The Blessed - By Tonya Hurley Page 0,3
Cecilia said under her breath.
“What is this, teen night?” Dr. Moss asked rhetorically as he prepped the oral charcoal.
“No, just Saturday night in Brooklyn,” the nurse responded. “Mondays are heart attacks . . . ”
“Lucy!” another nurse shouted. “Lucy, can you hear me?” The nurse didn’t need to check the clipboard for her name. Anyone who read the blogs or local gossip pages knew who she was and why she was accosted by the screaming paps.
Agnes overheard the chatter between the doctor and the hospital public relations officer who were standing outside her curtain.
“Keep those vultures out of here,” he ordered, looking over at the salivating row of photographers perched restlessly in the waiting room. “No comment and no confirmations from anyone, got it?”
Dr. Moss walked in to examine Lucy. The oral-activated charcoal treatment had already been started. She was gagging on the tube, which he took as a good sign. She awoke abruptly, as if the starter rope was being pulled on a lawnmower. Fully aware and completely awake.
“Get me out of here,” Lucy screamed, wrenching the tube from her throat. She was fidgety, crazed, almost manic.
“Relax, honey,” a large-and-in-charge nurse said, pushing gently down on her shoulders. “You’re safe from all those reporters out there.”
“Safe?” Lucy scoffed, fussing blindly with her makeup, her voice raspy. “Are you kidding me? This shot is gonna put someone’s kid through college.”
The nurse was clearly taken aback not only by her comment but also by the fact that the girl lying on the gurney was in full media mode.
“What are you talking about?”
“An emergency room photo? Do you know what kind of placement those get?” Lucy gave the irascible health aide the once-over and realized that she probably didn’t. “Like you’d understand.” Lucy pulled the overhead examination lamp closer and checked out her reflection in the chrome tray positioned over her gurney.
“Well, then, maybe you can get that officer outside to understand a little better what someone your age was doing passed out in the bathroom of a club?”
Lucy refused to acknowledge the seriousness of her condition, medically or legally, and reached down for the pieces of her scattered outfit. A searing pain stopped her short, and she doubled over, clenching her stomach in agony.
The nurse placed sticky-back electrodes on Lucy’s chest and wired her to the cardiac monitor at her bedside. The switch was flipped and instead of the expected beep . . . beep of Lucy’s heart rate, the sound was one long extended tone, indicating a flat line.
Then . . . nothing.
Lucy’s eyebrows perked up nervously as the nurse fiddled with the machinery.
“Everyone says I’m heartless,” Lucy jibed.
“Stop moving around,” the nurse ordered. “You’re messing with the monitor.”
“Ugh, I think I’m getting my period.” Lucy dropped her head down on the tiny pillow beneath her head. “Get me some Vicodin.”
Dr. Moss shook his head and left the curtained cubicle. He noticed the photographers and bloggers uploading and posting from their mobiles, calling sources, vigorously updating editors on the second-rate “it” girl’s breaking news. Suddenly, as if the fire alarm had gone off, the crowd dispersed, off to chase the next ambulance.
The nurse poked her head into Lucy’s bay to let her know things had settled down.
“Shit!” Lucy spat, her chance for a little cheap ink thwarted by someone else’s personal tragedy.
Hours passed, lights dimmed, staff, shifts, and dressings changed, and fifteen-minute-interval checks on Agnes’s restraints took place—also mandatory procedure—but the sounds of the sick, the injured, and the dying persisted long past visiting hours, into the night. It was sobering and depressing. Patients came and went, some discharged, some admitted, others like Agnes, Cecilia, and Lucy left in limbo, waiting for a bed or further observation, forced to endure the suffering of others as well as their own.
Agnes’s cell went off and she knew immediately by the Dynasty TV-theme ringtone that it was her mother. She hit the mute button and tossed the phone, limp-wristed, onto the monitor stand next to her gurney, ignoring the caller just as she had the digital cascade of text messages that now clogged her mailbox. She sighed and drifted off to sleep, like Lucy, whose lost photo op, and a first round of questioning by the NYPD, proved totally exhausting.
It was practically silent. Still.
13 An ER tech ripped open the curtain all at once, as if he were ripping off a Band-Aid, and wheeled in a computer on a mobile stand. “I need to ask you a few questions Cecilia . . .