Blood Lies

Chapter One The siren choked off in mid-wail. Within seconds, the flashing red light swept through the frosted glass of the ER's sliding door like a disco ball on overdrive. I heaved a self-pitying sigh. Ten minutes before the end of a long night shift, I'd counted on an uneventful and punctual exit. Any chance for either vanished when the ambulance stretcher and two paramedics burst through the main Emergency Room doors. "Which room?" the tall scraggy paramedic yelled as they careened past the triage desk. "Trauma Two," the triage nurse called back. I ran alongside the paramedics, but our pace wasn't fast enough to outrun the acrid smells of urine and vomit wafting up from the stretcher. A woman of indeterminate age lay on her side, twitching and thrashing. Without the restraining hand of the female paramedic she might have bucked off the stretcher. Legs and arms jerked in violent rhythm. Her chin slammed into her chest. A mess of long brown hair covered her face. Her T-shirt was spattered with vomit. A chain of drool connected the corner of her mouth to the sheets. An image of Linda Blair from The Exorcist flashed in my mind. "What's the story?" I asked the baby-faced female paramedic running beside me. "Seizing when we got to her. Found down at Cloud Nine." She glanced at me, deciding I was old enough to require clarification. "It's an after-hours club." "Thanks," I grunted. "What's she got on board?" "Her sister says she dropped two tabs of Ecstasy about an hour before we got to her. First-time user. Otherwise the kid is healthy." "Kid?" "Fourteen years." She wiped her flushed brow with a palm. "Name's Lara Maxwell." "How long has she been seizing?" "Twenty minutes, give or take." Way too long. Within half an hour of a continuous seizure, or status epilepticus, irreversible brain damage can occur. "What have you given her?" I asked. "Nothing. We scooped and ran. Impossible to get an IV in her in the back of our rig." She flailed her own arms, as if the wildly twitching patient wasn't explanation enough. We wheeled into Trauma Two, one of St. Jude's three identical resuscitation rooms. Nothing architecturally unique about this or any resuscitation bay I've ever seen; all are big bland rooms filled with medical supplies, lights, X-ray viewing boxes, and, at times like these, people. The place swarmed with them. Some moved with purpose, othersthe usual array of wide-eyed students and ER lookie-loos (staff who find any excuse to turn up whenever something exciting rolls in)just milled about. Swaddling her in the ambulance stretcher's sheet, the two paramedics swung the patient over to the room's stretcher. Lara Maxwell was oblivious to her new surroundings; her arms and legs never missed a beat of their syncopated contraction. Anne Bailey, arguably the poster girl for hardened frumpy ER nurses the world over, was the nurse in charge. She had no time for the bustling crowd. "If you don't serve a purpose, get out!" Anne shouted and, on cue, the room thinned. She turned to the other nurses. "Lucy, two IVKalla, Daniel is the author of 'Blood Lies', published 2008 under ISBN 9780765357922 and ISBN 0765357925.