Trauma Room Two

by Philip Allen Green

Sometimes the roughest part of what I do is getting out of bed each day knowing an onslaught of suffering is barreling toward me. Yet, there is nothing I can do about it.

So instead, we all get up and go to work, and the day begins. I arrive at the ER knowing my warnings once again have been lost in the noise of life. All I can do is prepare.

Step-by-step, I approach readiness, while step-by-step somewhere else, another person approaches disaster.

Like two planets whose gravitational fields pull them together, we begin on a collision course, gathering speed and momentum, neither of us yet aware of the other. I know a crash is coming, but I don’t know who, what, or where. My day is twelve hours of bracing for impact. The buzzer on the radio squawks. A car has hit a pedestrian. The victim is unconscious on scene, rigs seven and twelve are responding, and I know our planets are about to collide.

The radio stops. I take a deep breath. My job now is to drain the department of all emotion so that we can prepare. I become a human black hole. We cannot afford to feel. A child is dying. Feeling is for later. Now we must focus. We must move. But we must not feel, or we will lose focus and fail.

We scramble to get Trauma Room Two ready. People run. Voices shout back and forth. Tubes are prepared, drugs are drawn up, and machines are wheeled about through the department. One of the nurses hands out bright yellow gowns and blue gloves like bullets and helmets before a battle.

There are certain things I cannot write about. There are certain things which I will not write about. They are too terrible to share. It is my job sometimes to just keep them to myself. So be it. The next several minutes of that day are holy, private, and terrible. And they shall remain that way forever. Only those of us there that day should be burdened with what we saw. We will carry it for you. We will carry it for everyone.

I know that weeks, months, and years later her face will come to me. I will be camping alone in the desert as far from another human being as I can get. The door of room nine will rise in my mind, and I will sense the faces slowly wandering in from the horizon to take a seat next to me by the flickering campfire.

The desert, the stars, the desolation, and the emptiness are not enough to keep them away. I will stare into the fire, the smoke twisting like ghosts rising into the night above. I will wonder. Do the stars know? Does God know? Does the dirt know? What is this place, this life, this brief flash of light before we fall back into the darkness from which we arose? For hours, I will watch the fire dance and the smoke rise. The faces will sit with me. I will feel it. They, too, will wonder about it all. Finally, the fire will burn out, the smoke will stop, and the sun will rise. Two days later I’ll have to go back to work. But out there in the desert, I will understand.

She is standing on a hill in eastern Montana. The smell of spring fills the air. A warm breeze gently passes over her. She takes a deep breath and fills her lungs with a potpourri of pine trees, young flowers, and spring soil. She shifts slightly and realizes she is sitting on the hood of a car. The sun is setting.