“I’m your float from the Nursing Office,” I told her, and gave a short wave. She looked me up and down slowly, and her left eyebrow rose. I was wearing an old pair of OR scrubs brought from home, freshly washed, but not wrinkle-free, and my ponytail was of dubious quality. I could see her doing the math of letting me, a potential ingrate, nurse some of the children in her care. If you thought plain intensive care unit nurses were overprotective and judgmental—which I frequently did—you hadn’t met a pediatrics intensive care nurse yet.
I tried to give off my best “I won’t kill anyone tonight, honest” vibe, and waited for her to come to her assignment decision.
“You’re in sixty-two and sixty-three. Call if you need help.”
I walked away confident that I, as a float nurse, had been given the easiest assignment on the floor. I’d probably have two kids with broken legs, or a dehydrated baby. I found my set of rooms at the very end of the hall near the fire escape stairs.
The curtains were closed, and I could hear speaking in a foreign tongue. The charge nurse hadn’t mentioned relatives. Pediatric patient parents were the worst, either hovering or incompetently neglectful. “Is that German?” I asked aloud.
“Night shift?” came the response. “Come help.”
I sniffed the air. Closed curtains were rarely a good sign. It smelled sweet—
“Hello?” asked the outgoing nurse.
“Tying my shoe—sorry!” I lied, and ducked inside.
The patient was a boy who looked about twelve, with a ventilator connected to a tracheotomy tube in his neck. His whole body was flaccid, and his head was tilted to one side. The nurse had a plastic tub full of water balanced on the bed, bathing him. She handed me a dry washcloth. “Glove up.”
I sniffed the air again. “Strawberry?”
“Ensure. He gets 45 ccs an hour. But I didn’t connect his peg tube right, and I pulled the covers up and—” she said, and I saw the problem. For some reason this kid had a tube from his stomach to the outside world, and she’d set the feeding pump on when the tube was disconnected. Instead of going into him, the Ensure’d spilled all over him, as pink as the painted walls above his bed. But why didn’t the kid say anything?
“Shawn was in a motor vehicle accident four years ago. He’s a C3 quad now.”
“Ooooooh.” C3 meant a neck fracture, high. “And now?”
“Recovering from autonomic dysreflexia. He’s in the clear, we’re just watching him one more day is all.”
I nodded to head off any extra questions. She went through the rest of her report, while we finished the bath. All his monitors were on and all of the parameters were currently normal. I wrote things down at the appropriate times, and she seemed confident she was passing Shawn over to a competent nurse, one who hadn’t gotten a patient killed on the last active shift she’d had.
There were family provisions stocked up on the shelf near the windows, Doritos, Diet Cokes. The German continued from a small CD player set up with speakers by the table at the head of the bed. It made everything we were doing sound more dramatic than it was, like I was about to Nurse in Space, or in a fairy-infested cave.
“And over there?” I gestured to my second patient, in a crib on the other side of the room.
“Downs syndrome and RSV.”
“Ahhhhhh.” What the hell was RSV? Some pedidisease. In my mind, I scanned through lecture slides. Respiratory-something-virus, my brain pulled up, relieved. I walked over and peered into the crib. The baby was surrounded by teddy bears that actually seemed cheerful. She had a nasal canula taped to her cheeks and an extra tube, like a ventilation duct in miniature, pointed in front of her nose, with air hissing out, taped atop a teddy bear’s arm. “No lines?” I asked, after scanning nearby for IV poles.
“Nope. Just oxygen. You gotta watch her oxygen saturation—when she sleeps too deep, or rolls away from the blow-by,” the nurse said, waggling the duct-taped teddy bear pressed into service, “she drops.”
Desats, I knew about. “Okay. Got it.” I looked around the room. Not bad so far. I almost felt as confident as I sounded. “What’s up with the German?”
She shrugged. “I think it’s his grandfather, some philosophy professor. He likes to listen to it before he goes to sleep. Also”—and here she scratched at her own cl**vage, in a way that indicated she was talking about my own—“he’s a bit of a perv. Hormones and all. His trach is uncuffed so he can talk around it in whispers. He likes it when you lean over a lot. I suggest you pin up.”
“Heh. Thanks.”
She smiled warmly at me, happy to be going home. “Have a good shift.”
A girl could hope.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The two pedi rooms faced each other, like the mirrored sides of a clamshell. Each room was lined with privacy curtains, but I knew if I closed these I’d just make the charge nurse nervous.
The sinks, monitors, and standard room items were at the perimeter of the rooms: ambu bags, pediatric-sized, suction pumps, and the oxygen pumps that were already in use, the baby with her nasal canula, and Shawn with his ventilated trach. Bed right, crib left, and in the far rear corner of each room was a small bathroom for guests. The back wall had two couches if parents were spending the night; thank God both were empty.
I assessed the baby first. Dry diaper, nothing doing. She had spiky dark hair like a troll doll and she was contentedly asleep. I wasn’t going to change that.
I went over to Shawn’s side and waved down at him. He regarded me with the sort of disdain only a preteen can muster. “I’m Edie, your nurse tonight.”
He made a soft noise in response that I couldn’t hear over the rising German. I leaned over. “Duh,” I heard, more clearly.
I did my assessment under his bored gaze. “Do you need anything?” I asked at the end of it.
He cocked an eyebrow. “A bl*w j*b?”
“Nice try. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“Mom’s dead. Same accident.”
“Um. Sorry to hear that.”
His eyes rolled. “Right.”
After coming to this amazing détente, I felt sheepish. “Well, I’ll be over here if you need anything.” I backed out of his range of view, and did my charting.
Between the sliding glass doors that led into each room was a stretch of desk with a computer and … the Internet.
I sank into the chair and checked to see if the charge nurse could see me—not if I didn’t lean out too far. The night was looking up! Two patients who ought to sleep all night long, and an Internet connection. How lucky was I? Pretty damn lucky, at least until someone needed a diaper change.
I started clicking away on the Web, reading local news, catching up on the things I’d missed while I’d been incapacitated. The murder rate didn’t seem to have gone up, and if there was an uptick in the number of cats going missing, it hadn’t been worth reporting on.
I got into a routine of clicking on a page, reading a paragraph, then glancing over my shoulder at both monitors. Half an hour passed idly by, and Shawn’s German philosophy-loving grandfather stopped shouting. I heaved a sigh through pursed lips, and clicked onto the next page of celebrity gossip.
Two pages later, after reading about everyone who might possibly be pregnant any time this next century, the German began again.
“Shawn, get to sleep,” I muttered. And then I turned around. Quadriplegic patients weren’t known for their ability to hit the play button. I stood up and craned in his direction, looking for an adaptive stick that maybe he’d used with his teeth. The volume of the German voice increased.
I walked over. Shawn was completely asleep. There was only the small hiss of his ventilator pushing air through his trach. I turned the CD player—well out of reach of anything that Shawn could use—off. Its green “on” light went dark. I glared at it for a moment.
A woman wearing pink Hello Kitty scrubs knocked on the glass door. “Mind an early break?”
“Not at all.” I briefed her on both of my patients and took off for my one A.M. dinner.
* * *
I fished my badge for Y4 out of my back pocket as I walked back to the old building. As I neared the right elevator bank my stomach started to clench—what if it didn’t work? What if I stood out there, waving my badge around like an idiot, and it never worked again? No one would believe that I’d ever worked with vampires. I’d be condemned to pick up float shifts in the rest of the hospital for all eternity, the Flying Dutchman of RNs. I closed my eyes, shoved my badge toward the reader, and listened for the click.
I didn’t hear a click, but I did smell the sharp tang of fresh urine. I was home—or close enough. I opened my eyes, stepped forward into the elevator’s waiting chamber, and tried not to breathe while the elevator hurtled down.
“Why,” I asked myself upon exiting, gasping in fresh air, “must the elevators always smell like pee?”
Gina came out of the break room with a cracker in her mouth. She smiled at me around it, and I instantly felt relieved. “Hey, Edie—wait, you’re not on tonight, are you?”
“I’m picking up in Pedi ICU.” I shrugged with practiced nonchalance. “I’ve got a cat to feed, you know?”
“As your local vet nurse, I approve.”
I grinned at her. “Speaking of—why is our elevator a litter box?”
“It’s the weres, a territory thing. They can’t help it. Even in human form, when they visit during the days.”
I looked down at my shoes. I wore different ones on the floor, I kept them in the locker room. But I hadn’t considered the cooties I’d get on my real-life shoes, just by riding in the elevator to the locker room. “Ew.”
“You’d think the Shadows’d stop them, but no.” She shrugged. “I gotta get back.” She waved and went around the corner.
The Shadows this, the Shadows that—I’d asked Charles about them once, when our breaks had overlapped. He said they spent most of their time in the emergency department. He claimed one had touched him once, but he wouldn’t tell me more. They were a little like King Arthur, where the County equaled England, occasionally running in to rescue us, a threat to keep our assorted patient populations in line. Some help they’d been, though, back when I was accidentally killing someone.