PART FOUR
Emptiness. That’s me.
I’m a shuffling ball of nothingness, void of feeling in my arms and legs. An empty space where Cynthia should be, but instead, there’s just this husk wearing her name tag, her blood-splattered scrubs. Her face.
Where a smile should be, there’s just nothing. Typically, when a shift like this ends, I’m happy to go home. I miss my family. I have to fight the urge to stop at Carl’s on the way home for some fried chicken, telling myself I earned it. Good on me, I did the good things, so I get the good things.
But I’ve never had a day like this.
I’ve never lost so many people, so many faces now even emptier than my own, so many that could have been saved too. That’s what it is. It’s not all the COVID patients, not even the bad ones, it’s all the patients. The ones you can’t even get to because you don’t even know they are there. The people having heart attacks or allergic reactions, the broken bones, the strokes getting misdiagnosed as migraines, the migraines getting misdiagnosed as strokes. The true emergencies, the gunshot wounds, the burns, the stabbings, and the appendicitis. None of it handled with the care, or the compassion, or even just the mental energy to triage them right.
Because there was nothing left of Cynthia. Nothing left of me. I gave everything I had.
I take my phone out to see why Jim was calling me earlier. To check that text I didn’t have time to read. But my phone is dead too.
The whole floor is quiet. People roam around like poorly informed corpses without the wherewithal to lie down and be still, the patients and the staff. I walk past any number of either sleeping on stretchers. I can’t even see where I’m going; it’s just muscle memory taking me through the halls.
I find Clara resting against a wall, headphones plugged in. She looks as though she decided she’d had enough, leaned against the wall, then slowly sank down until her knees were bent to her chest. And that was it.
I slink down next to her and immediately regret the idea. The sharp pain and crunch in my knees result in an awkward descent. Then comes the realization that I might be stuck here now. Forever glued to the floor next to Clara.
We look at each other. She’s worn away, the bubbles for personality manifesting in the faintest smile. But she’s all distant. Pale. A ghost of the night we just survived.
“Do you think they’ll need the Hoyer to get us up again?” I say, cracking a smile I don’t mean.
“God… Cynthia,” she says, then just plants her face into her scrubs and starts to cry. I’ve got years of practice behind me, seen a lot of terrible things, been through the works and come out the other side. A lot of times when you talk to the older clinicians, you know, we come off kind of jaded. And you know why? It’s nights like this, hell, it’s nights half as bad as this.
“I know, kiddo,” I say, the mothering instinct dripping out of me as I rub the poor girl’s back. Tonight’s going to stay with her. I know it will. It’s going to be a defining moment, maybe one that’ll take away her compassion because sometimes you have to put up those walls to not hurt when you give it everything, and everything isn’t enough.
I have scars from scalpels. I’ve been stuck with needles. Have permanent imprints in bright white from a homeless man’s teeth on my forearm. None of it hurts the way today does.
“I just, I couldn’t.” She says, looking up at me with those big eyes I’d never seen hold so much pain before. “There were so many people, and they all needed me. ALL of them. And I just couldn’t and… I think I made mistakes, and I can’t even remember when, or with who, and I just, I just…”
She turns to me and ugly cries in my arms. For a while, and then for a while more. And she’s right. And I could tell her, hey hun, same thing over here. Anyways, guess I’ll see you tomorrow! Or I could say, well, in this profession, you do the good you can do, and you accept when it’s not enough so you can do good again tomorrow. Or a hundred other things. Any of those “lines.”
Instead, I don’t say a damn thing. None of it feels right. There just isn’t any right here, or, at least, if there is, I don’t have it.
When she’s done crying, or rather, when she runs out of tears—and I don’t blame her one bit, I’m going to be sobbing when I get home—I give her a hug.
“Thanks,” she says awkwardly. Even when it’s warranted, once those emotions come out, even if you’re with a work colleague, there’s still that whole professionalism thing. She’s still at work. And she let the floodgates open because if she didn’t, she might have never gotten off that floor. But she does, and when she does, she lifts me back up too. And if she didn’t, I think I would have stayed there as well.
A flash of anxiety sparks in my chest as I remember the missed call, the weird text I didn’t have time to read.
“Hey Clara?” I ask. She’s busy putting away her headphones and mentally getting herself to actually go home for the few hours she has before she’s due back. “Do you have a charger? My phone’s dead and I can’t find mine.”
“Sorry. Check the nurses’ station; someone always leaves one around there.” She smiles at me. “Probably you, actually, if yours is missing.”
We both laugh at that and say goodbyes with warmth that will be replaced by a weird uneasiness in the coming days.
“Hey!” I hear as I’m walking down the hall towards the nurses’ station. Turning and expecting to see Clara, I instead see an older woman on a stretcher outside of 14. She’s dressed in a hospital gown and is holding her active oxygen mask away from her face. “I know you.”
Cocking my head to the side, I wonder if I treated—or heaven forbid forgot to treat—this woman earlier in the day or night, or whatever it is. But nothing comes to mind.
“Oh yeah?” I ask.
“Yeah. You’re that lady on the facebooks,” she says to me. I cringe a bit inside at the plural of Facebook. “The one who’s saying to use ivermectin.”
She whispers the last word, her dirty little secret, and waves me over. This lady must have seen one of the videos Sarah and I made, where I explained loud and clear to the world the efficacy of this medication and pointed out the studies that say how well it works. We had a few people post studies which disagreed, but frankly, I never read them. I know what I know.
“Oh, yes, hey,” I say, kind of embarrassed, but at the same time thinking it’s sort of cool to have my own little fan. “Thanks for watching.”
“Yeah, yeah sure. You got to get the message out,” she says, all smiles and red lines from where the O2 mask had been. “People will try to say you gotta get the jab or something, and wear a mask, but you and I, we know what’s up. We know what’s real. Not those idiots.”
“Well, actually, the vaccine has been really helpful and saved a lot of lives,” I start and watch the woman go pale. “And masking has been around forever. The cloth ones aren’t perfect, but they have been shown to reduce the rate of spread.”
This lady looks at me with a brief pause and just starts laughing. “Oh, right, right. I get it,” she says through an overly wide grin and gives me an exaggerated wink. “The truth about the jab can be your next video. I know when you’re here they’re probably watch’n ya. So you gotta play nice and spout that bullshit.”
Before I can correct her, I hear a commotion in 14.
“See! I told you I’m not crazy. I want the damn ivermectin!” A man is yelling. An older gentleman having repeated coughing fits points a meaty finger at Dr. Gray and then at me. “Even your own people are prescribing it. I don’t know why the hell you don’t give me what I need, doc. I’m sick here!”
There’s a sinking feeling in my chest. The kind you get when you’ve been sneaking into somewhere you don’t belong and you get caught. Like my guts have stretched down to the bottom of the earth, except instead of it being a hot molten core, it’s ice.
“Like I told you, there isn’t enough good quality evidence to support the use of ivermectin for the treatment of…” Dr. Gray starts to say before the man gets up—kind of (he’s pretty wobbly)—from his bed and gets in Dr. Gray’s face, screaming himself red, O2 mask sliding around his slick face like a dyskinetic ice skater. I can’t make it all out. But there’s a lot of theys, and yous, and doctors, and more conspiracy theories than I can follow.
“Fine.” Dr. Gray says and walks up to me and pushes the patient’s chart into my chest. Hard.
I’m ready for it. The yelling, the ridicule, the scorn. He doesn’t believe in this treatment, fine
, and he’s about to take it out on me, fine. After the night we’ve all had, I suppose it would come to this. I clench my jaw and get ready.
His expression is cold. Distant. He doesn’t point his finger, he doesn’t make accusations, he doesn’t even look angry. No. Worse. He looks at me with disappointment. And then just leaves.
And part of me crumbles inside. I’m left with these two patients beaming at me, the champion of their cause, while my mentor, the man who taught me so much, walks away from me. Leaves me with them. Alone. Empty.
I’m stuck at a crossroads. I can give this medication that I believe is helpful, despite everything everyone is telling me. Or I can be a hypocrite and not. Despite literally spreading the message about its effectiveness online.
Or I can go home. Say fuck it. Tell the whole world full of sick people that they have had enough of me, that I have given and given until I’m the one in need.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, and my feet move me towards the medicine locker.
I read the chart on the way. Room 14 is a great candidate for Paxlovid.
Dr. Gray’s voice echoes through the fatigue that threatens to overwhelm me. The research isn’t there for the ivermectin. Why use it? Because it helped me. Didn’t it help me?
Would I have gotten better without it?
Why all the new COVID cases? Why the spike?
You know why, Cynthia. You went online. You let Sarah’s social media prowess put you in front of people. And you told those people what you wanted to believe. That you had your own special cure. That maybe those conspiracy people were right, maybe this medication really has been under-prescribed. Maybe this is an alternative being overlooked. Because it worked for you.
Didn’t it work for you?
Or was it regression to the mean, aka getting better anyway. The main way false treatments work. Natural course of the disease. The fact you were literally on every current treatment we have for the medication.
You just wanted to believe, didn’t you, Cynthia? You want to elevate how you feel above scientific analysis.
No—I was going to die until I took that damn med. I could feel it.
How do you know? What objective information do you have?
Placebo is a hell of a drug.
Video launched about two weeks ago. COVID has a 2-14 day incubation period.
I don’t know what to do. I’m stuck. Not in quicksand. Just, off. Like the day had drained me to the degree that I’m no longer capable of making this choice. I stand there in front of the medicine dispenser, card in hand, ready to make a choice, and that part of my brain breaks.
I think I should just leave. Just go home. I need a charger. I’m worried about my kid. I had Jim give him the ivermectin, but what if it’s not working? What if I’ve been wrong? Look at this spike in patients. What if it really has something to do with my videos?
What if this is all my fault?
No—it can’t be, I don’t think I could… I don’t think I could even keep going if all this—the flooded ER, the people sleeping on stretchers outside of rooms, the broken-down staff milling about past the point of exhaustion, the men and women dying preventable deaths for no reason other than volume.
Look at the waiting room. On any other day, I’d think those packed seats were busy, but instead, those are admitted patients with nowhere else to put them.
And then I see her. Margaret.
She’s sitting alone in a wheelchair, off in the corner of the waiting room near the window. She’s leaning to the side, asleep. I never saw her come in. We’d discharged her a little while after I came back to the hospital, before the spike. She’s probably off her diet again, with those finicky kidneys. Never even saw her get entered into the system.
Worst of all, she only has one blanket. And as we all know, Margaret needs two blankets. Hospital rules.
I’m not sure what else I can do tonight. But if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that Margaret gets two blankets. I don’t know anything else in the whole world right now besides this woman needing a second blanket. Just seeing her puts a little pep in my step as I fetch a nice warm one fresh from the dryer and head over to her.
She looks so still there, asleep in her chair. Her neck is going to kill her at that angle though.
“Well, well, well.” I say with a slight sing-song quality to my voice. “Someone hasn’t been good about their diet aga… Margaret?”
She is stiff and cold as I wrap her in the blanket. Her tongue has lolled out of her mouth and there’s white froth around her lips. Her eyes are wide open but she’s not looking at anything, and hasn’t been. Not four hours at least.
A cold calm claims me. I should be horrified. I should be sad. I should be angry. I should feel something. Anything.
But I don’t.
I can’t.
I go to the nurses’ station. Rhonda’s sitting there, eyes red, sipping an extra-large coffee. She looks up at me. “The patient in the chair over there has passed.”
The words come out of my mouth. But I don’t stay there. I know there’s a commotion around me. I know there’s shouting. I know the people who still can act, do act. But I don’t. Can’t. Should. Don’t.
Broken woman. Broken girl.
Oh look, my charger. There it is, plugged in next to the desk I’d written my notes at.
I plug in my phone.
It turns on as Margaret’s dead body is wheeled past me. I don’t look up. Can’t look up. Should look up.
My phone turns on.
37 missed calls. All from Jim.
And 23 texts. All about Mikey.
