Free The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives by Theresa Brown

get everything we talked about started,” he says, with a flick of his wrist to indicate that the tall, thin intern should enter her orders.
    “Tell me more about Chardash,” I hear him say as the team quickly moves up the hall to get to the fifth floor.
    The intern hurries up to the nurses’ station to put in the orders she suggested on rounds and I’m left alone and disappointed and, I realize as my stomach growls, hungry. I grab two packs of Saltines from the small patient kitchen across the hall and eat the plain crackers meditatively while standing in front of my medcart re-reading the notes I have on Sheila. It seems like no one on the team was very interested in figuring out what was up with her. They probably just didn’t have the time, but this is when I miss being in a university, a place where people could stand around and talk exhaustively about all sorts of arcane concerns for hours. I wanted a mini-seminar on antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, a fuller explanation of why Sheila had to come here at three in the morning, but instead I got the silence left in the wake of an emergency.
    “Hey, can you help me with a transfer? My patient came back pretty sedated; I’m gonna need some help moving him.” It’s Susie again.
    I swallow the last bite of Saltine. Mr. Hampton needs to take his pills and Sheila’s belly has not been listened to by me, but Susie needs help now. The escorts who move patients to and from different places in the hospital are blamed if they fall behind schedule. Patients dislike waiting on the hard carriers since their beds are a lot more comfortable. And Susie’s new—she’s learning about nurses having each other’s backs, or not.
    “Let’s go.” I tell her.
    “You sure?”
    “I’ve only got three patients.”
    “Three? You’re so lucky. My four are keeping me jumping.” We’re walking down the hallway, back to her pod.
    “It’s a busy time on the floor,” I tell her.
    In the room Randy, another fairly new nurse, is also waiting. The guys often get called in for transfers and Randy was an EMT so he’s good at moving people.
    “I’ll come on the other side of the bed with you, Susie,” he says, “Theresa, you grab the feet.”
    We take our positions. The patient doesn’t look that heavy, but bodies can be deceiving.
    “Can you get that IV line up and out of the way?” I gesture at the escort, who’s ready to push from her side of the carrier. She lifts up the plastic tubing and lays it on the patient’s chest.
    “He’s too out of it to help,” Susie says. “So, one, two, three!” We each pick up our section of the patient, slide it to the right, and lay it down with a gentle thud. It was a smooth transfer. The patient briefly opens his eyes, then closes them again.
    “Very nice!” Randy says. He looks at the patient, who seems sound asleep. “Jeez, what’d they give him down there?”
    Susie scrunches her eyes together, then remembers. “Conscious sedation, but he barely slept last night—he got platelets and his pump kept beeping. He was really tired.” Randy gives a quick nod. That makes sense.
    “You good in here?” I look at Susie and the escort while sliding between the carrier and the bed to raise the bed rail up and next to the patient. We don’t want him falling out.
    “Yup. Thanks!” Susie confirms.
    “I’ll get this carrier out of here,” Randy offers, and pushes it into the hall, stripping off the dirty linens after he gets it there.
    I see the patient’s physical chart in his room. “I’ll take this up to the nurses’ station,” I call out to Susie.
    As I head up the hall I dial down my impatience about Sheila. She’s getting a drug that will make her blood clot more slowly and we’re drawing the appropriate labs and getting a scan of her belly. It’s not dazzling clinical work, not the Sherlock Holmes of medicine in action, but then again most of modern health care doesn’t consist of intense deduction followed by