Searching for Forever, page 12
meltdown.”
I paused, suddenly oversaturated with sadness and anxiety.
Unable to go on, I picked up the closest chart to me and began
to examine it. “I have to get back to work, Charlie.”
And without another word, she was gone.
CHAPTER TEN
I spent the better part of a week avoiding Charlie—this girl
I so badly wanted, no, needed, to be near again. I was a heroin
addict going through withdrawals so severe that I ached, from
every pore of my body. Food and sleep held little interest for
me, and the only things keeping me from spontaneously
bursting into tears, or burning down buildings, were my
daughter and my job. I was angry in a way I’d never
experienced before. Angrier than I’d ever been at my father for
his drinking, angrier than I’d been at my elusive mother for
not thinking I was enough for her. Angry in a way that terrified
me.
I was attacking everyone who crossed my path. When a
patient wanted a refill on his Percocet, I told him he was a
lousy user and should get a job. When Tim asked me to stay
late, I told him to handle it himself. And when Peter tried to
kiss me, or even grab my hand, I told him not to touch me. I
was a monster to everyone, save maybe for Sammy.
My friends and colleagues were getting tired of turning a
deaf ear to it too. More and more, I’d hear the whispers
—“What happened to Natalie? She’s so nasty lately. That’s
just not like her.”
And it wasn’t like me. The fact that these people loved me
probably salvaged my reputation, in spite of my terrible
behavior, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring
myself out of the dark, hollow space I’d fallen into.
Charlie was finished chasing me too. Every day I saw her
at work, she became more distant and detached, until she was
only speaking a few words to me. To watch her life continue
as if I’d never mattered—to watch her smile, laugh, exist
without me—just fueled the anger that was already blazing,
until I was so miserable, I wished I could find a way to exist
without myself as well.
*
“There’s a gunshot to the head coming in, Natalie,”
Michelle said quietly, a glint of excitement in her bedroom
eyes. I couldn’t help but notice the change in her—as if her
sheer hatred and jealousy of me had all but disintegrated and
she was almost afraid of me. Maybe Charlie had told her she
was done with me. Maybe they were even dating already.
Maybe they’d get married and adopt some babies from some
foreign country, and she’d become Mrs. Dr. Charlie
Thompson.
“Dr. Jenner? Did you hear me?” she said again, with
slightly more apprehension.
“Sorry. What?”
“A gunshot…to the head. Fifty-six-year-old male.”
“Is he still alive?” I asked, blankly.
“Barely. But yes. They’ll be here in about five.”
Dazed, I got up from my seat and moved to the trauma
room, where a crowd had gathered. Like in an episode of
M*A*S*H, we stood there, donning gloves, gowns, and masks,
waiting for the crew to arrive. I was inappropriately grateful
for the distraction of blood and death, realizing that these were
some of the only moments left in my life that I wasn’t
consumed with missing Charlie. I shivered as a gust of shame
rocked me. I was a physician, a professional, an adult. This
was my job. People’s lives were at stake here. The family of
this man with a bullet in his skull was trusting me to do
whatever it took to bring their father, their brother, their son
back. It was time to pull myself together.
“Okay,” I said calmly, inhaling a breath of stale, electrified
air. “I want respiratory called. Get the intubation kit ready.
Let’s do this.”
Nurses nudged each other, smiling and whispering quietly,
and the intensity in the room lit up like a firecracker. Angry,
brokenhearted, or just plain fucked up, I had to make this man
my only priority. And this was what I lived for.
“They’re here,” Michelle said, peeking her head out the
back door of the trauma room.
The paramedics wheeled in a man, soiled with blood from
the neck up, covered only in a sheet stained with red, at a pace
that contradicted the urgency of the situation. That’s the thing
most people don’t realize about emergency medicine—
everybody takes their time. Because when you don’t, people
die.
“Twenty-two-caliber gunshot wound to the right temple.
Entrance wound. No exit. The family found him in his room
right after it happened. No spontaneous respirations on arrival.
We could only get a blind airway in him—he’s got blood
everywhere. He’s tachycardic at 121, pressures have been
around 50 palp. Pupils are blown. I’m sorry we couldn’t do
more.” The young medic hung his head.
“Hey, I’m sure you did what you could, guys.” I gently
placed my hand on his back, as the others in the room swiftly
moved him off the gurney.
“Someone get me a size 8 tube, please.” I moved to the
man’s head.
Out of the growing group of staff came all five feet three
of Charlie, holding a breathing tube and a scope. And for a
minute, she was no longer a woman who kept me awake at
night with images of her smile. No longer someone who mixed
me up so profoundly, I couldn’t even begin to function. For a
minute, she was nothing more than a brilliant paramedic, and I
was immensely comforted.
“Here,” she said, handing it to me and holding pressure on
the man’s neck to help open his airway.
“You want to give it a try, Charlie?” I asked, softly.
“No.” She smiled. “This one’s all you, Dr. Jenner.”
I suctioned the pool of fresh blood collecting in the man’s
throat and passed the tube easily through his vocal cords.
“Tube’s in.” Charlie confirmed placement with her
stethoscope, and respiratory connected the dying man to the
ventilator.
For at least ten minutes, we all stood around, watching the
monitors beep and blip, and listening to the ventilators hiss
and scream. What was left to do? The rush, the high I’d so
badly needed that day, quickly ebbed, and I was left with the
same restless need I’d faced so many times before. The man
was stuck somewhere between the living and the dead, his
heartbeat strong and young and vibrant, his brain destroyed by
the fragments of bullet that littered it. What, exactly, were we
saving here? There’s never time to ask that question until it’s
already too late to answer it.
I couldn’t help but think about my mother. As a child, I
came downstairs one cloudy day in late August to find her
sprawled in a heap on the floor, an empty bottle of what I
could only guess were sleeping pills and a half pint of Patron
sitting neatly on my father’s desk. There was no note, no
warning. I was ten years old—and when my father found us, I
was crouched over her, pushing as hard as I could on her chest,
just like I’d read in one of my father’s books. I couldn’t save
my mother. I couldn’t save this man, Mr. Taylor. And, that day,
I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to save myself.
For another half hour, Mr. Taylor’s heart continued to beat,
as his family members came in droves, crying and screaming
and hugging, over and over again, until their sadness, their
anger became mine as well. Became all of ours. It’s so easy to
forget, in the midst of tubes and machines and medicine, that
these are people, that these “gunshot wounds to the head” are
someone’s family. We force ourselves to see them as numbers
—a blood pressure, a pulse, a respiratory rate, a lab value. We
allow ourselves to be cynical and downright cruel, saying
things like “Well, he did it to himself, didn’t he?” Things that
would appall others outside of our world. We say you have to
be a little bit crazy to go into medicine, especially emergency
medicine. But you also have to be a little bit dead. If you
aren’t…you’ll die completely. And I realized, looking at the
man in front of me, who was no more alive than a ream of
paper, that we weren’t all that different.
“It’s time,” I whispered to Michelle, who had been
assigned as the man’s primary nurse. She nodded solemnly
and moved to the family’s side.
“Mrs. Taylor,” I said, “we’ve done everything we can do
for your husband. But unfortunately, he’s gone. I’m so sorry.”
It was a line I’d practiced a hundred times, maybe more, since
residency. But it never felt natural. It never got easier. I
watched as his wife collapsed into Michelle’s waiting arms
and sobbed uncontrollably until her scrubs were saturated with
tears.
“No! No,” she screamed again and again, until her sounds,
too, became just another piece of the symphony of death that
was playing in the trauma room that day. “I don’t understand,”
she finally said, this time with an eerie calm I wasn’t
expecting. Everyone in the room looked up from their work.
“Ma’am, your husband…A bullet passed through his brain.
He’s gone.” I reached out and placed a tentative hand on her
shoulder.
“But his heart…His heart’s still beating, isn’t it? The
monitor up there…it says his heart’s still beating! So he’s still
alive, right? There’s still a chance?” And one by one, the room
emptied out, until all that was left were Michelle, Charlie, and
myself.
“Well, that’s true but…” I stuttered, overcome with this
woman’s raw, jagged sadness that penetrated the room.
“What Dr. Jenner is trying to explain to you, Mrs. Taylor,”
Charlie said in a voice as soothing and tender as I’d ever
heard, “is that your husband is gone.” She moved closer to the
woman and put her arm around her shoulder, allowing the
woman to place her head on her chest.
“But…his heart…” She protested again.
“These machines here are keeping his heart alive,” Charlie
said, gesturing behind her. “But that’s it, Mrs. Taylor. It’s just
his heart. It’s a series of muscles and electrical impulses
moving in his body. But your husband…he’s not in there
anymore. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Taylor.” The woman folded again,
grabbing so tight to Charlie’s waist that the air was sucked out
of her.
“Mrs. Taylor,” she said again, slowly pulling the woman
from her grip and holding her in front of her. “Do you believe
in God?”
She nodded vigorously, wet, round tears leaking from her
dark eyes.
“Well, so do I. And I believe that your husband is with
God now. I really, truly believe that. So please…be sad. For
yourself. For your children and your family. But don’t be sad
for Mr. Taylor. God’s taking care of him.”
Tears poured like waterfalls again, but this time, Mrs.
Taylor wore a small, almost undetectable smile. “Thank you.
Oh, thank you.” She hugged Charlie again. “What’s your
name, dear?”
“Charlie.”
“Thank you, Charlie, for reminding me of God’s plan.”
Mrs. Taylor cried some more, resting her head on her dead
husband’s rising chest. “Good-bye, honey,” she whispered
softly, taking his cold hand in hers. “I’m sorry you didn’t see
any other way.”
Emotion inched its way up my throat, choking me quietly
and finally leaving me in the form of faintly wet eyes.
“Okay. I’m ready now.” And Mrs. Taylor took the gold
wedding band off her husband’s finger and began silently
mouthing a prayer.
I nodded to Charlie, who slowly made her way to the
ventilator and turned it off. For what felt like several long
hours, the room was silent. No one was passing outside the
doors of the trauma room. No one was shouting orders or
taking X-rays. And we no longer heard the comforting whisper
of the ventilator. There was nothing.
The three of us stood there, watching these two strangers
share their last moments together. In one morning—one dark,
terrible morning—it was all taken away from them. I watched
the monitors above his head as the peaks and valleys of his
heart rhythm quickened and then slowed ominously, and I
tried desperately not to ask why. I didn’t want to wonder what
was so horrible that Mr. Taylor would need to leave everything
in this world behind. To leave Christmas mornings, and
watching his young daughters get married, and grandbabies
running around naked in his kitchen, and night after night with
his wife, whose world clearly revolved only around him.
The alarming of the machines briefly interrupted the
screeching silence. I placed my stethoscope over Mr. Taylor’s
heart for several seconds, turned off the monitors, and nodded
somberly to Michelle. I didn’t have to look to know what she
was writing in his chart.
Time of death, 9:22 a.m.
I needed a save. I needed someone to walk into my
emergency room on the verge of death, and I needed to rip
them away from it. I needed to feel useful. I needed to feel
needed. Mr. Taylor had asked to die, but his wife had not. And
there was no doubt in my mind that a part of her, a very large,
nonregenerating part, died that morning too. And it was her
death that sent me deeper into my state of unyielding doubt
and despair.
“I need a smoke.” Charlie’s deep voice rocked me from my
introverted hell. “Come with me.”
Seeing Charlie standing in front of me, calm and confident,
steady and strong, sent a bolt of life through me I was afraid I
might never see again. And I was comforted in a way that felt
like being held.
Without a word, I followed her up to the roof—our roof—
where we sat on nearby empty trash cans.
For a while, neither of us spoke. Charlie took a single
cigarette out from behind her ear, twirled it in her thumb and
index finger a few times, then lit it slowly. I watched her take a
drag, exhale plumes of smoke in serene, deliberate patterns.
“Well. That sucked,” she finally said, as a puff of gray
clouds escaped her mouth.
“Yeah.”
“You know, I don’t get it.” Charlie threw the butt on the
ground and stomped it out. “I’ve lost people before.
Remember Gerald? The blown aneurysm?”
“How could I forget?”
“That was so awful. But this…this feels so much worse…”
“I know.”
“But why? I mean, Christ, this guy wanted to die! He did it
to himself. He got what he wanted, right? So why does it feel
so fucking terrible?”
Instinctively, I took Charlie in my arms like a small child
and cradled her.
“Because this wasn’t fate.”
She looked up at me, curiously. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, considering you believe all that God stuff you
told Mrs. Taylor in there, then you believe in fate. Right?” She
nodded. “And this wasn’t fate. This was a man, a young man
who still had at least another twenty years left with his family,
who ended it all. You know, with the Gerald Greens, you kind
of learn to accept over time that you just can’t control some
things. That God has a bigger plan for some people, and all we
can really do is get in the way. They’re going to die whether
we help them or not. But this guy…Mr. Taylor…he made a
choice. This wasn’t fate. This was a choice, and we couldn’t
do a damn thing to stop it.”
When she looked up at me again, her face was damp and
her eyes were red and swollen. And she clung to me hard.
“But you were amazing in there, Charlie.”
She shook her head. “All I did was hand you an 8 tube.”
“No. That’s not all you did.” I placed a finger under her
chin and lifted it, forcing her to look at me. “You told that
woman that her husband was dead. That’s the single hardest
thing you’ll ever have to do in your life. I guarantee it.”
“So what?”
“So, you comforted her, and you showed her that she
wasn’t alone, at least for a few minutes.”
“What does it matter, anyway?” She shrugged.
“It matters. Trust me. It does. You were there for her when
