Chapter Text
The trauma bay smelled like it always did — antiseptic and something underneath it that no amount of cleaning ever fully addressed. Dana had stopped noticing years ago. You either stopped noticing or you left, and she hadn't left yet.
"Bed four needs a new IV line," she said, not looking up from the chart she was signing. "Rodrigo, can you grab that?"
"Already on it."
She initialed the bottom of the page and moved to the next one. Around her the ER ran at its particular evening rhythm — not the controlled chaos of a trauma coming in hot, not the eerie quiet of 4am when even the regulars were asleep somewhere. Just steady. Manageable. The kind of shift that ground you down slowly rather than all at once.
Neil was somewhere behind her, she could hear him — that particular cadence of his voice when he was delivering news a family didn't want. He was good at it. Better than most of the attendings she'd worked with over the years. She'd told him that once and he'd looked at her like she'd said something faintly depressing, which she supposed she had.
Her phone buzzed. She glanced at it.
Mark.
She put the phone face down on the nurses' station and picked up the next chart.
They were doing this thing now where they were careful with each other. Considerate in a way they hadn't been in years, and somehow that was worse than the fighting had been. The fighting had at least been honest. This was two people trying to be decent while they figured out how to stop being married, and it exhausted her in a way she didn't have words for yet.
She ate a granola bar at eleven and called it lunch.
The radio crackled at the ambulance bay doors. Dana was already moving before dispatch finished talking — male, mid-forties, found unresponsive in an alley off Ninth, suspected overdose, Narcan administered on scene, vitals coming up but unstable. She pulled gloves from her pocket and snapped them on.
The gurney came through the doors fast.
He was heavyset, sweating through his shirt despite the October air still coming off the paramedics' jackets. The particular gray-yellow cast to his skin that she associated with people whose bodies were still deciding if they wanted to go on living or not. His eyes were open and tracking poorly — the Narcan had pulled him back but not all the way.
"Bay two," she said. "I want a full panel, tox screen, and get him on tele ASAP."
They moved him to the bed. He was muttering something, not quite coherent. Dana leaned in out of habit, trying to parse it, and caught the smell of infection underneath the sweat.
Something not right there. Sepsis? She made a note of it.
When they transferred him from the gurney his body shifted and something fell from his pants pocket and skittered across the floor.