Chloe Vance.
My older sister had been completely absent from my life for five excruciatingly painful years, but the mangled body coming in on that gurney was unmistakably hers, even beneath the horrific bruising and severe facial swelling.
The paramedics were shouting details at breakneck speed over the din of the monitors as they loaded her in.
“High-speed rollover on Interstate 84! She was hypotensive at the scene! Her abdomen is severely distended! Her responsiveness is rapidly decreasing!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw dark blood caked at her blonde hairline, asphalt grime embedded deep in the side of her designer jacket, and a pale hand hanging completely limp over the metal bed rail.
Then, twenty years of intensive medical training took over, and humanity had to wait in the hallway.
I started issuing orders before the wheels of her gurney had even stopped moving.
“Get her on the monitor! Two large IV lines, now! Activate the massive transfusion protocol!”
The handheld ultrasound screen lit up almost immediately with the dark, ominous shadows of free fluid. The steady beep of her heart monitor slowed. Her blood pressure dropped again. Her abdomen was rigid to the touch.
We ran bags of O negative blood, cut open her torn clothing, secured her airway, and moved with a synchronized, desperate speed.
There was absolutely no room for personal history in that trauma room. There was only anatomy. A ruptured spleen. A badly torn liver. She was bleeding internally, losing more blood than a human body should be able to lose and still be on this side of death.
I scrubbed in and got ready to go into surgery because there wasn’t a faster surgeon in the hospital than me. I operated because she was my patient. I stood in that freezing operating room, under the blinding surgical lights, for three hours and forty minutes, my hands buried deep inside the chest cavity of the sister who had destroyed my life, and I didn’t let my fingers tremble once.
When it was finally over, Chloe was alive. She was on a ventilator, her abdomen packed with gauze, massively transfused, and being taken to the Surgical Intensive Care Unit with a real chance of surviving the night.
I slowly removed my bloodied surgical gloves, as if that physical delay could somehow soften what I knew was coming next.
It didn’t.
The surgical waiting room smelled of stale vending machine coffee and the metallic tinge of pure fear.
My father, Richard, stood up the instant I walked into the room. He looked ten years older than I remembered. His broad shoulders were slumped with pain, and his mouth was already forming the desperate plea he would have made to any unknown doctor who walked through those swinging doors.
He asked me how his daughter was.
Then Richard’s eyes dropped. He saw the embroidered badge pinned to my chest, and every last drop of color vanished violently from his face.
My mother, Eleanor, reached out and gripped his arm so tightly that her carefully manicured nails left white marks on the fabric of the sleeve. She stared at the name stitched on my scrubs as if the English language itself had just betrayed her.
“Sarah…” Eleanor whispered.
