Medically Speaking

Chapter 1

The faint buzzing of the fluorescent lights wove together with the steady beeping of the heart monitor through the open patient door behind me; the rhythmic background music to my day. The bitter, clinging odor of antiseptics and the new cleaner they've been using on the floor clear my head instead of making my nose itch. All of the patients on the floor are stable and resting, making it quieter than usual on our usually hectic ward. It's... calm. Too calm.

I don't like it when things are calm on our floor. It either means the tweens and teens are plotting mischief or that Murphy's Law is about to strike. Shoveling another bite of salad into my mouth while I work on my charting, I try to enjoy it while I can. Moments like this don't last for long and they're normally too good to be true.

"Blair Harrison to the information desk. Blair Harrison to the information desk."

An arm reached across me for one of the tablets that we use for patient charts on the move, the common action not even drawing my hazel eyes away from the screen. "That's the third time they've called for him," Tina muttered, an air of gossip lingering as she unlocked the device, leaning against the nurses' desk next to me. She's always in the mood for speculating about anything that goes on anywhere in the hospital.

I hummed in recognition as I typed. "Could be a girl," I mutter.

She laughs and reaches over to flick my light brown ponytail back over my shoulder. "You'd be the one to know, Joey."

Smirking, I don't even look in her direction. My woes of being mistaken for a boy are well documented. "Blair is a perfectly normal gender-neutral name. It's nothing like Joey, although I can respect the annoyance." I don't bother to add that Joey is a choice I made when I was six, Blair is probably their given name. I just really hated being called Johanna.

"Is Chris still kicking up a fit because we won't let him out of bed to go to the rec room?" Tina asked as she skimmed through her own patient's chart.

"No," I replied, pursing my lips, my eyes darting to Tina conspiratorially. Her eyebrows raised as she waited for the gossip-- a nurse's bread and butter. "That pushover on child life is on our floor today. She moved an xbox into his room while his mom was down getting lunch. Mom's not happy about being undermined, but Chris is back to being himself."

On the pediatric floors, the balancing act between following the parents' preferences and keeping kids' spirits up can be tough to navigate. On the adolescent floor we tend to err on the side of the mama, though. Teenagers can be butts and we try not to make life harder on their parents. Most of them are already functioning under more lax rules than they would be at home. We sneak them treats from time to time, but for the most part we listen to parental boundaries.

Giving them an extra jello is worlds different from removing an xbox from the community game room and moving it into Chris' room after his mom said he couldn't have it until he finished a good chunk of his schoolwork.

Child Life Services gets to be all rainbows and glitter, flitting on and off the floor like butterflies since they're needed all over the children's portion of the hospital. Nurses have to live around here. We see their value in medical care and appreciate what they do for the kids... until some of them pull stunts like this.

"Well, he's going to be impossible to live with from now on," Tina snorts, her fingers moving across her patient's chart.

There was commotion down by the locked double doors that lead onto our floor and I glanced up to see a wheelchair being moved down the hall with an entourage of men in casual wear and one in a suit surrounding it, several on cell phones talking as they went. "Is the president in town and no one told me?" I asked Tina as we watched their progress. The adolescent ward main hall is almost an oval around a central spoke, the nurses' station and two general bathrooms, with short halls shooting off the main one with patient rooms. The group is on the wrong side for me to see them once they move past us.