On Call | Grey's Anatomy // Book 3 // COMPLETED

70 | Gun in the House

Upon Amelia's return, we were informed that the mother had chosen to go ahead with the surgery, which to me and everyone else in that O.R. was the obvious choice if we wanted to give Brandon any possibility of walking again in the future.

"Dr. Shepherd, BP is going down," Jo said as Amelia worked beside her.

"How's that bone graft coming?" Amelia asked after acknowledging Jo's statement.

Owen nodded to himself as he made one last adjustment to what he was doing. "It's out. Sealing up with bone wax."

Looking up from what he was doing, Alex cleared his throat before looking to Jo. "It's in the house?"

Jo eyed him. "What?"

"The gun. Where is it in the house?"

Jo rolled her eyes. "It's in a safe place."

"I didn't even know it was there." Alex scoffed. "I wanna know where it is."

"It's in a box under the bed."

"It's under our bed?!"

"That's where we'd need it."

Alex shook his head as Amelia, Owen, and I tried not to make it look like we were listening in too much on the conversation. "I don't want a gun in my house," Alex told her.

"It's my house, too. It makes me feel safer."

"Does it?"

"Have you seen our neighborhood?"

"Because you're not safer. You're more likely to get hurt because of a freakin' gun around."

Jo let out a sigh. "Alex-"

"I got shot once. You know that."

As the awkward and intense conversation in front of us came to an end, the monitor let out a few beeps and we all turned our full attention back to the surgery. "BP's sixty over forty. Starting him on levo."

"Once I decompress the spinal cord, it should get better," Amelia assured us. "I just...just let me work."

"Work faster," Alex grumbled under his breath.

We worked for a few minutes more before the monitors began going off again, but this time it was louder and more intense, telling us that something was seriously wrong. "He's in V-tach, rate of two-thirty-three," Jo called.

"Paddles!" I turned to the nurses.

"No, no paddles." Amelia refused. "His spine is completely unstable and exposed right now. If you shock him, he will move and he will be paralyzed. You'll undo all my work."

Owen wracked his brain for another solution before finally coming up with something. "We'll try and take him down with meds. Push Amiodarone, hundred-twenty-five milligrams."

"Add vaso on top of his pressors," Alex spoke loudly over the screeching monitors.

"V-fib," I announced as the beeping got louder once more.

Alex watched as Amelia worked, but it was clear that she wasn't going to finish on time. "Shepherd, we have to shock him. Charge to fifty."

"No! If he moves, he won't walk." Amelia refused again.

Reaching over, Alex grabbed the paddles from the crash cart. "If he dies, he won't walk, either. Clear. Amelia, clear!"

"Just give me-" Amelia shouted before stepping away from the table and throwing her arms in the air. "Damn it! Clear."

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After Brandon's surgery, he was admitted into the ICU, like most post-op patients are. We had been forced to shock the boy in the O.R. so we had pretty much thrown away all chances of giving Brandon the ability to walk ever again, but he was still alive; and in the grand scheme of things, that was what mattered most.

"There's a chance of some recovery of movement, but it's very small," Amelia explained to Brandon's parents as she shone a light in Brandon's eye to check his responsiveness.

"He'll get physical and occupational therapy to help him regain some function, find some new ways-" Alex added.

Brandon's mother stared down helplessly at her son. "But he'll never walk again?"

"I'm sorry. It's very unlikely." Amelia answered.

Brandon's mother sucked in a deep breath as she tried to fight the tears that were welling in her eyes. "The gun was locked up. It was supposed to be locked in a drawer. It was. I don't know how they-"

"Kids watch," Amelia told her. "They pick up everything you do. I'm very sorry that this happened."

Once we fire that first shot, we're committed. There's almost no way to take it back. The question becomes...do we keep firing back and declare an all-out war?