Page 5 of Vanishing Legacy
Car doors thudded shut. Alana’s eyes followed the SUV carrying Warren. Any thoughts of a bonus sped away with the author.
Regardless of the payment, at least she’d apprehended the stalker and Warren was safe. She’d just work extra hard to secure the funds for her dream project.
* * *
SAVANNAH GENERAL HOSPITAL
THURSDAY, 2:44 P.M.
Dr. Cash Thomas respected the Second Amendment more than most Americans, but he’d be a happy man if he never operated on a gunshot wound again. This was the third GSW this week. It wasn’t the responsible gun owners shooting each other in the streets. Illegal firearms accounted for the majority of wounds Cash saw in his operating room. The trigger man was almost always too young to legally own the weapon.
The patients seemed to get younger and younger too. This one? Well, Cash doubted he was old enough to shave. And the kid never would if Cash didn’t get the bleeding under control.
A bullet to thirteen-year-old Dante Johnson’s chest had ripped through his scrawny body. Cash hadn’t seen a gunshot wound this bad since Morocco. And that’d been a two-hundred-fifty-pound Navy SEAL. This kid? A hundred ten soaking wet.
Cash determined the bullet had entered just below the heart and punctured the left lung, tearing through tissue and organs before exiting. Now he and his surgical team worked to control the life-threatening bleeding in the spleen.
Alarms blared.
“Pressure’s eighty over fifty.” His surgical nurse, Brooke Newton, shifted beside him and silenced the alarms so they could concentrate without the ear-splitting sound.
“Calling for two units of type-specific and running five hundred saline,” the anesthesiologist said.
Cash held out his hand. “Clamp.”
The steel hit his palm, and he clamped the section of tissue he’d been repairing and moved to the heart. The bullet had grazed the pericardial sac. Blood pooled inside the sac, causing pericardial effusion.
Brooke called out vitals. “He’s not responding to the fluids.”
“Page Dr. Shiro,” Cash said.
Generally, he could handle these types of heart injuries, but with so many other complications, Cash needed the heart surgeon to repair the sac and drain the blood while he continued to locate all the bleeders in the spleen.
The machines went haywire. The boy’s heart rate and blood pressure crashed again.
“He’s in bradycardia,” Brooke said.
“Not good. Not…good,” Cash muttered. The blood filling the pericardium had too much pressure on the heart. “The left ventricle’s collapsed. He’s in tamponade. We need two more units! Where’s Dr. Shiro?”
“On his way. Five minutes,” someone said.
“We don’t have five minutes! Call him again!” Cash flicked his eyes to Brooke, then back to his work. “Start needle decompression.”
“Urine’s dropping,” the anesthesiologist said.
“Can’t worry about the kidneys until I’ve got Dr. Shiro here.”
“Pushing more fluids to stabilize the pressure.”
He focused on relieving the pressure around the heart while the anesthesiologist focused on pushing fluids to stabilize the pressure.
The OR door opened and closed.
“Hey, Dr. Thomas. Read me in?” Dr. Shiro asked.
Brooke didn’t look up. “Pulse zero.”
The sac was filling again. Fast.