Shortness of Breath

Chapter Twenty Five

Casey - December twenty fifth, technically

I wondered, if it were me on the table, what my heart monitor would've looked like.

We walked in confused and misplaced. I wanted to sprint, of course, but instead walked briskly toward pediatrics, where it certainly looked as though an emergency operation was just beginning. An emergency, a catastrophe, some kind of disaster whose magnitude I didn't yet realize. Paralyzing confusion. I caught my own colleague in the hallway, looking for a story, any story.

"Dennison," I called after him. "Where are you headed?"

"Same place you are," he said, not feeling my urgency. "Interesting choice in work clothes, Dr. Kenny."

I looked down at my own cocktail dress, then over to Hallie's, and wondered just how clear it was that our coordinated attire wasn't a coincidence that began and ended with it being Christmas Eve.

"I wasn't really planning on coming in tonight," I understated. "Why did they call in so many?"

"Well, we called you in because you're in charge of all pediatric surgery at this hospital, so presumably you're the patient's best chance at survival," he rationalized. "We called in Strickland because you always want Strickland on your surgeries and we need you at your best. And we called in the rest to make sure nothing falls through the cracks."

It still didn't make sense. I was more confused than I'd begun. I'd never seen such an elaborately planned surgical team. Something didn't add up. "What am I not getting?"

"Perhaps you've heard that the patient was pulled out of Elisabeth Harper about thirty minutes ago," he continued. "Whose father, your husband, was murdered in this very facility. If the patient dies in your hands and we don't look as though we've gone the extra mile, we'll lose the hospital."

"Merry fucking Christmas," Hallie muttered as we turned a corner to change.

I was a wreck for so many reasons. Hallie wasn't going to mention what had just gone down moments prior. We hardly spoke the entire way to the hospital. Thank God no one seemed to notice or care that we'd arrived together. If anyone knew the night that the two of us had been having, the dynamic in the room would've been drastically different.

It was strange, so strange. I thought for a moment on how this stage had set itself. How one minute it was Christmas Eve, and I was sitting in my living room telling Hallie for the first time that I loved her, and then all of a sudden it was Christmas and I was being told, and rightly so, that my job and all the jobs around me potentially depended on my own superhuman ability to save a struggling baby that wasn't even thirty weeks old. The second I was in the OR, there was no more time to think - only to act, and to do so quickly. It just may have been that all of our lives depended on it.

"What do we know so far?" I asked nervously, wondering where the shakiness in my tone had come from.

"It's worse than we thought," someone responded. "ECG and cardiac catheterization show pulmonary hypoplasia," someone frantically explained. "Congenital diaphragmatic hernia too. Patient's at around 26 weeks of development."

"Shit," I said, not having necessarily prepared for the worst. Obviously they were expecting a plan. I had none.

"Dr. Kenny?" someone prodded.

Look alive, I thought to myself. Aplasia. Twenty six weeks. Do your job.

I came back to life, however temporarily. I had to. "Hydrops?"

"Pleura and pericardium."

"Ventilation?"

"ECMO."