Deadly Diversion: A Medical Thriller (11 page)

Tim watched me approach, his one black eye giving him a lopsided owl-like appearance.

“Any traffic?” I asked him.

“Some,” he admitted, handing a smiling young woman a brochure.

“Any live ones, really interested?”

He turned to me. “What does administrations want us to do? Tell these kids how wonderful it is to work at St. T’s? Lie?”

“Tim, I’m sympathetic to you. And everyone. But we have a job to do here.”

“Some job,” he said. “We don’t even have recruiters like the other hospitals. Or a real booth—just a table and a few feet. On top of that we’re expected to do this on our own time.” Tim had a family—a pregnant wife and two young girls—and he treasured his days off. “Anyway, you’re here now. I’m going to take a break.” He left without telling me what I was supposed to do.

A group of students approached, and I gave them my best smile.

“What do you have to give us?” asked a young man dressed in a navy golf shirt, tan slacks and expensive-looking loafers.

I looked around on the table. “I have some brochures here about St. Teresa’s.” I smiled again.

“Humph. That all?”

A couple of the girls with him giggled and then the group moved on. I kept busy after that as a steady stream of students grabbed brochures as fast as I could hand them out.

At a break in the crowd, I spotted Bart and Wanda standing behind a counter in a booth down the aisle. Milbum University had twice the exhibit space St. T’s had. A tall display board stood at the back and held photos of smiling graduates proudly displaying diplomas. Waist-high, narrow counters surrounded the booth on three sides and were covered with colorful brochures.

Wanda saw me, spoke briefly to the older man, and then made her way to my side.

“Are you the advertisement for graduate school?” I asked her, smiling.

“Ain’t I the one who’ll grab them?” She laughed. A little on the chunky side, Wanda had wavy brown hair, turning gray, and a no-nonsense attitude.

“Him, there. He sure seems to know where he’s going.” She waved toward Bart, who had a couple of young women intently listening to what he was telling them.

Bart bounded back and forth from in front of the booth and around to the back table, collecting information for interested students, talking all the time.

“He’s pretty energetic,” Wanda commented.

“And he worked last night. Bart Mickelson. He works nights in ICU,” I explained.

A group of students approached, read the name on our sign and moved on.

We looked over to watch Bart’s girlfriend, Lisa, interrupt his conversation with the women, and push herself up close to Bart. He frowned at her and turned back to the women, but they had taken the hint and moved off. We couldn’t hear what Bart said next, but Lisa turned away, and then she jerked her arm away from him when he tried to grab it. She moved on to a pharmaceutical company’s booth where she picked up a syringe and examined it. Another woman stopped at Bart’s booth and he launched into an animated discussion with her, gesturing widely.

I handed a student a brochure, but she wasn’t interested in talking. She dropped it in her plastic bag and moved off, swinging her arm.

“I wonder where he gets all that energy. Me, I can hardly stay awake sometimes in my evening classes.” She picked up one of my brochures. “Yeah, this captures it. Smiling nurses working side by side with equally cheerful doctors. That’s us. Every day.” She tossed the pamphlet back onto the table.

“What made you decide to do it? Go to graduate school,” I added, offering a reluctant young man a brochure.

Wanda leaned back and folded her arms across her plaid blouse. “Aren’t you sick and tired of it, Monika? Fewer and fewer staff, sicker and sicker patients. And all administration says is, ‘Work smarter.’ Damn, I’ve always worked smart.” Wanda had once told me she was the oldest of six; now she was divorced with a teenage son. “This way I’ll be able to work decent hours, make a good salary and have a life, too.”

“But won’t all your patients be asleep?”

“Hey, that’s how I want them.” She grinned. “I’d choose sleeping patients any ol’ day over all those crabbing people in the E.R., mad because they have to wait. The other ones who are really sick, they’re just waiting to sue us.” She shoved off from the table. “I’d better get back.”

“Who’s that?” I asked her, nodding toward the man talking to Tim, who was over at the Milbum booth.

“Dean Swanson. We’re supposed to bring him in when we get a live one.”

“I hope that doesn’t mean he’s leaving St. T’s. He works for me.”

“Aren’t you the lucky one?”

“Huh?”

“He’s sooo good-looking.”

“And so married.”

“Aren’t they all? But that other guy isn’t married, is he? He is definitely a hunk.”

“Oh, you mean Bart. I never noticed.”

“Wow, Monika, you dead or something? Those blond curls, burly arms, big smile, blue eyes—”

“Okay, okay, that’s enough. He’s just not one of my favorite people, that’s all. Tim, on the other hand, is very conscientious.”

She squinted toward the booth. “Isn’t he the one pushing the union?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“He’d better watch out. I just heard they fired a nurse at St. Michael’s. She was one of the union leaders.”

“They can’t do that. At least not for supporting a union.”

“No? You’re way too naive, Monika. Of course they can. They just say it was for ‘attitude.’ It gets them off the hook, legally.”

“You’re really burned out, aren’t you, Wanda?”

“You know, even if someone resigns they can change the record to say they were fired. Who’s to know?”

“Why don’t you just quit? Do something else?”

She looked surprised. “I can’t, Monika.” She stopped and pulled herself up. “I’m a nurse,” she said, looking me in the eye. “It’s who I am.”

Tim returned when Wanda went back to Milburn’s booth, and for a few minutes we had a rush on brochures. A couple of students asked questions but none wanted to give us their names and addresses. The room was clearing out. A voice on the loudspeaker invited everyone to the program beginning in the next room. I told Tim I was going to see what they had to say and he nodded his agreement.

Out in the hallway three models, wearing the latest in uniform fashion, pirouetted on a small stage. With their perfect makeup and equally perfect figures, they sashayed back and forth, displaying snappy scrubs in sun-splashed prints under crisp white jackets and lab coats. None had any blood on them.

“Monika!” Lisa said, grabbing my arm. “Can I talk to you?” she asked, her round baby face marred by dark smudges under her eyes. “Please.”

Shaking off her arm, I said, “Come on. I’m going in here.” I started toward the crowd heading into the auditorium.

“No, no, someplace we can talk.” Her eyes darted back and forth. “It’ll just take a minute.”

I looked at my watch. The program was due to begin in five minutes but, judging by the size of the crowd still lined up to get in, they’d be late starting.

“We could get a Coke or something,” I said, nodding toward a refreshment stand doing a brisk business in hot dogs, ice cream and soft drinks.

After we bought our drinks we found an empty table among the few scattered along the wall. We settled ourselves, carefully balancing our cups on the black grill-work top of the wobbly ice cream table.

“I wanted to ask you about Bart,” she began, stirring her drink with a straw, its paper cap still on. She stared at the dark liquid swirling in the ice. Finally, she looked up, her green eyes serious. “He’s a good nurse, you know,” she began as if I’d argue with her. “He really is.” She stirred some more.

Her knit top looked a size too small for her, or maybe it had shrunk in the wash. But that had been a while ago; perspiration stained the underarms and the front showed the remains of more than one food group.

“I was still living at home in Louisville and working my first nursing job on nights in the E.R.,” Lisa said, looking off in the distance. “Bart came in with his father.” She turned to me and shook her head. “Nothing we could do. Alcohol and pills. Looks like he did it on purpose. Bart said he’d just been fired from another job.”

Inwardly I sighed. I never have been able to understand suicide. Life was just too damn precious, no matter what.

“Bart was upset, his mom, too, of course. He told me he was a nursing student but he said the instructors had it in for him, him being a man.”

I knew what she meant. Tim and other men in nursing had told me how difficult some women made it for them. The ones who stuck with it were all the more noteworthy, I’d always thought.

“You’ve been together since then?”

“Most of the time. I got hurt lifting a patient. He came up here for school, and I came a month later when I finished physical therapy. It still hurts, though,” she said, pressing a fist into her back and straightening up. A smile spread across her little-girl face. “We got this cute little house in Dogtown I’ve been trying to fix up when I feel up to it.”

I finished my drink and looked around for a trash can.

“Wait,” Lisa said, her hand on my arm. “He’s a good nurse, you know that, he just made a mistake. We’ve all made mistakes.” She ducked her head and looked up with a small smile. “Even you.”

There was one time. I tried not to think about it. I was just out of school, working nights on a medical floor with no help, as usual, and I’d thought the man—one of the twenty-two I’d had that night—was asleep. At least he was quiet. It wasn’t until my supervisor called me the next day, waking me from some badly needed sleep, to tell me the man had died during my shift, his body cold when the day nurse checked him shortly after I’d left. He’d been dead several hours.

“And he’s got to keep this job,” Lisa said, jerking me back to the present. “Until he finishes school.”

“Lisa, I can’t talk to you about this. It’s a personnel matter.”

“But I’m his fiancée, we need the money!” She scrubbed at her head, leaving a spike of her pixie-cut hair standing on end.

I shook my head. “I can’t talk about another employee no matter what.”

“Tell me one thing.”

A security officer motioned a few final stragglers toward the auditorium door.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Tell me you’re not going to report him to the board.” She looked up at me, her eyes pleading. “Monika, please, please. I don’t know what we’d do if...” Her voice drifted off as she looked down into her cup at the few remaining ice cubes.

The security guard, hampered by a straggle of giggling students, tried to shut the doors to the auditorium.

“I’m going to the talk.” I stood, slurping the last dregs of my drink.

“Just tell me he can keep his job. Just that.”

I shoved my empty cup under the lid of a trash can overflowing with ketchup-smeared sandwich wrappers and paper cups dripping ice cream. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, wiping my hands on a napkin and tossing it in the can. “He’ll be okay.”

I smiled an apology to the guard and squeezed through the closing doors with one last glance at Lisa. She sat looking down into her cup.

I took a seat in the back and looked around at the students settling in. As I’d often thought recently, they looked young. Scattered talk muffled the introductions of the dignitaries—some St. Louis hospital administrators and the dean of one of the local nursing schools. Then a young woman took the stage. She wasn’t beautiful—not like the models parading outside—but when she started speaking, the room quieted down. She leaned into the microphone and spoke directly to me.

“I first became aware of what nurses do,” she began, “after my little sister Sally was hurt in a boating accident at Lake of the Ozarks.” The woman went on. “I was only sixteen. My mother and I stayed at the hospital with her and my dad went back and forth between St. Louis and the hospital.”

The woman looked down for a moment and seemed to collect herself.

“I remember one night I was asleep on the sofa right outside tier room. I woke up when I heard the nurse talking to Sally. I thought Sally had awakened from her coma, but she hadn’t. The nurse, though, was talking to her as if she were awake. She was telling her that her family was nearby and that we all loved her and wanted her to get well. Her voice was upbeat but gentle and caring. And calm, I remember thinking, as I lay back down. Just before I dropped off to sleep, though, I realized Sally’s nurse was talking to her as if she loved her!

“That,” she said, “is the essence of nursing care.”

I could hear our collective breath let out as she continued.

“I couldn’t imagine any career other than nursing after that. So I got serious about school, enrolled in college and studied hard to make it through the science courses that schools use to weed out students who won’t make it in clinical courses—” there were a few chuckles at that “—and celebrated the day that I was accepted into the nursing major.

“I wasn’t an honor student, I won’t try to tell you I was, but 1 graduated in the top half of my class. Then as most of us do, I started working on a medical-surgical floor to hone my skills and pick up speed.”

She still worked in nursing, she said, although most of her time now was spent traveling around the country and speaking to groups of nurses and students.

“I know it’s true, what I learned back when I was sixteen and watching my sister being cared for by nurses who didn’t even know they were becoming my role models, that nursing is the most satisfying career anyone can have, caring for people when they need us, when they’re most vulnerable.”

The auditorium was silent.

“Yes,” she said, “there are problems in nursing, in health care. As there are in any worthwhile endeavor. But the main problem is that there are too few nurses now and not enough people entering nursing to care for the millions of baby boomers on the cusp of developing serious health problems and needing nursing care.” She had some suggestions for the audience. “Every one of you can be an ambassador for nursing. Tell other people what you do, what nursing’s really like, what it takes to be a nurse. It’s up to you to tell people how rewarding nursing can be.”