Page 10 of Caution to the Wind

“Christ,” I muttered to a fellow resident as he started to intubate her.

“Get her into surgery,” Dr. Pandey demanded, all efficiency, her face a mask of professionalism. “Fast.”

We worked on her for hours.

A brain hemorrhage from blunt force trauma.

Brutal tears in delicate places that had to be sewn up carefully so she’d have a hope of regainin’ sensation.

A broken clavicle and fractured eye socket.

By the time we finished, I had a vicious ache in my spine from hunchin’ over as I assisted Dr. Pandey and a headache that beat a strong tattoo behind both eyes. I’d been on shift for twenty hours straight but didn’t go to the bunk room like the others. I knew the moment I closed my eyes, all I’d see were visions of Baghdad overlaid by that young girl twisted apart by male cruelty.

It shouldn’t’ve been so much worse, this one girl broken open by a cruel pimp compared to the dozens of soldiers and insurgents I’d seen in combat blown to bits by bombs, bullets, and shrapnel, but somehow it was. I’d been driven to join the army ’cause I needed the structure and some kind of greater purpose to my life, ’cause I couldn’t afford university without their fundin’, ’cause I’d craved a sense of belongin’.

What had driven this girl to prostitution?

Whatever the reason, she hadn’t signed up for violence like I had. She hadn’t gone to work each day worryin’ it might be her last.

“You’re too soft,” Dr. Pandey said when she caught me with my head in my hands in the cafeteria, starin’ blankly at my uneaten tray of food. “You won’t make it as a doctor if you don’t toughen up.”

“I’m a vet in the Medical Services Training Program,” I explained woodenly, redundantly ’cause she already knew. “I’ve seen worse.”

“Have you?” she countered mildly, stabbin’ a straw into her apple juice box. “That woman in there didn’t sign up for pain or danger. The circumstances of her life bought that for her because it was all she could afford.” She paused, sucked on the straw, and cocked her head to contemplate me. “In real life, Dr. Axelsen, white knights rarely get happy endings. Only broken hearts.”

I didn’t have a response for that, so I sat there in silence while she ate and chatted away about hospital routines. It wasn’t ’til she was standin’ up to leave that she put a long-fingered brown hand on my arm and smiled softly down into my face.

“She’s got a child,” she said. “Waiting with a neighbour in the ER if you want to check on the patient and give them an update.”

I told myself not to do it. They taught you about professional detachment in medical school. They basically pounded it into your brain so even those with the thickest skulls would brand it into their grey matter.

My dad had always told me my skull was thicker than most.

’Cause I went to check on Katherine Kay, tiny and fragile as a broken doll in the hospital bed, and then I went to the ER to update her family.

Twenty-three years old, a prostitute, and she had a kid.

Not a young one either, I noted as Nurse Watson pointed them out to me, but an eight or nine-year-old little girl with straggly brown hair and a red-tipped nose. She sat in an elderly woman’s lap, snifflin’ like she was at the ragged end of a cryin’ jag. The moment she saw me, she froze, then curled into an even smaller ball in the lady’s lap.

“I’m Dr. Axelsen,” I introduced and learned their names were Shelby Yikkers and tiny Cleopatra Kay.

“You scared about your mama?” I crouched down to address the kid.

She stared at me for a long moment with enormous, spiky-lashed pale eyes before noddin’.

“Yeah, that’s fair. She got hurt pretty bad, but she arrived here just in time, and Dr. Pandey is the best at what she does. Your mama is gonna be just fine.” It was a lie, probably. Sure, she’d recover from this, slowly and brutally, but I knew she’d go back to her pimp, and the whole thing would likely happen again.

I didn’t know the stats around that kinda thing, but I vowed to look them up when I had a spare minute.

“Are you a real doctor?” Cleopatra asked in a tired, croaky voice.

“You bet I am.”

“You don’t look like a doctor,” she accused with a frown.

Despite everythin’, I almost laughed. She was right, and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard such a thing. At six foot four, two hundred and forty pounds of military-grown muscle, and hair I hadn’t cut professionally short since I’d returned from tour at nineteen, I looked more like a savage than a doctor. The tattoos didn’t help much either, but most of those were covered up by my scrubs.

“Are you a princess?”