Unrivaled by Radclyffe

Author:Radclyffe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781636790145
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2021-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Dec arrived just as Honor and the staff transferred the man with the gunshot wound onto the treatment table. From what she could see of his slim body and smooth face beneath the tape around the ET tube, he appeared to be in his late teens or early twenties. She said to the EMT, “I’ll take over the compressions. Do we know how this happened?”

“His grandmother heard a shot and found him on the front porch. She kept saying it was his girlfriend when we got there. No shooter on the scene. Police are on it.”

“Good.” Dec had never experienced it personally, but she’d heard of plenty of instances where a shooter arrived in the ER to finish whatever altercation had prompted the assault.

The EMTs stepped away, and Dec took up the count while Honor supervised the resident inserting the chest tube on the right side. The bullet wound was adjacent to the young man’s nipple, suggesting a deflated lung at the very least and the possibility, considering how much blood soaked the gurney, of a major vascular injury.

Emmett McCabe arrived a few seconds later, moved up next to Honor, and scanned the patient. “Anything coming out of the chest tube?”

“No,” Honor muttered. “I think he’s lost most of his blood volume already.”

The ER resident working next to Honor said, “I can’t get a decent line anywhere.”

Dec, mentally keeping count and watching the blood pressure readouts, said, “Cut down on the femoral. Don’t worry about being neat. Just get something big in there. He’s got no blood volume.”

“Right.” The ER resident turned away to grab the cutdown tray.

“We need to open his chest,” Dec said. “I can’t get enough compression with him being so low in blood. Emmett, you want to get on that?”

“Yeah,” Emmett said without the slightest hint of uncertainty.

“Do it.” Dec had never worked with McCabe before, but Quinn Maguire wouldn’t have made her the chief surgery resident if she wasn’t practically ready to be an attending. Technically she was still being supervised, and right now that hardly mattered. If they didn’t get some kind of blood flow to this kid’s brain, he’d be joining Tony Ricci as a possible organ donor. But unlike Tony, he’d arrived with a chance, and to lose him now would be an unacceptable failure.

Dec edged up a little toward the shoulder to give Emmett room to get in on the left side, where she quickly doused the torso with Betadine straight from the bottle, pulled on gloves, and said to Raymond Chang, the ER tech, “You’ve done this before. Can you assist?”

“You got it.” Chang, a former Navy corpsman, pushed a stainless steel instrument stand up close to her right arm and ripped open a sterile instrument pack. With the alacrity born of hundreds of repetitions, he popped open a scalpel from its sterile pack and dropped it onto the tray. Emmett picked it up, walked her fingers down the ribs to the fifth space, and made a wide incision from the midline of his chest toward his armpit.

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