Chapter Text
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She’s in the staff room when her bleep goes off.
Trauma call.
Fifteen years of doing this and Eve’s neck still prickles at the sound, pulse jack-hammering in her ears as the automated voice blares through her pager. It’s followed by two further bleeps in quick succession. She knows it’s Jess. Or Hugo. They’re both on-call with her.
She throws her theatre hat off and makes a run for the door, down two corridors, four flights of stairs, past Costa (she’s desperate for a coffee) and Marks & Spencer’s (desperate for a sandwich, too) and straight to A&E.
It takes seconds to push her way through the crowd of staff and patients milling around – some on crutches, others in beds, most of them waiting propped in doorways or on seats for God knows how much longer.
The hospital’s been on code red all week.
She stops to catch her breath when she sees Hugo hovering by the phone at the nurses’ station, pen in one hand and paper in the other, waiting.
“Where’s Jess?”
He motions towards the resuscitation bay where Eve can hear a cacophony of loud sounds: machines beeping, the rhythmic slam of a bed as someone does CPR, a distraught wailing noise coming from the far end of the bay, and instructions – clear and resonant, barked confidently by the senior A&E consultant.
She steps into the chaos of it all, yanking Hugo with her.
“Write everything. Starting with the time. Don’t fuck this up.”
Jess is already at the bedside of the most critically injured casualty.
The multi-collision double-decker RTA had infiltrated the department like a flood, spilling across Majors and into Resus until they were both filled to the brim.
Eve watches Jess do a secondary survey. She’s surrounded by doctors in scrubs of all colours – green A&E SHOs, registrars and their black consultants, blue members of the intensive care unit and surgical team, pink for the anaesthetists.
She grabs the ultrasound trolley and jumps to Jess’ side.
“You carry on. I’ll FAST him.”
They work meticulously together. They always have. Jess had by far been the best registrar Eve had ever been given. She looked forward to the times when their nights overlapped, or even their days off, usually spent in the pub or at the local park.
She runs the probe over the comatose patient’s thorax and abdomen, scanning for internal bleeding, hand steady but slicked with sweat. She barely hears Jess hand over to her – male, nineteen, cyclist, head on collision – before she’s being flocked by the surgeons.
She reports the findings to them: ruptured spleen, flail segment which may or may not go into pneumothorax, she can’t be sure of a cardiac tamponade, but possibly. Certainly no traumatic dissection. Jess had already told her about the suspected tib-fib fracture she’ll have to get her own team to fix.
She watches the body in front of her jostle as dozens of hands work to prep it for the CT scanner and then for theatre.
There’s a collar around his neck, the rest of him bare and strapped to a spinal board.
Briefly, she wonders who this kid was – where was his family? A girlfriend, maybe? Was he in college? Why was he on a goddamn bike and not in the middle of class? And why the fuck, hadn't he worn a helmet?
A deep part of her seethes. In her time as the head of Trauma & Orthopaedics, she’d seen her fare share of people doing dumb shit and she’d secretly grown to despise every single one of them. Helmetless cyclists were up there, if not top of her list. Then again, they provided her with a steady and rewarding financial income, so.
She stares at the boy as the nurse hooks him up to a bag of blood. She knows he’s teetering on the precipice of life, right beneath her hands. She looks at his face – dirty blonde hair over panda eyes, cheeks smattered with blood and freckles. This was somebody’s incredibly stupid but incredibly important child.
And it was exactly why she did her job.
Before she can get too sentimental, Dr Vasiliev nods at her from the head of the bed, ripping her away from her reverie.
“Eve?”
“Yeah.”
“Airway – it is secured. Are you ready?”
She watches Konstantin’s gloved hands cradle the patient’s neck, endotracheal tube attached to a bag and mask. On the end of it is one of Konstantin’s juniors, pumping oxygen into the boy’s lungs as his chest rises and falls symmetrically, much to her relief. No pneumothorax after all.
“Ready.”
Aside from an emergency splenectomy for the general surgeons and a quick once-over from cardiothoracics, on Eve’s part, the cyclist is a quick patch-up job. She lets Jess do most of the work – joint resurfacing at the tibial plateau, then a plate and screws for the rest.
She’d always been taught that long bones lost the most blood, stealthy and invisible right up until the patient crashed into hypovolaemic shock.
Luckily, Jess works quickly to fix the problem - Eve’s all too happy to play assistant this time.
She watches Konstantin pour over his Sudoku across the operating table.
He’s wearing a hat with ducks on it today. She’d asked him about it weeks ago, during one of their elective lists.
Irina likes it, he’d told her. That had made her laugh – the great Dr Konstantin Vasiliev, bowing down to his eleven-year-old daughter’s every whim. She’d seen him single-handedly end the careers of three house officers, argue with Dr Carolyn Martens over accepting a dubious intensive care transfer (and win), intubate a patient mid-Grand Mal just outside of Costa, and make the most delicious Stroganoff six vodkas in.
She had not seen him get bossed by a child. Needless to say, she was dying to.
“So, Konstantin.”
He looks up from his puzzle.
“When’s our next dinner date?”
His eyes light up as he chuckles. “You want me to drink you under the table again?”
Eve laughs beneath her surgical mask. It’s itchy and sweaty and makes her visor fog up, but she hopes her eyes alone convey just how much she really loves him.
“I can hold my own.”
“You are Korean, Eve. It is no contest.”
When she glances to Jess, she finds her nodding in agreement. If she wasn’t busy suturing, Eve would shove her.
“Okay, so invite me over so we can practise.”
Konstantin leans back in his chair. A quick glance at the observation monitor to make sure things are running smoothly followed by an indulgent sip of his steaming coffee. Eve would kill for some caffeine.
“I am on-call this weekend.”
“Well, shit. How about the next?” she shrugs. “Wait – no, the next, I have a thing – with Niko.”
The eye-roll Jess gives doesn’t go unnoticed. Nor does Konstantin’s groan.
“How about the next?”
Konstantin puts his Sudoku to the side and rises from his chair. He approaches the operating table, careful not to touch anything.
“How is that SHO of yours?”
“Shit,” Jess mumbles before Eve can.
Eve feels her blood boil. Since the swap-over in August, Hugo had been a bit of a loose cannon. On a good morning, he’d waltz in half-way through instead of after the ward round had finished, notes unprepped and most of his jobs discarded or incomplete from the day before.
Part of her felt shame. He was her responsibility. Bar him, all her trainees had sailed through foundation without so much as a missed bag of fluids.
This week alone, Hugo had forgotten to prescribe anticoagulation for every single one of Eve’s post-ops, left a geriatric patient nil-by-mouth with no IVs, and not bothered to request the x-rays Eve had asked for.
He had bought her pastries though, one morning over a shit-eating grin. So, there’s that.
“He – I can’t quite figure out if he just doesn’t care or…” she helps Jess un-scrub, then proceeds to take off her own mask and gown.
Konstantin grins at her. “I have a new one as well.”
Eve brightens. She wonders if he’s going to tell her all about it, like he does every four months when the trainees rotate.
“A registrar.”
“Oh.” So, not a four-month rotation then. “So?”
There’s a smirk, hidden somewhere in his greying beard. He strokes it mysteriously, then laughs.
“I like her.”
“Yeah?”
“She’s funny.”
“Really.”
“Sure. Very smart.”
“Good!” Eve tosses the last of her gear in the bin and pats him on the shoulder as she follows Jess out of the operating theatre. “Let me know if you want to swap!” she calls out.
“An SHO for a registrar? You are a joker, Eve.”
She throws Konstantin a wink, then retraces her steps despite herself, to give him a parting one-armed hug.
“Thank you for today. Drinks after work? Since you can’t do the weekend.”
“Now you have a deal.”