Angels on the Night Shift (23 page)

“We’re trying to put a stop to it,” the officer told us. “But the stuff is easy to buy, and we’ve been seeing a lot of break-ins lately for some reason. People are scared. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before you see your first one,” he added, looking over at me.

To this day, I don’t know how he knew, but the door leading out to the triage area burst open and the triage nurse ran into the department carrying a young child in her arms.

“Dr. Lesslie! Get over here quick!” she called out to me, heading to the nearest empty room and carefully putting the child down on the stretcher.

We all jumped up from our chairs and headed over to the screaming little girl. The police officer darted toward the triage entrance, his hand on the butt of his firearm. We had heard loud yells, and there was no telling what was going on outside those doors.

“What happened?” I asked the triage nurse, looking down at the girl. She was clawing at her face and eyes and her horrifying cries were becoming garbled. Foam was coming out of her mouth, and she started gurgling.

“Her name’s Missy—Missy Jones,” the nurse said breathlessly. “And it’s lye burns!”

“Lye burns?” I echoed, not believing what I was hearing.

“Red Devil lye!” the nurse clarified.

We sprang into action—one nurse starting an IV, another restraining Missy’s flailing arms while another was suctioning the ever-increasing foam from the little girl’s mouth and throat. One of the techs was getting the supplies together to start irrigating her face, eyes, and upper body.

I was preparing to secure her airway and turned to the triage nurse.

“Do we know what happened?”

“I couldn’t get much from the mother,” she began to explain, catching her breath and calming down a little. “But the boyfriend told me she keeps a glass of Red Devil lye on her bedside table, and Missy came in while the mother was asleep and must have pulled it over on herself.”

“That’s not the way it happened,” the police officer said, walking into the treatment bay. “When Missy walked into the bedroom, it startled her mother, and without thinking she threw the lye in her girl’s face.”

One of the nurses gasped.

My heart sank as I looked down on Missy’s destroyed face. The cornea of one eye was completely clouded over, gone. And the other was bright red and steamy. The skin of her left eyelid and the left side of her face had disappeared, eaten away by the lye.

As I passed an endotracheal tube through Missy’s throat, I was shocked by the amount of swelling and damage I was seeing. Her mouth and pharynx were puffy and red, and her vocal cords were already swelling and purple. I was lucky to get the tube through and in place.

“Doc,” the officer said, standing right behind me. “The mother wants to come back.”

Suddenly it seemed that every eye in the room was on me.

My face was flushed and I was trembling with anger. I wasn’t sure Missy was going to survive this, and even if she did…

“No!” I said, my voice tight, and as controlled as I could make it. “Not yet.”

I knew the anger I was feeling was doing me no good, and it wasn’t helping Missy.

Somehow I was able to put it behind me—at least for two days. Then Missy died, and I became angry all over again. This time it didn’t go away.

One day Virginia Granger called me into her office and closed the door behind us. She didn’t sit down behind her desk, but took the chair right beside me, pulled it close, and leaned toward me.

“Robert, when I was in the army, stationed overseas, I worked with a surgeon, Major…no, his name doesn’t matter. What
does
matter is that he was one of the best trauma surgeons I had ever been around. Great ability and a great attitude. But one day we had three young recruits injured in a training accident. It was a freakish thing, and these boys were really mangled. The problem was that it had been caused by an officer who had been out drinking the night before. That really set off the surgeon, and it was all I could do to keep him calm and focused on the injured soldiers.

“He told me later that his younger brother had been killed by a drunk driver. He apologized and told me he thought he had gotten over it, but it was obvious he hadn’t.

“We worked with those boys all day and night, and early in the morning we lost one. The other two were eventually shipped back to the States. But they were never going to be the same. One lost both hands, and the other lost an eye and part of his face. It was awful.

“The surgeon never recovered from that night. He just was never the same. We tried to help, but all we could do was watch as he became more and more angry, and more withdrawn and sullen. Finally he transferred out of there. I don’t know what happened to him. In fact, I don’t even know if he stayed in medicine.”

She was looking at me intently now, studying my face, and for a moment she didn’t say anything. I knew what she was telling me and what she was trying to do.

“Here, I want you to have this,” she said, handing me a folded slip of paper. “Keep it with you.”

She got up and walked out of the office, closing the door behind her. I sat there alone with my thoughts, staring at the paper in my hand. I unfolded it and started reading. The first part had been carefully typed, and it was clear and legible. Underneath those words was something in Virginia’s own handwriting, and it took a little longer to make out.

Anger is a killing thing; it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before—it takes something from him.

—Louis L’Amour

If you don’t have something in you that’s above you, you soon give in to the things around you.

I knew she was right, and that Louis L’Amour was right. What I was feeling was killing me and taking something from me. Just like the army surgeon’s anger had taken something from him. And I realized my anger was changing me too. I needed to release this to the One above me.

I folded up the paper and slipped it in my pocket. This wouldn’t be the last time I would need to read it and be reminded.

Ted Nivens and Lori Davidson were still standing by the stretcher, working with Cindy, who was lying quietly now. I turned and walked out of the room.

I was on my way out to triage to find Cindy’s mother, and as I passed the nurses’ station Darren looked up at me. His eyes still burned with anger. I recognized myself in those eyes. He needed Virginia’s wisdom.

I caught his eyes and said, “Darren, when I get back, let’s sit down.”

7:35 a.m.
In less than a week, it started all over again.

“Dr. Lesslie, can you come here a minute?”

Lori Davidson was standing in the doorway of the medicine room, motioning for me to join her.

When I got there, she was standing in front of the narcotics cabinet, unlocking one of the doors with her keys.

“I need to show you something,” she said, reaching into the cabinet and picking up a box of medicine. It was the same type of container Walter Stevens had shown me a few weeks earlier. This time, I knew exactly where to look.

“Hmm,” I murmured, stunned at this development. “More Demerol.”

I counted six tiny perforations in the bottom of the box, neatly spaced for proper balance, just like before.

“Do you have any idea when this might have happened?” I asked Lori, putting the box of Demerol down on the counter and reaching into the cabinet for another. My mind was racing and I was trying to get a handle on this.

“That’s the only one,” she told me. “I checked twice. But look at this.”

She reached to another shelf and picked up an open box of morphine vials. Before she handed it to me, she pointed down to the narcotics logbook on the countertop. Then with her index finger, she moved down to today’s date and the morphine column. The number “9” had been written in the small space, indicating there should be nine vials of morphine in the open box.

I glanced at the container in her hand and counted nine.
That matched. So what was the problem?

Lori moved her finger over just a little, to the place where the counting nurse puts their initials.
D.A.

“Okay?” I asked, puzzled. At least this part seemed to be in order.

“Now look at this,” she said, handing me the box of morphine.

Once again, I counted nine vials, all unopened and all intact. Then I withdrew one of the vials and rolled it around between my thumb and index finger.

“What! How did this happen?”

The vial in my hand was Vistaril, not morphine. Someone had intentionally switched it out and pocketed the narcotic.

“I just noticed it a little while ago,” Lori explained. “I don’t know what made me do that, but I took a couple of them out and saw they had been changed. From the top, they all look the same.”

“How many…?” It didn’t matter. My mind was reeling and a hundred thoughts were screaming for my attention. But almost immediately, I latched onto one pressing realization.

“Amy!” I exclaimed. “This will clear Amy! Whoever’s been doing this has finally tipped their hand, and it can’t be her!”

I’ll get Virginia, and we’ll go to Bill Chalmers and set this straight!

I must have been turning toward the doorway because Lori stopped me.

“Hold on, Dr. Lesslie,” she said patiently. “There’re some things we need to think about.”

I turned to face her and then glanced over again to the narcotics cabinet.

“No, that’s all that’s been tampered with,” she said, following my gaze. “But we need to be careful about a couple of things. I’ve already talked with Ms. Granger and told her about this. She had to go to a mandatory management meeting this morning and won’t be back ’til around noon. And she asked me to tell you about this, but to be sure you didn’t do anything—not until you two can talk.”

She was looking up at me, and seemed to be waiting to be sure I was listening.

I had heard what she’d said, but my brain was in overdrive. We needed to get in touch with Amy, and there was the matter of the switched medicines. You can give morphine intravenously without any problems, but IV Vistaril will burn a person’s veins and can cause other problems.
If an unknowing nurse reached into the morphine box and took out a vial of Vistaril…

As if Lori was reading my mind, she said, “I’ve been off for two days and just noticed this a little while ago. But I checked, and we haven’t given much morphine over the past forty-eight hours, so I don’t think anyone has been given the wrong medicine. No one has said anything, and that’s something that would stand out, don’t you think?”

“It should,” I mused, considering other possibilities. If the person who had switched the two drugs was also the person dispensing them, it would be a simple matter to disguise their actions. But that person—almost certainly a nurse—wouldn’t always be working. And that left open the possibility of one of our patients being given the wrong medicine by mistake. That would be a disaster, and I felt my face flush with anger as I thought about it.

“Here,” I said to Lori, handing her the medicine box. “We need to put this somewhere safe, where no one can get their hands on it.”

She took it from me and said, “I’ve already thought about that, and I’m going to take it to Ms. Granger’s office.”

I looked down again at the narcotics logbook and studied the last entry.

“D.A.,” I said softly.

“I know,” Lori whispered, a note of sadness in her voice. “I don’t want to think Darren could be doing this, but…”

Her voice trailed off. She was coming to the same conclusion I was now being forced to face. I had supported Darren Adler through all of his troubles and had championed his return to the ER. I thought I knew him, and I would never have thought he was capable of stealing and abusing narcotics. But he
had
become a little unpredictable lately, with more and more frequent outbursts of anger. And there had been that little girl the other night with the burns…

“What did Ms. Granger have to say?” I asked Lori, needing to put those thoughts away, at least for a while.

“She had the same response you did,” Lori said, nodding her head. “Her first reaction was to clear Amy’s name, but then she started considering other things. She still doesn’t know who is doing this, and she doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardize catching them. But she
had
to go to that meeting, and she said she wasn’t going to talk with anyone until she had a chance to talk with you.”

“Okay,” I sighed, closing the logbook and looking out into the department. “I guess we’ll have to wait. That’s hard for me to do. I want to handle this thing head-on and get it over with. But Virginia’s right. I need to hear what she has to say. And it looks like we have work to do.”

I was almost at the nurses’ station when I heard it. Stopping cold in my tracks, I cocked my head toward the hallway and listened.

“Yep, you heard it,” Susan Everett said, looking up from behind the counter.

Then there it was again.

Woof! Woof! Woof!
It was high-pitched and definitely of canine origin.