it feels to be cheated on, so I understand where he’s coming from.” Embarrassment, heartache, anger... Yes, she and Mr. Baumgartner probably did have something in common. “So, now that we’re here, what’s the plan?”
“How about we knock on the door and hope he opens up for us?”
“Not very likely, Daniel. Remember what that note said about not wanting to see any of us again?”
“That was then, this is now. He might have already changed his mind, or at least had some second thoughts. So, did you try to get in earlier? I’m assuming you have a key.”
“I did have a key, but I turned it in at the office already, and they’re going to take care of returning it to Mr. Baumgartner.”
“You turned it in that fast?”
“Yep. Once we’re dismissed from a patient, the supervisors don’t let us hang onto any of his or her personal property. And that includes the house key. Which means that, if he doesn’t answer his door, we’re not going in.”
Daniel sighed heavily. “Then let’s hope he opens up.” With that he climbed out of the car and hurried around to open Zoey’s door for her. “Because if he doesn’t, this was a big waste of time. Of course, we could always go to the coffee shop...”
“You and your coffee shop!” Daniel was finally beginning to loosen up, and she liked that. When he wasn’t so guarded, he was very personable. Of course, he was personable when he was guarded, but it was a different kind of personable—the kind where he was pleasant enough to be around but you didn’t give him a second thought. When he wasn’t guarded, though, well...that set her toes to tingling. Which was invasive, took up too many of her thoughts, completely overwhelmed her when she let it. And that was a good summation of Daniel—sometimes he made her tingle, sometimes he did not.
Today, he was on verge of doing both to her, which left her feeling confused. “He’s not going to answer his door,” she said after Daniel’s second knock.
“Maybe not,” Daniel said, pulling back the screen door. He tried the doorknob and it gave to let them enter. So, they pushed on into the house and stopped just inside the door. “Mr. Baumgartner?” Daniel called out. “It’s Dr. Caldwell from the hospital. I came to check on you.”
No answer.
“I don’t like this,” Zoey whispered. “It’s not right to just walk in.”
“It’s not right to ignore him, either.” Daniel took a few steps into the living room then stopped. “Mr. Baumgartner?” he called. “Are you here?”
Again, no answer.
“I think we should go now,” Zoey prompted from behind Daniel. This made her nervous. It almost made her feel like a burglar, and if not for Daniel being there with her, and actually leading the way, she would have been long gone.
“I think we should take a look in his bedroom,” Daniel stated. He headed toward the hall but turned to Zoey before he proceeded down it. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
Zoey blinked twice, then hurried to get behind him. “You’re not leaving me here alone!” she whispered, almost bumping into Daniel in her haste.
“I’m coming in, Mr. Baumgartner. Along with Nurse Evans. We’re both concerned about you.”
This time when no answer came, Daniel picked up his pace on his way down the hall, and stopped short of entering the bedroom. There, in the doorway, lay a very unconscious man, amid a scatter of spilled pills. “Suicide!” Daniel whispered, dropping immediately to his knees in front of the man and feeling his neck for a pulse.
“Anything?” Zoey asked, also dropping down.
“A weak pulse.” Daniel shook his head. “Call nine-one-one.”
Zoey reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone as Daniel did a cursory exam on Mr. Baumgartner, checking his breath sounds and his eyes.
“He’s not fixed and dilated,” he said, looking up to Zoey. “But his breathing is irregular and shallow.”
Zoey told the emergency dispatcher the address and urged them to hurry, then grabbed up the empty pill bottle on the floor next to her unconscious patient. “This was almost full yesterday,” she told Daniel as she counted the pills scattered about. “I’m guessing he took about a dozen of these.”
It was heart medication Daniel had prescribed. The right amount helped, the wrong amount brought about seizures, unconsciousness...death.
“Damn!” Daniel growled. “I completely missed all the signs.”
“What signs?” Zoey asked. “I’ve been here every day this week and I never noticed anything off with him.”
“He tried to kill himself, Zoey! That’s about as off as it gets.”
“But he didn’t succeed.”
“He would have, if we hadn’t come here when we did. And he still may get his way, depending on how long the pills have been in him.”
Zoey looked around the room and saw a cereal bowl sitting next to the bed. “He ate this morning, which tells me he wasn’t anticipating committing suicide then. So he took the pills sometime after breakfast.”
Daniel took Mr. Baumgartner’s pulse again. “It’s fading,” he muttered, shaking his head in frustration.
“And there’s nothing we can do,” Zoey stated.
“He needs his stomach pumped, we need to get him on a cardiac monitor and have a ventilator on standby...and we’re not exactly equipped to do all that here.”
“So we wait for the ambulance.” She reached across and squeezed Daniel’s hand. “He’s going to pull through this, Daniel. We got here in time to save him.”
“But from what? The man was under hospice care. I don’t imagine he could see much of a future for himself.”
“But you told him that it may not be that bleak, that you could anticipate a recovery of sorts, depending on how hard he wanted to work for it.”
“Well, apparently, he didn’t want to work that hard.” For a lack of anything better to do, Daniel felt Baumgartner’s pulse again. He tried his neck, then his wrist, back to his neck. Then laid his hand on the man’s chest to count breaths. But his hand didn’t move, and nowhere he tried gave up so much as a twitch. Immediately he went up on his knees and assumed a position over his patient. “Arrest,” he said, going in for the first chest compression.
Zoey raised up and tilted Mr. Baumgartner’s head back, ready to start mouth-to-mouth. “Count it out,” she urged Daniel, then waited until he announced thirty before she gave Mr. Baumgartner two deep breaths through an emergency breather she’d pulled out of her medical bag.
They repeated the procedure over and over, for the next five minutes, until the ambulance arrived. “Full arrest,” Daniel told the paramedic. “We need to intubate and get an IV started before we take him in.”
Zoey took the IV tubing and catheter from the paramedic and started the line herself as the paramedic took over the breathing duty. “What next, Daniel?” she asked, even though she could anticipate what he would want used.
“Give me one milligram of epinephrine, or ten millimeters of a one-to-ten-thousand solution. We’ll keep it dripping in every three to five minutes while we’re resuscitating him, hopefully following it up with a twenty milliliter flush when he’s back.” He continued his cardiac compressions. “If he comes back.”
Zoey looked up at the second paramedic in the room, who was readying the endotracheal tube for Daniel. “When you get that done, bring in the stretcher. We need to transport him as soon as we can.”
The paramedic, a young man with black, curly hair and an unusually large mustache, nodded and handed the tube and laryngoscope to Daniel. “I’ll let the hospital know we’re on the way in,” he said, then hurried out.
“Need any help in there?” an emergency m
edical technician asked from the doorway. He’d shown up with the rescue squad from the fire department and, all in all, the house was filling up with medical help quite quickly. Since Mr. Baumgartner didn’t want medical help anymore, she imagined he’d hate all this attention going on around him.
Daniel nodded his head. “Take over the compressions while I intubate.”
The med tech followed Daniel’s orders and was immediately on his knees, ready to take over where Daniel left off.
In the span of the thirty count, while she waited to breathe again for Mr. Baumgartner, Zoey studied Daniel’s face—a beautiful face, she decided as he bit down on his lower lip in concentration. A face she could get used to if she allowed herself. “Hand me the bag,” she said to a paramedic who was hovering over her, referring to the bag that would force breaths into Mr. Baumgartner’s lungs once the endotracheal tube was in place.
“Is he resistant?” Daniel asked as he slid the tube into place so easily it looked like second nature to him.
“His breathing?” She shook her head. “No, his lungs aren’t stiff at all.”
“Any attempts at breathing on his own?” he asked once the cardiac monitor was in place and he was able to observe Mr. Baumgartner’s wavering heart pattern.
“Afraid not.”
“Well, I think we need to bundle him up and get him to the hospital anyway. There’s only so much we can do for him here, and I’d rather finish this in the emergency room.”
“Is he going to...?” She glanced across at Daniel, whose face was set in stone.
Daniel’s eyes softened for a moment as he looked back at her. “I’m hoping for the best, but it’s too soon to tell.”
A lot of people would have given up on Mr. Baumgartner—a man with a potentially terminal illness who’d tried to take his own life. But Daniel was determined to pull him through, and she loved that in him. Admired it. Admired the way he cared about his patient, no matter what the condition.
“You do good work,” she told Daniel. That was an understatement, if ever there was one. Daniel did brilliant work and she was so proud of him, she could almost burst. What she’d witnessed here today was nothing short of a miracle—bringing a dead man back to life. Mr. Baumgartner was by no means out of danger yet, but she trusted Daniel to pull him through this crisis. More than that, she was coming to realize that she simply trusted Daniel...with everything.
* * *
Daniel glanced out the back window of the ambulance to make sure Zoey was following in his car. Glad to see her right behind them, he turned his attention back to his patient, and frowned. “I don’t know what possessed you to do this, Mr. Baumgartner, but when you’re conscious again we’re going to talk about it.” Had his patient died of an overdose, Daniel would have taken that as a personal failure. He should have seen it coming. Should have noticed that the man had been too euphoric in his grave condition. Thank God Zoey had brought him the note he’d left posted on his front door. If not for her quick thinking, Mr. Baumgartner wouldn’t have pulled through.
She was a good nurse. A damned good nurse, which was a fact that hadn’t escaped him when she’d been caring for Elizabeth. Elizabeth had looked forward to Zoey’s visits, had been genuinely happy to see her. They’d grown close over the course of weeks, and Daniel regretted now that he hadn’t really been a part of that relationship. He’d missed out.
“They’re transferring him to the ICU,” he told Zoey a little while later as they walked out of the emergency room and headed to the elevator leading to the intensive care unit. The afternoon was long over by now, and it was well into the full of the evening, where the halls were thinning of guests and excess medical personnel. In essence, the hospital was getting ready to bed down for the night, and in its emptiness the clicking of Zoey and Daniel’s heels on the beige tile floor in the hall was the only sound being made, except for the occasional ding of the elevator.
Zoey pushed the elevator down button and stepped back. “Has he come around yet?”
Daniel shook his head. “Not yet, but his vital signs are stable now, and I’m pretty sure we got most of the drugs pumped out of his system. So I’m optimistic.”
“And he lives to try it again?” she asked.
Sadly, that was a distinct possibility. But, the next time Daniel dismissed him from the hospital, he was going to make sure Mr. Baumgartner had a psychiatric consult first. “It’s hard to predict. Some people want to extract every bit of life they can hang on to.” Elizabeth, for example. “Some people simply don’t care, though. I didn’t think Mr. Baumgartner would be one of those.”
The elevator doors opened and Daniel stepped back to allow Zoey to enter first. He followed her in, and intended to turn to face the door as it closed, but Zoey fell into his arms and laid her head against his chest. “I don’t do resuscitations, Daniel. Haven’t done one in years. Not in my specialty.”
“Are you OK?” he asked her, pulling her tighter into him and leaning his chin down on top of her head, as if to wrap her totally in his embrace.
“I don’t know. I think I had an adrenaline rush going there for a little while, but now that it’s all over...” She sighed. “I don’t know what I am.”
“You never get used to them, Zoey.” He unwrapped from the embrace for a moment, to push the stop button. Then he wrapped his arm around her again and simply held her. “And they’re always rough, even when the patient pulls through.”
“How do you do it, Daniel? How do you put so much time and emotion into a patient, only to end up where we are?”
“It’s part of who we are, I suppose. You know—the need to protect and take care of.” The way he needed to protect and take care of Zoey in this moment.
Zoey relaxed into his embrace and didn’t respond. The elevator didn’t move. The call light didn’t go off, telling them they needed to proceed to another floor. And, for the very first time, Daniel felt totally at ease with another woman in his arms. No guilt. No memories. Just this moment. This moment that defined so many things he’d been afraid to define.
How it happened, he wasn’t sure. But it did happen. He kissed her, and it felt natural, like it was meant to be. And, while it wasn’t a kiss of platonic friendship, or even the kiss of a passionate lover, it was a soul-shattering kiss. One that reached him in places he thought were unreachable. A gentle touching of the lips turning quickly into the light probing of their tongues. Hands grabbing hold, clinging. Breaths mingling as one. Dear God, the kiss that he’d feared so much yet wanted so desperately.
Surprisingly, Zoey didn’t press to end the kiss, as he’d expected she would do. Rather, she reached up, winding her hands around his neck, and fit her body into the contours of his. And such a nice fit it was. So familiar, and yet so new. “Daniel,” she whispered, pulling back slightly. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
She was right, of course. They shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be. And, just like that, Elizabeth came flooding back. “Sorry,” he said, dropping his arms to his side, and stepping back. Feeling exhilarated and guilty as hell, all at the same time. “Guess it was a reaction to the moment.” A moment that was now over.
Zoey started the elevator up again and turned to face the button panel. “I’m glad you were here to face this with me, Daniel,” she said, her voice tainted slightly with a quiver. “And I apologize for getting carried away.”
“I think we were both carried away.” He didn’t step up to stand beside her for the remainder of the ride down to the second floor. Didn’t look over to see the smile that had crept to Zoey’s face. The contented smile...
“So, do you and Maddie have big plans for the evening?” she asked.
He knew she was trying to sound nonchalant. Avoiding the obvious. Trying to come off as unaffected. Trying to put the kiss out of her mind. That was the way she was, always moving away from things that drew
her in emotionally, and he understood that need in her. He didn’t like it, but understood it. “Maddie’s going to spend the night with her grandmother. And I’m going home to collapse. Physical exertion, mental exertion...it all combines and makes me tired.”
“Then you’re not up to dinner tonight?”
Just the two of them? And after the kiss? What a surprise! “Are you asking?”
“Maybe. If you’re up to it.”
When the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened, they stepped out together, then stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to face each other. “Are you sure about this, Zoey?” he asked her. “Because I don’t want you feeling like you’re under some obligation to me because we...”
“Because we gave in to a moment of weakness?”
“Is that what you think it was?”
“What else could it be?”
She knew what it could be. He was sure of that. But he was also sure that she was denying it to herself, and far be it from him to rob her of that delusion. Especially since he expected his own denial to pop up any moment. “It could be the two of us, going back to my place and making omelets.”
“Omelets sound good,” she said, but tentatively.
Daniel noticed her reaction and wondered if he should have suggested they go to a public place. Somewhere where they could avoid being alone together again. “Or we could go grab Chinese or Italian.”
“No. Omelets are fine.”
“But you’re not sure about coming to my place.”
“Maybe, a little.”
“Are you hesitant because of Elizabeth?” he asked her. “Because the last time you were there...” Elizabeth had died.
“No, I’m fine with that. It’s just that this day has been so different, and right now I’m not sure how I feel about anything.”
“It was a nice kiss, Zoey.”
“But it was more than a kiss between friends. Don’t you feel guilty about that?”
“I probably will, once I’ve had time to think about it. You were my first since Elizabeth.”