Page 6 of Protecting What's Mine

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Dr. Mackenzie O’Neil hovered over her patient as the bird lifted fast enough to tickle the floor of her stomach. Flight medicine came with its own brand of challenges, and she thrived on them. Communication with her patients en route to the trauma center was usually impossible even when they were conscious.

It was a high-stakes guessing game. A high-wire act of stabilization and being prepared for when things went to hell.

The unconscious girl before her, early twenties, good physical shape, was a mystery to be solved and saved.

Mack continued her quick, careful physical exam while Bubba, flight nurse extraordinaire, cut through the jacket and the t-shirt beneath. Bubba was just an inch and a few pounds shy of the max size limits to practice medicine in the cramped quarters of the EC145. But he was light on his feet.

“Patient’s abdomen is hard as a rock. Significant bruising on the chest,” Mack reported, pressing on each quadrant.

“Bleeder, doc?” Sally chirped over the headset from her seat behind the controls. Ride Sally, or RS, as she was known to the air medicine team at Keppler Medical Center, was the best damn pilot Mack had ever had the privilege of flying with. Whisper-soft landings, lightning-fast reflexes, cool under pressure. She was also so petite, she sat on a cushion to reach the controls easier.

“Looks like it,” she confirmed into the headset’s mic.

She heard Sally relay the information to the hospital over the radio

“Bubs, what’s the BP?” Mack asked.

Bubba was the exact physical opposite of their tiny pilot. Black to her fair freckles. Burly to her waif-like stature. Mack had found the opposites amusing. He still looked like the college football player he’d been while studying nursing. He shook his head. “Tanking.”

“Let’s push the fluids, see if we can’t get her BP stabilized.” Mack ran through the mental calculations. They were ten minutes out from the hospital. For now, her sole job was to get the girl there alive.

She took another listen to the chest, eyeing the monitor next to her. “Tachycardic. Decreased breath sounds on right side.”

“She’s hypoxic,” Bubba said, reading the oximeter. “Intubate?”

She could feel the patient slipping away. “Yeah. Let’s do this,” she said.

They moved quickly and in tandem. This was only her third shift and fifth call in a new job in a new place. But she liked and respected her team. Bubba had no problems taking orders from a woman who wasn’t afraid of giving them. And RS was happy to chauffeur them.

When they’d come in for a landing, the devastation on the highway beneath them was grimly fascinating. Mack had started her medical career flying in and out of battle, hauling injured soldiers. She’d been on choppers under fire, even survived two emergency landings. But seeing this kind of carnage on domestic soil was oddly unsettling.

From the looks of it, the eighteen-wheeler hadn’t seen the construction signs and was unprepared for the slow down, plowing into multiple vehicles and causing a chain reaction wreck.

The people on the ground hadn’t been deployed to a hot zone. They didn’t have military training under their belts. They were soccer dads running errands, businesswomen taking lunch breaks, teens playing hooky. Or, like the girl before her, just young women enjoying a nice summer afternoon on a motorcycle.

“ETA, RS?” she called.

“Nine minutes,” came the reply.

“You ever intubated en route, Bubs?” Mack asked.

“Virgin. Be gentle with me,” he said.

“She’s crashing,” she noted. “Stay with us, kid.”

They worked quickly, speaking only when necessary. Sweat coated her brow, and her back grumbled a complaint from her hunched posture. The adrenaline hummed its familiar tune in her bloodstream. It was a siren song. One she was going to have to start resisting…eventually.

The heart monitor reading flatlined.

“Hell,” she said and grimly charged the paddles while Bubba started CPR.

Life and death. She’d grown accustomed to walking that line daily. To seeing the disasters only small percentages of the human race would ever witness firsthand. A retrievalist, a flight doctor, like other first responders, was wired differently. They sought out the crises, made themselves tools. There were protocols in facing down death and gore and trauma. Protocols organized the chaos, gave the brain something to think about besides the horror of young lives slipping away.

Her hands shook, and she tightened her grip on the paddles.

“Clear.”