The Doctor's Guardian

Ericka looked at her for a long moment, as if assessing the genuineness of the statement. And then her sharper features melted into a softer expression as she smiled.

“Call me G,” she urged.

Nika cocked her head. She’d heard the detective refer to the woman that way. Was it her middle initial, or the first letter of some kind of nickname?

“G?” Nika repeated, an unspoken question in her voice.

The platinum-blond head nodded. “That’s what I told Coleman to call me when he first came to live with me. I hated the way Grandmother sounded. Still do. Makes me think of some old, bent-over woman, shuffling around in sensible shoes, her white hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck.” Finished with her description, Ericka shivered.

“No worries,” Nika told her with a laugh. “That certainly doesn’t begin to describe you. I thought the computer made a mistake when I looked down at your chart earlier. If ever a woman didn’t look anywhere close to eighty-four, it’s you.”

Ericka positively beamed. “You know, you just might have become my new best friend after all,” the older woman told her.

“I’ll settle for being the doctor who makes you feel well enough to go home, Mrs.— G.” About to use the woman’s last name, Nika corrected herself at the last moment.

“Fair enough,” Ericka declared. “Continue,” she urged, indicating that she was ready to endure the rest of the physical.

Nika suppressed her smile and did as she was “bidden.”

She had just finished the feisty woman’s exam and was carefully entering the last of her notes on the chart when the sound jolted her. Piercing the late morning air, the alarm sounded a great deal like an air raid siren used in one of those old movies depicting Europe during World War II.

Except that this wasn’t an air raid. And rather than warning of a possible multitude of deaths, this had to do with only one possible demise. But even one was one too many.

She didn’t want to have another on the books if she could help it.

Nika instantly abandoned the chart, setting it down on a side counter.

“What is that awful noise?” Ericka asked as she put her hands over her ears and tried to press out the sound.

“I’ll put down you have good hearing when I get back,” Nika promised, trying to divert the woman’s curiosity from the reason that the alarm was going off. She didn’t want the woman frightened—and she definitely didn’t want her to start wondering if perhaps that alarm would ever go off for her.

“What’s going on?” Ericka demanded, shouting in order to be heard.

“It’s a code blue,” was all Nika said before she ran out into the hall—making sure she closed the door to Ericka’s room behind her.

The sound that signaled the very real possibility of someone’s life ebbing away filled the hallway, making it momentarily impossible for her to ascertain from which direction the alarm was coming. The next moment, Nika had her answer. Alerted by the monitor at the nurses’ station, the two responding nurses and an orderly were all running toward one room.

A quick scrutiny told Nika that so far, no doctor was coming to the patient’s aid. They were still incredibly shorthanded.

“Crash cart,” she yelled out to the other three. “We’re going to need a crash cart.”

The orderly, Gerald Mayfield, a powerful-looking man who was almost as wide as he was tall and had helped get her out of the elevator earlier, fell back to fetch the lifesaving device.

She knew who the room belonged to a second before she entered. John Kelly. She’d paused to talk to the man this morning just before she’d gone down to the cafeteria. And subsequently gotten stuck in the elevator on her way back, she thought ruefully. Maybe if she’d taken the stairs, she would have gotten back sooner and somehow could have prevented this.

God knew how, she thought now, looking at the painfully thin man whose heart had abruptly stopped beating.

The monitor attached to him, tracking his vital signs, had nothing to show for its efforts but very thin, straight lines. They were accompanied by an eerie, flat note that mournfully announced the end of a life.

“There’s no pulse, Doctor,” Katie O’Connor, one of the two nurses who’d made it to the patient’s room first, told her. The nurse’s long fingers were still pressed against the elderly man’s throat, as if that would somehow make his vital signs magically reappear once again.

But they didn’t. The straight lines on the monitor continued going nowhere.

It couldn’t end this quickly, Nika silently argued in her head.

“He was just talking to me,” she said out loud, addressing her words to Katie. “Telling me how much he was looking forward to going back to the nursing home because he’d figured out a chess move that would confound his roommate. He was positively gleeful about it. He didn’t sound or behave like a man who was about to die,” she added, saying the words more to herself than to the other two women.

Katie, who’d been a nurse more years than she’d willingly admit, looked at her with sympathy. “Can’t always tell by the way they look, Doctor.”

She knew that. And yet…

Behind her, Gerald was coming in, pushing the crash cart before him.

“Charge ’em,” Nika ordered, grabbing the defibrillator paddles. She held them up while Gerald quickly covered both surfaces with a gel. Rubbing them together, Nika called out, “Clear!” before applying both paddles to Kelly’s chest.

His body convulsed in response, clearing the mattress in some places, but ultimately the former police sergeant didn’t awaken from what appeared to be his now permanent sleep.

Nika didn’t want to let him go.

“C’mon, Mr. Kelly, you’ve got a chess game to finish, remember? You wanted to show Don that he couldn’t just come in and be the center of attention, remember? Don’t wimp out on me now,” she pleaded. Glancing over her shoulder, she looked at the nurse who was now at the controls of the defibrillator. “Again!” The next moment, with the amps raised, Nika cried “Clear!” and tried to revive the man again.

With the same results.

Twice more she made the retired police sergeant’s body go through its macabre, lifeless dance and had the exact same results each time.

Holding the paddles, she saw the two nurses and the orderly looking at her, waiting. Silently telling her to do what she knew she had to do.

Call it.

She released the sigh that was rattling around in her chest. “Time of death—eleven twenty-three,” Nika pronounced quietly and then returned the paddles to the cart.

“You did everything you could do, Doctor,” Katie told her sympathetically. “It was just his time to go,” the grandmother of five added softly.

“Besides,” the other nurse, Jenna, chimed in, “where he’s going is a lot better than where he would have gone if you’d brought him back from the brink,” she assured Nika with the confidence of the very young who never doubted themselves. “Have you seen that nursing home he was living in?” Jenna, all of twentysomething, shivered to make her point. “If that’s the way I’m going to end up, shoot me now.”

“Hey, a little respect for the dead,” Gerald chided sharply. Jenna frowned and fell into a brooding silence as she slowly stripped the deceased man of the various tubes and wires that had been connected to him. Gerald spared Nika a compassionate look. “Death’s all part of it, Dr. Pulaski,” he told her philosophically. “You shouldn’t take it so hard.”

The orderly was right. After all, what did she expect, Nika asked herself. She was working in the Geriatrics Unit, for heaven’s sake. These were old people. A lot of them had overtaxed their immune systems and were susceptible to so many different things, things that could fell them without a moment’s notice.

That was why they were running understaffed in this unit, because of the threat of someone unwittingly bringing in the flu. They couldn’t control the visitors who came in—although, sadly, a lot of these patients had no one to visit them—but they could at least control the staff’s interactions with the patients.

Nika nodded in response to what the orderly said. She forced herself to focus on the steps she had to take next, not on what had just happened.

“I guess it just seems like a lot of these old people have been dying lately,” she murmured. And death was not something she would ever get used to.

“That’s because they have,” Katie told her. She went about tidying the man up so that he had a little dignity left, even in death. “They’re old people,” she emphasized, just as Nika had in her mind. “It goes with the territory and is to be expected. It’s a lot harder to handle when you lose a patient in the pediatrics ward,” she pointed out. “At least these people have had relatively full lives.”

Nika nodded, then squared her shoulders, silently telling herself to get over it, to straighten up and fly right. She’d do none of her remaining patients any good if she allowed herself to break down and cry.