Shiloh Walker's Blog, page 73

The Unwanted

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But it was the only thing in the world that had felt right in a very long time.

Opening for him, she shuddered as his tongue traced and teased her lips before slowly pushing deeper. The kiss was a seduction, in and of itself. Slow and sweet, like he wanted to take his time to learn everything about her all over again.

One hand skimmed up over her back and she whimpered, arching closer to him. Against her belly, she felt the hard, rigid length of his cock and the strength threatened to drain out of her legs. Hunger shot through her and she clutched him closer while the voices of sanity and need shrieked inside her head.

You can’t do this…did you forget what happened?

What are you waiting for, you stupid woman?

As she reached for the hem of his shirt, the voice of need all but cackled in glee and the voice of sanity moaned in despair and Destin just wanted to tell the both of them to shut the hell up.

His skin felt hot and smooth against her hands. Hot, smooth and the muscles of his abdomen were hard, rippling under her touch. She went to push the shirt higher and then Caleb caught her face in his hands.

The kiss lightened.

Eased.

“Damn it, Caleb,” she groaned as he went to pull away.

“The phone,” he muttered against her mouth, pressing another kiss to the corner of her lips.

“Fuck the phone.”

He laughed and the sound was strained, tight.

“The phone is ringing, sugar,” he said, stroking a hand down her back.

And then the voice sanity started to sing. If Destin didn’t know better, she’d almost think it was the chorus to “Glory, Hallelujah”.

“Shit.”

What in the hell was I thinking? She stared at him in a panic for one long second and then jerked away from him. By the time she reached her phone, it had already stopped, but it didn’t matter. The phone call had come at a crucial time. Right before she would have given in and done another stupid, thoughtless thing. Granted, this one only would have hurt her, but still. She didn’t do stupid thoughtless things any more.

She was careful.

She was patient.

She thought things through and she no longer responded simply to emotion. Or her body.

Staring at the phone, she said woodenly, “It was Oz. Probably wanted an update already. She’s impatient.”

“She always was.”

“Yes.” Closing her eyes, she pinched the bridge of her nose and then set her shoulders. She had to acknowledge what had happened, had to set things straight, make sure he knew it couldn’t happen again.

Slowly, she turned around and faced him.

And once more, that voice of need started to whisper, please, please, please…

He looked so good. Flags of color rode high on his cheeks and his eyes glinted with a wicked, hungry light. Caleb rarely let his guard down but when he did…

Her heart raced as she thought about what she was about to turn her back on. But she had to do it.

“That was a mistake,” she said quietly. “It can’t happen again.”

“Is that a fact?” He held her gaze steadily.

“Yes.” She licked her lips. The taste of him still lingered and when he dropped his gaze to follow the path of her tongue, she was tempted to tell that annoying voice of reason to take a flying leap. But she couldn’t. She’d lived by need and emotion and want and it had ended badly. Very badly. Now she lived by logic and reason. It was easier. Safer.

Lonely…

But lonely didn’t end with her heart broken, and lonely didn’t end with her costing somebody their life.

Lonely was better.

“I did trust you, Caleb,” she said quietly. She had to get that out there. “I trusted you more than I ever trusted anybody. And I trust you now…as far as the job goes, I know there’s nobody I trust the way I trust you.”

Turning away from him, she moved to the window, staring out over the pretty little town of Charlottesville. Even now, it was bustling with activity, young adults moving all over the place. “And I almost begged you not to leave. If I’d known…” Then she stopped, shook her head. “I never hurt so much in my life. But it’s over now and we’re different people. I can’t go back to who I was. You’ve got a different life now. That part of us is over and done.”

She blew out a breath and then forced herself to continue. “But you’re wrong…in the end, whether you left or not, we would have fallen apart, but it had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. It’s myself I didn’t trust. I still don’t trust myself.”

 

 

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HelenKay Dimon

TJ Michaels

The Unwanted

Kindle

He wasn’t looking at her, though. He was still studying the file in front of him, his gaze rapt and intent, as though it held the answers to the universe.

Unaffected.

Part of her wanted to sulk. The other part of her insisted this was a good thing. She did not need him being aware of how aware she was of him. Didn’t need it at all. But still…

He glanced up, his brown eyes opaque, and she couldn’t read anything in them. There wasn’t a sign of heat, interest…anything. Good, she didn’t want… Focus on the job! She dug her nails into her palm, used the slight pain to center herself. Just in time for her to focus on his words as he said, “I just think it will be better if you wait to talk to the women before you try to get a read on this one.” Then he shrugged and said, “But you’re the hotshot here. If you want to do it now, be my guest.”

Destin shook her head. “You’ve filtered for me too many times, Caleb. I trust you.” She gathered the pages, giving that simple task more attention than needed. Made it easier to not look at him that way.

Still, when the skin on her arms prickled and she felt the weight of his stare, it made it nearly impossible not to look at him. No. Not nearly. Impossible. Against her will, she found herself looking at him, lost in the brown velvet of his eyes…and now, they weren’t unreadable.

There was heat there. Hunger. Something that looked too much like her own longing. She swallowed against the ache in her throat as he rolled to his knees and crawled across the floor until he was kneeling in front of her. “Do you trust me now? You never did before.”

Destin swallowed and shook her head. “You’re wrong, Caleb. I always trusted you.”

A sad smile curled his lips and he reached up, traced his finger across her mouth. “If you trusted me, we wouldn’t have fallen apart.”

“Fallen apart?” she said, curling her fingers around his wrist. She could feel the strong, steady beat of his pulse, could feel him…the heat of him, throbbing against her shields and she wanted to say to hell with it and just get lost in him again. It had been so wonderful. So amazing. She wanted it so blindly, so desperately.

“We didn’t fall apart, Caleb,” she said quietly. “You walked away from me, remember?”

“And you didn’t say a thing to stop me,” he replied, his voice just as quiet as hers.

His eyes, darkening to near black, locked on her face and when he eased in closer, she had to fight just to breathe. “Every step of the way, I waited for you to say something, Destin. Every damn step.”

Yeah, right…she could feel the words hovering on the tip of her tongue. Wanted to hurl them at him. The only problem was that he wasn’t lying. It was enough to wrench her heart in two.

And when he eased closer and pressed his lips to hers, she couldn’t move away, couldn’t even think about it.

As his mouth took hers, she reached for him. It was the very last thing she should do.

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The Unwanted

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The flight from DFW to Richmond was uneventful enough after Destin had convinced the yuppie sitting next to her that he wasn’t really interested in her. All it had taken was turning around to face him so he saw her completely.

Once she’d met his gaze, once he’d had a chance to see her scarred face, he’d decided she wasn’t really worth a quick flirtation and he’d spent most of his flight with his nose buried in an urban fantasy. She couldn’t fault his taste…she loved the author herself.

But she had given up on casual flirtations a while back. Caleb had started out as a casual flirtation and she’d tumbled head over heels into love with him, then head over heels into heartbreak when he left.

“What was with the guy on the flight?”

Destin shot Caleb a look. Surprise barely had a chance to form before it died. Of course he’d noticed. Caleb noticed everything. It was one of the things that made him excel at his chosen profession. His psychic skill might be classified as a sub-ability but he had a unique ability to filter through the shit, as Oz had once termed it, and he noticed everything, saw everything. Hell, he could probably give a written report, five pages in length, on the visual details he’d noted in Oz’s Spartan office.

“There was nothing with the guy on the flight,” she said, shrugging.

“He’d been checking you out since before we boarded. Then five seconds after he tried to talk to you, he was all but crawling inside the book.”

Destin smirked. “He saw the scar, baby. It freaks people out, haven’t you noticed?”

He didn’t say anything else and as they approached the upcoming exit, he took it, slowing down only when he had to either hit the brakes or they’d go flying off the road. She braced herself. “I see your driving hasn’t improved much.”

“Did you expect it to?”

“Not exactly, but then, you showed up in Oz’s office looking like the typical cookie-cutter Bureau boy, shiny shoes, perfect suit… I guess some part of me thought you might have gone all straitlaced.”

A faint smile curled one side of his mouth. “Yeah, that’s me, all right, Destin. Just your typical bureaucratic FBI boy. I’m a dime a dozen now.”

Like hell, she thought.

Some part of her mind that she couldn’t turn off made her think about pushing that slate-gray suit jacket back from his shoulders. Wonderful, wide shoulders, and that suit was just a little too nice for him to look like a cookie-cutter Bureau boy. Especially with those shoulders.

Forget his shoulders, Destin. He walked, remember? She shoved a hand through her hair, flicking her bangs out of her eyes. She needed to get it trimmed again. Grew too quick. Keeping it short kept her from messing with it, and she’d discovered a serious pleasure with the wash-and-go look but it was a pain in the butt getting it cut every couple of months.

“When did you cut your hair?”

She turned to look at Caleb, but he was paying an inordinate amount of attention to the road as he slowed and turned into the parking lot of the restaurant. “Couple of years ago,” she said, shifting her attention away from him as he pulled into the parking lot of a little mom-and-pop diner.

She had no idea where they were, but she knew the sort of place. The food would be plentiful, filling and cheap, the coffee would be excellent and they may or may not take credit cards.

“I take it we’re getting dinner,” she said blandly.

“We can eat at the hotel if you’d rather, but I need to get out, hit the restrooms and get some coffee at the very least.”

The second he pushed the car into park, she was out, slamming the door and striding away. Food. I can do food. A break from him…yeah, that works…

It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to get away from him, to quit thinking about the fact that she missed him, that she was still thinking about pushing that slate-gray suit jacket from his shoulders. That she—

Get it under control.

You’re on a job.

Remember the job.

Get it under control.

She was halfway through the third chorus of her little pep-talk mantra when a hand closed over her wrist. She recognized his touch, his scent, his presence even as her body started to jerk away in instinctive reaction. She slowed to a stop and waited.

Caleb faced her, studying her from under a golden fringe of lashes. When he touched her cheek, his fingers soft and gentle on the scar tissue, she held still. She couldn’t react, couldn’t lean into him, no matter how much she wanted to. She hadn’t ever gotten over him, nor had she tried to fool herself into thinking otherwise. But she’d be damned if she let him see that.

“Was it after this happened?”

“What?”

“This.” He pushed his hand through her hair, then curled it over the back of her head.

She could feel his heat, remembered the way his touch had always made her feel—it was like a drug, heady and euphoric. She’d been addicted, then he left and she came crashing back down to earth. Not going there again. Nuh-uh.

Due out next week…

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The Unwanted

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He hadn’t looked at her much since they’d checked in for their flight. And he hadn’t said a word to her the past night after she’d told him about her spectacular failure four years earlier.

Destin understood why easy enough. She had a hard time looking at herself. It had been years since Dawn Meyer’s death and she still had a hard time facing the woman she saw in the mirror every morning.

She should have saved that girl. Was supposed to save her. If she’d listened to Caleb back when he’d tried to tell her all those times that she needed to learn some modicum of control, she could have saved Dawn.

But she hadn’t learned, and because of her, a girl was dead. She’d failed the girl. Failed her unit. Almost got them all screwed.

But the worst thing was that she let a girl die. Nineteen years old. Terrified and hurt and alone, and she’d died because of Destin.

Her unit saw it differently, she knew. At least some of them. Oz had rallied around her and refused to feed her to the sharks and that was a debt Destin could never repay. There were others, too, former agents who’d refused to let some of the higher-ups turn her into the scapegoat.

They should have, though.

They should have fed her to the sharks, left her for dead…nothing would have been a suitable-enough punishment. Just how did she atone for not saving a girl? For costing that girl her life? She couldn’t. She didn’t.

If she’d listened to Caleb all those years ago…

You can’t always dive in feet-first, baby…sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in a mess that you can’t get out of.

He’d been worried she’d end up dead.

She only wished that had been the cost.

No wonder he wouldn’t look at her.

Even now. They’d only been waiting for the flight for thirty minutes or so—Oz had arranged to pick them up—one more debriefing, she’d told them, and then she’d ended up picking them up a good hour earlier than what was really necessary. Now they had nearly an hour to kill before their flight.

The silence was a little heavy, even for her. She glanced over at him. “You hungry?”

Caleb made an odd little hmmm under his breath. A man of few words. The sound could either be, Yeah, I could eat or No. Shut up so we can get this over with and I can get the hell away from you.

Destin decided it was probably the latter and she was petty enough to want to drag things out. Petty…and lonely. Damn but she’d missed him. Being close to him again, having him this near, it did the strangest things, soothed the ragged gaping hole in her heart and left her feeling a little more at peace. And it made her ache. That wound inside her that had never healed started to bleed again and she wanted to yell at him, scream at him. Beg him to come back. All of it, any of it. And there was no way she’d give in to any of those urges.

“I’m hungry,” she lied, climbing to her feet. “If you want me to bring you back something, I can.”

She couldn’t eat. But she wasn’t going to keep sitting here next to him with his silence weighing down on her and his disapproval and disappointment choking the air around them.

She needed at least a short reprieve, even if it was only for five minutes while she hid in the women’s restroom or tucked inside one of the little bars that seemed to grace every airport she’d ever been in.

Actually, a bar didn’t seem like a bad destination…

Caleb got to his feet. “I guess I could eat,” he said, his voice low and smooth, the lingering hint of the South still echoing in his voice after all these years. “What are you in the mood for?”

Solitude.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” she said, shrugging and turning on her heel. She caught the handle of her carry-on and started down the main corridor. Anything would be fine, as long as she could have a drink.

 

 

Caleb didn’t know whether to be relieved or frustrated when they ended up being seated in opposite sections of the plane. Both of them were in business class—nice of Oz, that. Destin was two rows ahead of him on the opposite side of the plane and he could see the business exec trying to put the moves on her.

And then he saw the man go rigid when Destin turned to face him fully.

Fury lanced through him as he figured out what she’d done. Using that scar as a shield. Yeah, he knew there were plenty of assholes in the world who’d back off over a thing like that. Assholes, the lot of them.

It was a bare sliver of a scar and didn’t take away from her beauty, didn’t do a damn thing to detract from who she was.

But she let people decide to make that her defining characteristic.

It pissed him off.

It wasn’t anything she wore as a badge or a mark of courage…she used it to keep people away from her. She deserved better than that.

I was careless…

Her words echoed in his mind and he closed his eyes, blew out a breath. He could find out what had happened. A few phone calls, an email or two and he’d know it all. The surface details, at least. But the information he wanted was Destin’s. He knew she wasn’t going to share it with him easily.

Maybe not at all.

Guilt lodged in his gut and part of him kept wondering, Could I have helped…

He didn’t even know. For months after he’d left Destin, he’d had to work to get his own gift back under control and it had taken him even longer to find a way to mesh with somebody other than Destin. He’d had his own screwups to deal with and those screwups were legion.

Because of those issues, it had taken more than a year before he was stable enough to work regularly in the new unit.

Now, thinking about the months that had followed his leaving, thinking back to the way she’d looked at him, and he was left wondering…had he done the right thing after all?

Due out 7.30…. wanna pre-order?

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Hitting the road…

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We’re hitting the road.  The blog’s not going dark, but I won’t be around to answer anything…I’ve got posts for The Unwanted preloaded.  It’s due out in a little over a week and it’s time to start…um, sharing. Yeah. Sharing.  Not teasing.

See ya when I’m back from vacation.

Saturday Snippets… The Unwanted

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The boys of summer…

No nightmares.

There were dreams, but she couldn’t call them nightmares.

Hot, sexy dreams where Caleb put his hands on her and she returned the favor. They were the kind of dreams that had her kicking off the blankets and when she woke up sometime near two a.m., hovering on the edge of orgasm, it took a great deal of willpower to keep from climbing out of her bed and finding him in his.

It took almost as much willpower not to push her hand between her thighs and bring herself to the climax she could feel hovering just out of reach.

She ached with the need for it.

For a long, long time, she’d existed without any of that. It wasn’t even that hard. After what had happened with Dawn, she’d turned herself into a tool. Focused on the job, on making herself better so that she never made such awful mistakes again. She’d always acted on impulse, lived by the emotions that guided her gift, actions that led to the awful mistakes she’d made.

In response, she’d cut off those emotions. She couldn’t stop feeling but she could damn well stop letting them control her and it became second nature. Sexual desires, pleasure, even simple happiness had all become obstacles that were in the way of the job, so she shut them off.

Odd and random dreams about Caleb would slip in, but they were forgotten almost as soon as she woke up, and when she didn’t forget them soon enough, she reminded herself about what he’d done. How he’d hurt her. How he’d left her. That made it even easier.

But it was almost impossible to brush this dream away, this need away, when he was sleeping just a few yards away.

She missed his heat.

She missed his quiet strength and the way she felt so much steadier when she was near him.

She just plain missed him.

And you didn’t say a thing to stop me. Every step of the way, I waited for you to say something, Destin. Every damn step.

His words echoed in her mind and she had to wonder, how much different would her life have been if she’d given in to that impulse? She’d always thought that he’d changed his mind.

He’d told her that he loved her, and she’d almost believed him. Almost. But Destin had had people tell her they loved her before. Like her mom and dad. And then her abilities had started to surface and their love hadn’t been all that real, after all. They’d hated her. Feared her.

Had even thought maybe she was as bad as some of the monsters out there. Monstrous little thing—

It wasn’t so far a stretch for her to think that the man she’d thought she might have loved had changed his mind about them. If she had reached out to him, then, would things be different now?

“It’s too late to worry about that,” she whispered. “No do-overs allowed.”

He didn’t seem all that different. A few more lines around the lines and maybe a little more serious, but all in all, Caleb was just as he’d always been. Solid, strong, steady.

She was different, though. She was completely different and if she needed any reminder of that, it was in the mirror. Stroking a finger down the scar, she closed her eyes and curled up on the bed and waited for the miserable, achy need to subside. It took too long. By the time she was able to fall back to sleep, hours had passed.

Come dawn, she woke to hear him moving out in the sitting area; she didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep. She opened the door and almost swallowed her tongue when she saw him. He was wearing nothing but a pair of running shorts and another old T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, leaving his biceps bare.

A fine sheen of sweat highlighted his muscles and she watched, mesmerized as he lowered himself to the floor and then pushed himself back up. Slow, steady.

Talk about a perfect push-up. The man could have done a TV infomercial, the way he looked.

Of course, he’d always looked good.

Get over it, Des, she told herself. Squaring her shoulders, she made herself walk past him into the small kitchenette. She desperately needed coffee. Coffee, and a psych eval. She went about making the coffee and tried to pretend she wasn’t watching him as he did a good fifty more push-ups beyond however many he’d already done and then shifted around to lie on the ground and do crunches.

The hotel had a perfectly good gym. Why couldn’t he do his workout there instead of in here?

Five more minutes passed while she stayed in the kitchenette and drank her coffee. She passed the time by studying an absurdly boring abstract painting and hoped by the time she had her coffee done, he’d have his workout done.

But she planned it a little too perfectly. He finished up his workout at exactly the same time as she finished her coffee, which meant they ended up running into each other at the refrigerator.

“I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

Destin shrugged. She almost told him the truth, but she figured that would have just given him more of an excuse to keep talking and she wanted to go hide in her room while she got her treacherous body under control.

He didn’t seem fooled. “I take that means yes,” he said, shifting so that she couldn’t go around him unless she brushed up against his body.

A body that was damp with sweat and way too hard on her self-control. “I was already awake.”

Caleb studied her face. “You don’t look like you slept well. Nightmares?”

Shit, no. But she wasn’t about to tell him that she hadn’t slept well because she kept having lurid sexual fantasies with him as the one and only star. “Some dreams did keep waking me up, but it’s nothing I can’t handle,” she hedged.

A sympathetic look entered his eyes and he reached out, skimmed his fingers down her arm. “Need to talk about them?”

“No.” Talking used to help. Or rather, talking with him had helped. But no way, no how was that happening now, even if it had been nightmares keeping her awake. Nope.

He squeezed. “You sure?”

“If I wanted to talk about them, I’d talk about them,” she snapped. Lack of sleep, need and general moodiness were quickly eroding any politeness she might have started out with when she climbed out of bed. She jerked her shoulder away and shoved past him. “We’re not together any more, remember?”

“Just because we’re not together doesn’t mean I can’t listen.”

Destin stopped in her tracks and turned back to him. “Yes. It does. I laid my soul bare for you because I felt safe doing so. Then. But that’s changed now.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. “So that means you don’t feel safe doing it now?”

“That’s exactly what it means,” she said. Destin rubbed her hands over her face and then drove her fingers through her hair. The words danced on the back of her tongue, fighting to be free, and for once, she decided, to hell with pride.

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Lauren Dane

Shelli Stevens

Leah Braemel

Jody Wallace

Caris Roane

Eliza Gayle

Lissa Matthews

Mandy M. Roth

McKenna Jeffries

Taige Crenshaw

Delilah Devlin

HelenKay Dimon

TJ Michaels

Writing a more believable medical hero/heroine…day 4, handwashing, sore feet, etc

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Image © Shannon Matteson | Dreamstime Stock Photos

This is going to be a hodge-podge.

But things I never see come up in a book with a medical professional…

We are always washing our hands
We tend to have very sore feet
We like pens–we have to write a lot and the pens disappear

Handwashing

From the CDC’s website… because I can’t resist the chance to educate…

Handwashing

It is estimated that washing hands with soap and water could reduce diarrheal disease-associated deaths by up to 50% 1.

Researchers in London estimate that if everyone routinely washed their hands, a million deaths a year could be prevented 2.

A large percentage of foodborne disease outbreaks are spread by contaminated hands. Appropriate hand washing practices can reduce the risk of foodborne illness and other infections 3.

Handwashing can reduce the risk of respiratory infections by 16% 4.

The use of an alcohol gel hand sanitizer in the classroom provided an overall reduction in absenteeism due to infection by 19.8% among 16 elementary schools and 6,000 students 5.

Now nurses know this stuff.  And hospitals (and doctor offices) are dirty places.  People get sick there.  So we are always washing our hands.  We carry alcohol sanitizer in our pockets.

Want your nurse or doctor be believable? One way to add to that? Have them washing their hands more.  We do it between each patient.  We do it before and after changing bandages.  We do it all the time.

If it’s in the workplace, there are probably posters up… they are all over the place in the health care setting. Posters on how to wash your hands… it’s not just shoving your hands under the water for fifteen seconds. You don’t have to detail the handwashing, but if she sees the poster on handwashing? That’s just another way to craft a believable medical character, showing things that she’d see every day.

Sore feet & pens… eh, I can’t really give you hard and fast facts on the sore feet thing or pens, but we spend most of the day on our feet, usually on tile floors.  If you’ve ever worked on your feet, you can imagine how tired your feet get.  We like comfortable shoes. And my pens were always disappearing or getting swiped.  By a doctor, another nurse, left in a room. Sometimes, though, I was the pen thief.

Things that you see that don’t really happen:

Getting it on in various parts of the hospital.
Nurses who still wear all white — or, hey that cap thing.
CPR on beds, with bent elbows
Giving aspirin for all sorts of shit-other than a heart attack

Sex in the workplace…

Remember how I said hospitals are dirty? I meant it.  I don’t think you could convince me to have sex in a hospital.  There are things like MRSA lurking there.  What is MRSA?  (Link) Nasty, nasty, nasty superbug.  One that is resistant to antibiotics…writing about nurses and doctors getting it on tells me that you don’t know much about nurses and doctors.  Nurses and doctors don’t want to pick that kind of infection down in those places.

The white hat

I haven’t seen a nurse in a white hat since my clinicals and there was only one nurse who wore it.  She said she’d worked too hard to get it and she’d continue to wear it, thank you very much.  I’ve been in a lot of hospitals.

When I was talking about this on twitter, I asked for feedback…none of the nurses, EMTs, doctors I know can think of any place that require the white hat, or for that matter, for the nurses to wear that stereotyped white uniform.

CPR on a bed/bent elbows

On TV, you’ll see a person give CPR and their elbows are all bent, the patient will start talking after… you’ll see CPR taking place on a bed…

CPR has to be on a flat, unyielding surface to be effective.  The person administering CPR has to lock their elbows.  CPR is brutal.  We’re told when we get the training-and we get it often…I take it every two years-you might hear a crack…ribs can break.  You can’t get the force you need to jumpstart the heart if the patient is on a nice, comfy bed or if you have spaghetti arms.  

Sidenote, while I have fortunately never had to administer CPR, when I was flying back from Alaska years ago, a passenger on the flight needed CPR.  We had to touch down briefly to get him off the plane after they’d managed to get his heart started.  A few people were freaking out… they didn’t get him breathing, he’s still dead…  CPR isn’t pretty.  People don’t stop breathing, lose their pulse and then have somebody pound on their chest and come back from that two minutes later and jump up, ready to dance.

Aspirin

Know why they tell you to use aspirin if you suspect you’re having a heart attack, your guy, your mom, neighbor, etc, etc?  It thins the blood, helps prevent clotting. So it can buy time on the way to get emergency help.  That’s not a bad thing…in the event of a heart attack.

But say you’ve got a head injury.  Do you want to give something that can thin the blood and predispose you to bleeding?  So why does a doctor or nurse give aspirin to a person complaining of a headache after a head injury?  What about somebody who has had an ulcer?  A bleeding disorder?  Aspirin isn’t the drug of choice for a lot of reasons, but these are just a couple of them.

Hat tip to Lillie A… she read through my posts and gave me a few more points.

FYI:  None of this, absolutely none of this is to be construed as medical advice.  I’m not a doctor.

Writing a more believable medical hero/heroine…day 3, bedbaths…

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Image © Shannon Matteson | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Upfront…I’m tackling this one because Lillie A asked me to and I’m think we need to tackle it. I’m tackling it from the standpoint of somebody who hasn’t been in a patient care setting where bedbaths were needed in a long, long time.  That was back in my nursing home days…quite some time ago.

Bedbaths, yes, as a rule can be needed.  In general, a CNA will handle it. Not the nurse.

However, should you think that the nurse needs to handle it in your book?

Some things to keep in mind…

It’s problematic to make it sexy.

If the patient is strong enough and feeling good enough to get aroused, then more than likely, that patient is strong enough to sit at the bedside and do his own bath.

Nurses are all about getting them up as soon as possible. The quicker a patient is mobile, the better is is for the patient.  This is a health thing/nursing thing.  We aren’t going to encourage him to lie back and take it easy while we wash him up.

If he has to have somebody do the bedbath? Again, it’s probably not going to be the nurse. It will probably be the CNA. A nurse is rounding on patients, distributing meds, calling doctors, admitting, etc, etc.

But keep in mind, most people who need help with bedbaths :

Seriously ill or recovering from a serious illness
Unconscious
Just recovering from surgery (this means they are probably on pain meds)

There are other situations, yes.  But if any of the above apply? They aren’t going to be feeling teh sexy and I personally think it’s kinda skeevy to be lusting on somebody who is either unconscious, out of their mind from pain, fever, or so heavily medicated they can’t do their bedbath. See the problem here?

Particularly if the patient is recovering from surgery. Many patients recovering from surgery will have drainage tubes and catheters. Let me tell you from experience…you do not feel sexy at this time.  You don’t want sex. I don’t think a bucket full of aphrodisiacs could have induced me to have sex at that point.

Aside from catheters and tubes, there’s also the issue of the pain meds.  If a patient is drugged up, and many are, it’s…problematic, at best, to present a sexual situation.

It’s also questionable ethics on the nurse’s part…while he’s a patient, she needs to keep her sexy feelings under control. Period.

A sidenote… relationships between a patient and a doctor are even more problematic. The patient is in a more vulnerable position and looks to the doctor, trusts the doctor.  It places the patient in a more vulnerable position. There may be even ethical violations, depending on the state.

Writing a more believable medical hero/heroine…day 2, confidentiality

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Image © Shannon Matteson | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Ever heard of HIPAA?

If you’re writing a medical hero or heroine, you should have heard of it.

Also, if you’ve been to the doctor’s office in the past umpteen years, you have heard it.  You just might not realize that is what it is.

In 1996, HIPAA, also known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, was endorsed by Congress.

Why does this matter when writing a doctor or nurse? Because your doctor or nurse should have a basic understanding of it. You don’t need to go throwing that term in there, because your readers might not understand it.

But your medical readers, and there are a lot of us, will laugh or roll our eyes or get downright irritated when you trample all over confidentiality… because that is what this is about.

Confidentiality.

Confidentiality has always mattered to an ethical nurse or doctor, but after HIPAA came into being, it got more important. Talking about a patient in the cafeteria, where other people can hear you can lead to serious trouble.  Looking through records you have no business accessing can get you fired. (Link)

Facebooking about a patient can lead to big trouble.  Nurses get fired over this. (Link)

And while this case here – the woman took photos for pete’s sake – look at what is under the header…referred to the FBI.(Link) That FBI thing should clue you in… confidentiality is no joking matter.

I cannot tell you how many books I’ve read where the hero or heroine is somehow connected to the medical field…a doctor, nurse, EMT, etc and will be in the cafeteria, talking about Ms. Shaw and her hip, in the elevator, talking about cranky old Mr. Roberts and his dialysis, etc, etc.

Yes, the staff will talk. But…the smart ones, who value their jobs, aren’t going to do it in public where anybody but staff can hear.

And it shouldn’t be gossipy.  Say a nurse in ICU hears you’ve got a hunky cop on the med-surg floor.  She comes up and wants details… yes, this is totally believable, right?

Do you know that if you are overheard discussing those details, you can get fired?

Basically, you share only the necessary information with the necessary people.

So if you’re overheard discussing patients at yoga…in the supermarket…with your BFF…that’s a no.

You might think this is too restrictive to your story, but if you want to make your medical character more believable, then you can find a way to work it.

Basically:

No gossiping, especially not in public spaces
You can’t have the hero/heroine pull the doctor or nurse aside for info on a patient.  Unless that patient has given permission, and the staff should check, that doctor/nurse is risking his license, his money, possibly his freedom by giving out those details so easily.
The same goes goes if a character out of the blue asks the doctor/nurse for info…unless that doctor/nurse knows the patient has okay’d that release of information, they aren’t going to give it.  They like having their license, the money from the job…and yeah, not being investigated, thrown in jail, etc, etc.
If your nurse/doctor goes digging for personal data, s/he’s doing it at the risk of losing his/her job, possibly her license. Since many records have gone digital, this can be tracked…and it often is.
Only the minimum amount of information needed for patient care is accessed.  Again, say I’m working a med-surg (medical-surgical) floor and there’s a patient in ICU, I can’t go flipping through their file.  I have no business doing it. Again, that information can be tracked.
Violations can and do lead to fines and/or jail time, so this is serious shit. Nurses/doctors/CNAs/Aides they all understand this…we don’t take it lightly, neither should your characters.

 

Yay! Kit made it through! Here’s my thank you… a Damon POV…sorta

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So I made it through the character battle.

Wanna help me try to to make it to the next level? Round 2!

Here’s a Damon…um, out-take maybe?  It’s not a scene that was in a book, but it happened shortly after Kit was grabbed in Night Blade.

My body ached.  I wish I could blame the workout.  I’d been going at it for close two hours now and wasn’t even close to done.  Oughta give Chang a call.  He was the only one I could think who could maybe give me the beating I probably needed.

Why the fuck had I done?

The look on her face.  Something was wrong.  I knew there was.  Magic…under that cloying, awful scent of another man on her, there had been the scent of magic.  It had been there for a few days.  Kit usually smelled of magic—there were charms all over her office, but after she was gone a few hours, it started to fade.  But it wasn’t like this.

The door opened.  “Get out.”

Another snarl answered me.

I bit back a roar. Doyle.

Another person in my life who’d been acting like his tail had been stepped on.  I was tempted to get up and kick his ass, but not in the mood I was in.

He wouldn’t back down and I didn’t want to hurt him.

A flash of orange and black appeared in the corner of my eye.  He was back in his tiger form.  Doyle often shifted to cat when he was edgy.

As much as I didn’t want to worry about anybody else, it was my responsibility now, one I couldn’t put off just because I didn’t want to mess with it.

How long had he been like that?  I didn’t know.  Son of a bitch.  Lowering the heavy bar, I sat up.  Sweat stung my eyes as I stared at him.  I didn’t want to worry about Doyle.  Problems in the clan.

Kit…

Following me.  My hands closed into fists while I stared at the floor.  She’d been following me.

I can’t talk about it. Let me work it… I’ll explain. I’d thought this through a thousand times, it seemed over the past few days, but this time, those words seemed to hit different.  Can’t talk.  Can’t.

Can’t talk…not won’t.  Can’t.

That stink of magic that clung to her.

“Son of a bitch!” I stood up and spun around.  Fury blinded me and I grabbed the bottom of the weight bench, upending it as the realization blasted me.

Had to get dressed. Had to—

A fist pounded on the door.

“Not now!”

The door opened.  I spun around, rage burning in me, tightening my muscles in warning.  “I said—”

Tyson, one of the new cats I’d accepted into the clan, stood there, his head bowed.  “Alpha, forgive me.  But I think you need to speak with this wolf.”

The huge man who shouldered past him had to duck his head to come into my rooms.  He wasn’t a stranger.  I hadn’t ever met him until Kit had introduced us, though.  I’d thought I knew most of the wolves in the area—at least those who’d present a threat.

Goliath was a hell of a mother-fucking threat.

Right now, the look on his ugly mug was one that promised a bloody, painful death.

His eyes were pale and blue as they caught mine.  “You seen Kit?” he demanded.

I stilled. My heart slammed hard against my ribs and the cat inside me went still.  “A few days ago.”

“She’s disappeared.”

Disappeared—

For a second, the word didn’t connect.

Then, as the strength drained out of me, I stumbled, fell back against the wall, staring at the floor.  She ran…she just ran.

“You going to stand there looking some lost little kitten?”

Jerking my head, I watched as Goliath prowled closer, the floor vibrating under each heavy step.  His eyes narrowed in on my face and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

“Justin and Colleen been throwing  spells.  There’s been a witch at her place…and not a good one.  Coll felt a lot of fear, panic.”  He leaned down, his nose just an inch away.  Slowly, the strength came back as what he was saying made sense.  Strength, and fury.  Somebody was going to die.  Slowly.  I’d rip them limb from limb.  “Her trail just disappeared.  Now if that brain of yours is working, cat, you already know what that means.  Somebody grabbed her.”

I shoved him back as Doyle’s roar echoed through the room.

It’s over…Good-bye, Kit.

Those were the last words I’d said to her.

If I make through another round, maybe I’ll do another scene. Vote here!