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“Absolutely not.”
“Dr. Robinavitch, if you would just–.”
“No fucking way.”
“The next press conference is tomorrow morning. The board feels it would be best if we had an attending present to field medical questions.”
“Plenty of those in the building that night. Ask someone else.”
“Everyone else I've asked has said no.”
“Imagine that.”
Robby is mercifully spared Gloria’s next argument by a shout of, “Robby, need you in trauma two!” He throws up his hands at the hospital administrator in the most harmless ‘what can I do?’ gesture he can muster under the circumstances, already in motion.
The trauma bay is empty when he gets there aside from Dana. “Thought you could use an escape,” she says.
The short response to that is yes. The long one is also yes, but with a depth of feeling he has spent the 40-odd hours since the initial Code Triage call shoving back into its designated box. He rubs a hand over his face, weary in a way that he'd be aggressively caffeinating through were it not the tail end of a half shift designed to bridge the gap between the all-hands-on-deck of the MCI and a return to business as usual.
“How are we looking on the restock?” he asks. Looking around the room, he can see most of the big set pieces back in place – ultrasound, crash cart, portable imaging – but there are odds and ends he expects them to be chasing down for a while yet. The list of supplies, equipment, and medication they typically keep on hand is expansive, and they burned through not only their stalwarts but their alternatives and their alternatives’ alternatives to such a degree that even the supply of items he doesn't usually have to worry about is now in question. There’s an argument to be made that the autoclave is currently the hospital's hardest working employee.
“In decent shape on everything but blood; the earlier you can get a type and cross in for anyone who might need it to save our limited supply of O-neg, the better.”
“Copy that,” he says. “I'll spread the word.”
She nods, checking something off the list she’s been working her way through all morning. He does her the courtesy of not asking if ‘Rescue Robby’ was the corresponding line item. It isn’t a ‘yes’ to the initial question that worries him, but the natural follow-up regarding how many more times she expects she’ll need to do so before the shift is over.
“You ready for this, Cap?”
“Not really, no.”
“...yeah,” Dana says. “That sounds about right.”
-
Their doors officially reopen to the public at noon with just under a third of their typical capacity available for new patients, a third taken up by shooting victims in non-critical condition waiting on the surgery backlog to clear, and the remainder consumed by boarders returned to them from the hallways upstairs.
Lucky patient number one is an infant with a fever just high enough to put them all a little on edge. Robby refuses to see it as a talisman of things to come but does have Dana put the family in North 3 rather than Peds under the principle that he is not in fact a masochist.
It's normal except for all the ways that it isn't. The clatter of an instrument tray getting knocked over sends not one but two staff members diving to the floor. The board is a mixture of names and MCI casualty numbers, the latter still needed for consistency of communication over scheduling discussions had hours ago. The latest betting pool is on the combined tally of the number of times they get called heroes and number of inappropriate questions asked by a member of the public, with bonus points available for the same person producing an entry in both categories in back-to-back statements.
Robby's just finished adding three points to the tally – “You're so brave, what would you have done if the shooter came in?” – when he comes across Whittaker staring down at his phone looking the closest to angry Robby has seen him in the three days of their total acquaintance.
“Whittaker?” he prompts gently.
The younger man startles, nearly fumbling the device. “Sorry, sorry, just putting it on vibrate.”
“Everything okay?”
“It's dumb.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
“I don't think it's appropriate.”
Robby’s willing to leave it at that – he might be their teacher, but they're all entirely too old for him to be reading messages out to the class at large – except that Whittaker's face crumples and he holds his phone out far enough for Robby to see an open message window. Only once he's pulled out his reading glasses does the blurry text resolve itself into a group title of U Pitt Med Class of 2026 and most recent message of ‘Dennis you’re so lucky!!’
After years of dealing with med students and interns alike, it doesn't surprise him. Every year they get people come through the department who are so eager to put into practice what they've learned that they lose sight of the patient associated with the procedure. Recalibration of the line between pride of profession and the empathy that makes them human is only ever done the hard way. Whittaker will be a better doctor for his experience on Friday. That doesn’t make him lucky, it makes him the one who was there.
He says none of this to Whittaker under the principle that by this point, they’ve all just about reached their limit on receiving speeches. Robby knows he’s reached his on delivering them. “Ah,” he says instead, leaning around Whittaker to grab a black marker off the tray. A blank region of the whiteboard he sections off with a clean line, titling the new area ‘Number of inappropriate adjectives used by friends and family.’
The marker he then passes to Whittaker. “Want to do the honors?”
Whittaker does.
-
McKay pulls him into a room just after lunch to look at one of their stable shooting victims awaiting bullet removal from his bicep. The full-body rash is a relatively new development and the speed of its onset concerning.
“Looks like an allergy to me. He's NPO until surgery, it's not food. Could be the antibiotics, but he was on amoxicillin a few years ago following a wisdom tooth removal and didn't have any issues then. I thought maybe metal – he's reacting to the bullet?”
“Unlikely,” Robby says. “Reaction would be more localized. Right track, wrong horse. Luke, do you happen to know your blood type?”
“A negative…why?”
“Delayed-onset transfusion reaction,” Robby says, watching as the light dawns in McKay’s eyes. To the teen in the bed, he says, “You received O-pos when you came in Friday night. The hives are an immune response to an incompatible blood type.”
With an IV drip of diphenhydramine ordered, he leaves McKay to get it started. Coming out of the room, he nearly runs into Mel exiting a room at speed. “Whoa there!”
A glance back through the window of the door reveals a patient who looks alert and stable, sitting upright in the bed and doing something on his phone. “Dislocated shoulder,” Mel explains. “I just need – a sling?”
She doesn't sound uncertain but rattled and Robby frowns at the sight of it. A light touch to her shoulder guides her to the side of the room, the closest thing to privacy they can get in a pinch. “What's going on?”
He watches her face closely as she pulls herself together, feeling that sixth sense of when to check on his people solidify into a red flag. “He's got a lot of questions. Um. About the shooting? He heard that some doctors gave blood and wanted to film a TikTok about it.”
His first thought is ‘fuck, no’ – his second the same, but with more volume. “Oh, that's not happening.”
The look of utter relief on her face does nothing to quell the protective feeling riding herd on the control center in his brain. “Do you want me to take over?” he follows up with, watching her face closely.
“No, I can handle it,” she says.
While he respects her choice in the matter – unfortunately, it isn't the first and it won't be the last time a patient has made one of his team uncomfortable – he does follow her back into the room to stand silent backup. If Robby glowers at the patient until the guy gets weirded out and puts his phone away, that's his business.
-
Their first trauma is a sedan-vs-median direct from the highway. The type and cross comes back before Collins has to make a call on a fasciotomy to relieve the compartment syndrome. The driver's blood type looks to be AB-positive, which pleases Dana and therefore pleases Robby. Collins makes the first cut with two units on standby and Javadi watching from stage right, the younger woman’s voice nervy but feet absolutely steady.
Their second trauma – their second trauma is a GSW, something that Robby realizes at the same time as the rest of the room. Trauma bays receiving new patients are not quiet or still places and so neither the sudden silence nor the shared instinct to freeze go unnoticed. The moment builds off itself, contagious in its spread. Robby is here and now but also then and there, and he doubts he's the only one who glances down at the patient's wrist to look for a triage band that isn't there.
“Is it–?” Princess asks, and he uses her as his reference point. Many of his doctors might be new to the department but the nursing staff is not; they give him the best gauge of where his own reaction lies on the scale from ‘reasonable under the circumstances’ to ‘going to be A Problem.’
“No!” The EMT says. “Isolated incident.”
He resists the urge to stick a gloved finger in his ear to disrupt the ringing as the room collectively exhales, the tempo of orders picking back up to normal. They've got the EFAST going and vitals coming up on the monitor and oh look, there’s free fluid in the chest that's almost certainly going to need draining before it collapses the lung. He thinks they’re doing pretty well – imaging, not pulse and mental status; an IV, not an IO – until he hears Mohan swear quietly under her breath, whisper the word, “Labs,” and then tack a slew of orders onto the end of the previous set of instructions.
Maybe it’s the room, maybe it’s the timing, definitely it’s the injury – exchanging a look with Samira, Robby feels pretty confident in his assessment that they both tripped the same landmine on this one.
They don't do post-mortems on missteps rooted in thought and not actions – if they did, they'd do little else – but he does add it to his list of things to worry about if he ever gets more than ten interrupted minutes to reflect.
When the patient stabilizes, he exits the trauma bay to find Dana serving as a second set of eyes through the contents audit and subsequent relocking of the Pyxis by Pharmacy. He focuses on plastering if not a smile than at least a neutral expression on his face.
“You okay?” Dana asks. He manages to suppress the wince at being caught out, but only just. The last thing either of them need is for him to be another worry on her plate.
“Always,” he says, meaning to brush her off. A glance over at the board reveals a couple of changes while they were working on the GSW, most notably the opening of two beds. Happy days.
“Uh huh,” she says. “Well, that makes one of us.”
And doesn't that just snap his head up again. He takes a step towards her reflexively, hand reaching out to her elbow, the scan for injuries automatic. “Dana, you’re not–?”
“No! No, God, I'm sorry. Just understaffed. Perlah called out today. Sick.”
There's a warning note in her tone that he recognizes as one of concern, and he'd be lying if he claimed he doesn't know what she's getting at. Prior to this year, Robby’s spent every anniversary of Adamson’s death on his bathroom floor for reasons that have nothing to do with food poisoning and everything to do with an inability to face the world. Sick covers more than just the physical.
While his heart goes out to her, Robby’s not sure Perlah doesn't have the right idea of it. He's only here because the alternative is being alone, and that is definitively worse. It's different for everyone, though. Robby doesn't want to go to sleep. He's also known people in the same emotional state who can do little but.
“Want me to talk to her?” There are resources available to her; Robby knows that, Dana knows that, hell, Perlah probably knows that – but it's been just under two days since the shooting, and the number one resource any of them need is time. To grieve, to scream, to cry. To process, if such a thing is possible. He likes to hope it is, though any jury would find reasonable doubt.
Dana shakes her head. “I've got it.”
“I know. But it doesn't hurt to ask.”
“Remember that, will you?”
The laugh that comes out of him is one of disbelief, on the edge of derisive in a way he's normally better at curbing. “Physician, heal thyself.”
When Dana squeezes his arm, Robby's hand comes up to cover hers and holds on for all he's worth.