BSG fanfic: Do No Harm
This was my submission for the femgenficathon. It has not been betaed and was finished in a frenzied, caffeinated rush, so please forgive any errors.
Title: Do No Harm
Rating: T for medical gore
Characters: Layne Ishay, Doc Cottle, Felix Gaeta (briefly)
Word Count: 3,300
Summary: The story of a mutiny, a medic, and the three patients who stayed with her.
Sickbay was a blur of chaos, activity, and barely controlled panic. The wounded filled every bed. More lined the walls or sat groaning in the aisles. Ishay’s world had narrowed to this cramped tunnel of blood and screams, life and death. Outside, a battle raged, but in here mutineers and loyalists alike found treatment for their wounds, if there was any treatment to be had.
Her hands brisk, her eyes dry, Ishay zipped a body bag closed. She dropped a set of dogtags into a small plastic bag, clipped it to the toe tag, and nodded to the two orderlies to take it away. At that moment, two civilians staggered through the door with a third man supported between them. Ishay glanced around the Medical Bay. Doc Cottle was in the back performing emergency surgery with a pocket knife and a pair of forceps, and his other aides were engaged in triage, trying to stop the bleeding where they could, save what lives could be salvaged.
Making up her mind, Ishay strode towards the newcomers. “No guns, gentlemen; you can leave them by the door.” The panting civvies didn’t seem happy about that. Ishay arched an eyebrow. “Or shall I get Doctor Cottle over here?” Without a word, the mutineers slung the rifles off of their backs. Ishay’s breath caught and she took an involuntary step backwards, but they merely engaged the safeties and propped the weapons on an old umbrella stand. Ishay swallowed and nodded to the bed a dead man had just vacated. “You can put him there.”
The civilians stumbled to the cot and lowered their man onto the blood-stained sheets. Ishay winced at the lack of sterility, but there was nothing she could do.
The wounded man moaned loudly as his comrades set him down. Across the aisle, a loyalist Marine glared daggers at the civilians, but held her tongue. No one was willing to challenge the delicate truce that declared sickbay neutral ground. Nobody said it, but at that moment Doc Cottle commanded more respect than Gaeta, Zarek, and both Adamas combined.
Ishay grabbed her clipboard, flipped to a clean sheet, and started the triage. The new patient was conscious, semi-alert, and very reactive to pain stimuli. She scratched a few notes.
“What’s his name?”
One of the uninjured civvies looked at the other, who seemed to search his memory. “Ah . . . Lucas. Lucas Zimmer.”
That was a Sagittarron name, which meant this fellow was likely from Dogville, a notion supported by his patched, blood-soaked shirt. Ishay took up a battered pair of scissors and began to cut through the coarse fabric, praying it wasn’t the only shirt he owned. Of course, judging by the quantity of blood on it, he might not need it much longer anyway.
“How was he wounded?”
“A sidearm-I think. We were trying to defend a munitions locker and came up against a couple of officers.”
“Just one shot?”
“We think so.”
Ishay wiped away the blood as best she could. It wasn’t looking good. The bullet had entered between the lowest vertebrosternal ribs on his right side. Chest wounds could be devastating, and Ishay doubted this man could survive emergency surgery. Steeling herself for the worst, she eased the man into a sitting position-ignoring his ragged scream-and peeled the ruined shirt away from his back. Blood poured from an ugly hole just below his shoulder blade. Ishay breathed a sigh of relief. An exit wound was very good news.
Zimmer only grunted slightly as Ishay lowered him to the bed. His face was pale and gleamed with a sheen of sweat. Ishay looped a blood pressure cuff around his arm and took a quick reading. She bit back a curse at the result. This man was going into shock.
She scanned the room desperately. Nurses and orderlies were congregating around Cottle’s makeshift operating theater, a sure sign that his surgery wasn’t going well. Ishay spotted an orderly resting his head against the wall. “Petersen. Petersen!” The young man looked up, one hand clapped over his mouth. His eyes were red. Ishay didn’t have time to hold hands. “Get me a bag of saline and a unit of O-Neg stat!”
The man-boy, really-seemed to shake himself, nodded jerkily, and headed for the refrigerated locker on unsteady legs. Leaning over Lucas Zimmer, Ishay swabbed his forearms with alcohol and began the arduous process of inserting intravenous catheters into blood vessels constricted by dehydration. When Petersen returned, she slapped the bags into place, reached for a stethoscope . . . and froze as the patient suddenly convulsed, gasping for breath. Fortunately the paralysis lasted only an instant before her training kicked in and she pressed the stethoscope against his ribs. She listened carefully for a moment, then bit back a curse.
“Petersen,” she fished in a drawer and drew out a mask attached to a collapsible plastic bag, “Ten breaths a minute. I’ll be back as quick as I can.” Looking slightly faint, the orderly pressed the mask against the man’s face and began to pump air into his failing lungs. Ishay all but ran through the infirmary, edging past Cottle’s many attendants. “Doctor,” she began, “Can you spare a minute? I’ve got an acute pneumothorax in . . .” She trailed off when she caught sight of Cottle. The doctor was up to his elbows in a young Marine’s abdomen, a leaking artery clamped between two slippery, latex-covered fingers.
“This kid’s hemorrhaging, Ishay. Chest tubes are on the top shelf. You’ve got the ball.”
“I . . . understand, sir.”
Her hands trembled as she rifled through the familiar supplies. A scalpel . . . a hard plastic tube as thick as her thumb . . . a preloaded syringe of morpha . . .
“Ishay . . .” Judging by the note of panic in Petersen’s voice, Ishay was out of time. For the thousandth time that shift, she swallowed her doubts and hurried back to her patient.
Zimmer’s fingertips were beginning to turn blue. Petersen looked ready to pass out. Ishay didn’t have time to worry about either problem. Elbowing past the orderly, she ran her fingers over Zimmer’s blood-slicked side, feeling for the gap between two ribs. It was too easy; like everyone else in the fleet, this kid was one missed meal away from emaciation. A quick glance at the mutineer’s face revealed that he had passed out. It was now or never. She lined up the scalpel. Just like in the instructional vids . . .
An incision. Not too deep, not too long.
Muscle fibers wound tightly together. Ishay couldn’t remember all of their names, and frankly, she didn’t give a frak.
The chest tube met resistance, but not much-Zimmer was so painfully thin.
Gauze and tape clung to Ishay’s dripping red fingers.
His skin was clammy. He smelled like gunpowder and sweat. Ishay pressed the stethoscope against his chest once more, holding her own breath as she listened to his lungs . . .
There.
Exhaustion kept the relief from her face as she leaned back and wiped the stethoscope clean. She swallowed.
Another nurse’s voice dragged her back to reality. “Ishay! We’ve got a bleeder over here!”
With a decisive snap, she removed her bloody gloves and grabbed a new pair from their ever-dwindling supplies. “Petersen, go get a pulse ox from Monroe. She’ll show you how to set it up. Get a line on him and let me know if his O2 stats don’t hit 90%. Then put a standard field dressing on that wound and take his vitals every fifteen minutes.”
“So . . . he’ll be okay?”
“Too soon to tell.”
“But . . .”
“Ishay!”
Her mind already on the next patient, she spun back to Petersen. “His frakking lung collapsed. Provided that doesn’t happen again, he doesn’t bleed internally, doesn’t catch an infection, and doesn’t have any bullet fragments in his chest, then yes, he’ll be okay. Maybe.”
Petersen’s jaw snapped shut, and Ishay instantly regretted her brusque tone. It wasn’t as if she didn’t intimately know the mindset of the terrified and overwhelmed aid. As an afterthought, she grabbed Zimmer’s IV line and injected the standard dose of morpha. She refused to look at his face. She hoped this kid would live. A chest wound was a terrible way to die.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
As Ishay’s double shift stretched into a triple, the steady stream of new patients slowly dwindled to a trickle. After word of Zarek’s surrender came down, they were briefly swamped with slightly wounded patients who had holed up waiting for the fighting to stop. For the most part, though, the seriously injured had either made their way to sickbay or never would.
More than six hours after the announcement came, the exception to that rule came crashing through the doors, supported by two of her fellow crewmen. The woman was young, military, and bleeding from two freshly made bullet holes. Ishay quickly tied off the suture she was applying and hurried over, trying not to stumble. “What the frak happened?”
The man on the left grunted. “Couple of diehards holed up in a storage room off the hangar deck. She goes looking for her tool belt . . . bang.”
The woman struggled to raise her head. “My . . . fault . . .” Her words were slurred but audible. “Wasn’t . . . paying . . . ‘tention . . .”
The patient was cognizant. Ishay made a mental note. She carefully modulated her own voice, striving to convey both compassion and professionalism, privately reflecting that both were worth their weight in shit. “How do you feel, Petty Officer?”
The young woman drew a slow breath. “Dizzy . . .”
Ishay quickly scanned the room, confirming that nothing had changed since she last checked five minutes earlier. Every bed was full. She grabbed a pillow and a sheet from a cart in the corner.
“Right this way.”
The ragged sheet did nothing to soften the cold, steel deck, but it was the best they could do. As one of the men lowered the new patient’s head onto the pillow, Ishay directed her questions at him. “What happened to the shooters?”
He smiled bitterly. “We’re under orders to requisition a couple of body bags.”
Ishay knew she should feel something at those words. She knew. Her voice was hollow. “Storage is in the back. Last drawer on the left. Make a note on the clipboard.”
The men grunted an assent and departed as Ishay mechanically cut away the green uniform. Her fingers ached as she inserted what had to be the thousandth IV of her shift. The other woman flinched and shivered, and Ishay cursed herself for being so tired she forgot to talk to her patient.
“Don’t worry, Petty Officer. Let me just get this capped, then we’ll see about getting you a bed. Maybe even a doctor.”
The wounds stood out against her tanks: an entry wound just below her right collarbone and an exit wound near the top of her shoulder. There wasn’t much blood. Maybe this one had gotten lucky.
“Cold . . .”
Ishay staggered to her feet and wove her way back to the linens cart. It took a few moments, but she managed to find a blanket with only a few drops of blood on it. On her way back to the patient, she stopped an orderly. “Get Dr. Cottle.”
“He’s with Anders . . .”
“He can spare five minutes.”
“Yes sir.”
The young petty officer (they were all young-too young) seemed paler than she had just moments ago. Ishay draped the blanket over her and looped a blood pressure cuff around her arm. Weariness kept the dismay from her face. The patient was breathing regularly, and her pulse was still strong. She might still pull through.
The smell of cigarette smoke accompanied by a soft hand on her elbow announced Cottle’s arrival. The doctor knelt beside the wounded petty officer, apparently not caring that his surgical gown was contaminated. As Cottle checked the patient’s vitals, Ishay removed a pulse oximeter from the finger of a more stable patient. When she returned, the doctor was listening to the patient’s heart and shaking his head.
Ishay cleared her throat. “Her blood pressure’s down. I was about to start a transfusion.”
Cottle blinked. “Don’t bother. We ran out of donor blood a half hour ago.”
“Then . . . then I’ll check the records, find a new donor. We could do a direct transfusion . . .”
Cottle shook his head more vehemently. “Wouldn’t do any good.”
“Doctor . . .”
“Her BP is dropping too fast. It’s probably a nicked aorta.”
“So . . . surgery then . . .”
“Ishay.”
“Could try a graft . . .”
“Ishay.”
“I’m saying, we can’t just . . .”
“Ishay.”
She closed her mouth reluctantly. For a moment, the only sound was the slow beep of the oximeter. Too slow.
“You’re sure there’s nothing . . .”
“Nothing.”
After a moment, he sighed and reached into his pocket. Ishay held up a hand to stop him. “I’ll do it. They need you back in surgery.”
The old doctor slowly got to his feet, squeezed Ishay’s shoulder reassuringly, and walked away. Ishay lowered herself to the ground by the patient’s head and reached for the tool she’d used far too often: a simple black marker. Her hand was steady as she drew two intersecting lines on the young woman’s forehead. A black X. A lost cause. If the woman knew what the mark meant, she gave no sign. Her eyelids fluttered weakly.
Ishay swallowed hard. “Just sit tight. A few more minutes . . . and we’ll see about that bed.”
“It’s . . . okay.” The woman’s voice was soft. “Don’t worry . . . ‘bout the bed . . .” Her breaths were becoming more labored. Her head rolled to the side. “Someone’s having a baby . . .”
Ishay looked away as the patient’s eyes fluttered shut. She didn’t flatline then and there-this wasn’t a TV movie. But, from the slow beat of the pulse ox, Ishay knew she wouldn’t wake up.
Though there were a thousand other things she should have been doing, the medic took a moment just to close her dry eyes. A chest wound was such a terrible way to die. Without thinking, she turned her head to see what had captured her patient’s attention moments ago. She almost wished she hadn’t.
Tucked neatly under the bed beside them sat a disassembled fetal monitor, forgotten in the confusion. Right here. Just weeks ago, Ishay had stood right here chatting with Gaeta, commiserating over prosthetic dysfunction and Cylon gynecology. And now . . .
The oximeter blared a tinny alarm. Ishay silenced it with an almost violent slap. For a moment, the only sound was her own breathing. Then the cacophony of coughs, groans, and mechanical beeps resumed.
Ishay leaned her head against the cold bulkhead. What have you done, Felix?
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Ishay’s triple shift stretched into a quadruple, and still her work was not done. She finished changing a bandage and made her way to the pharmacy counter, stepping carefully around Petersen. The young orderly had finally passed out an hour before and now sat propped against the wall with a dextrose IV in his arm.
She didn’t even need her key to open the controlled substances locker; there was such demand for morpha that they’d given up on locking it away hours earlier. Ishay stared at the pain-killer for a moment, but reached instead for a bottle of stimulants.
Two pills. No more than the recommended dose. Ishay swallowed dutifully and waited a few moments while the stims dispelled some of the cobwebs from her head. At least now she could blame the tremor in her hands on the caffeine.
The announcement had come over the wireless just moments ago. The Admiral had reviewed the cases of Tom Zarek and Felix Gaeta and pronounced the judgment that everyone knew was coming.
Ishay squeezed her eyes shut and wished it was so easy to block Zarek, Adama, and Gaeta from her mind. Because of those men, she hadn’t slept in two days. Because of them, her sick bay was full of the wounded and the dying. Because of them their supply of body bags was grossly depleted. Because of them . . .
And yet . . .
Her eyes were drawn inexplicably back to the morpha bottle as phantom gunshots rang out in her head. A chest wound was a terrible way to die.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
“I’m sorry, but no one is permitted to see the prisoner without advance authorization. Admiral’s orders.”
Ishay stared back at the Marine with eyes that could almost have belonged to a corpse. “The prisoner is also a patient, and he’s due for his next dose of painkillers.” The Marine’s face flashed with anger, but Ishay just arched an eyebrow. “Unless you’d like to countermand Doctor Cottle’s orders?”
He gritted his teeth. “Two minutes.”
Ishay stepped past him before he could change his mind.
The quarters beyond were dim, even by Galactica’s low standards. It was a moment before Ishay’s eyes adjusted enough that she could make out the bent form of her patient.
Lieutenant Felix Gaeta sat hunched over a metal table, his head resting on his hand as if it cost too much energy to hold it up. His eyes were red-rimmed, but he managed a smile when he saw Ishay. The woman hesitated. She hadn’t given much thought to what she would say.
“How’s the leg?” She managed finally.
Gaeta blinked, reacting possibly to the obvious futility of the question. Still, he ran a hand over the scarred stump where his right leg once was and shrugged. “It’s fine. It’s . . . good, I mean . . .” he trailed off. “How are things in sickbay?”
Now it was Ishay’s turn to look away and shrug. “Under control. Really, it’s . . . fine.”
“We made quite a mess.”
“Nothing we can’t handle.”
They both winced at the lie.
Ishay swallowed. “Anyway, I’m here because . . . your leg. I brought you some more morpha. You’ve been requesting it since . . .” She held out a paper bag.
He took it with a furrowed brow. “My prescription ran out weeks ago.”
“Well . . . we made you a new scrip.”
He peered into the bag and froze. “Ishay, this is . . .”
“The dosage is the same as before,” she cut him off, “I trust you remember how to administer it?”
“Well, yes, but . . .”
“Then, I really should go. We’re quite busy.”
“But . . . you shouldn’t . . . I can’t . . .”
“Felix.” She waited until he met her gaze, then shook her head sadly.
His expression softened. “Thank you, Ishay.”
She looked away. “Call me Layne.”
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
A few hours later, the medicine came back to Layne in the same white paper bag. She stared at the capped syringes with tired eyes. Two doses of morpha: the most powerful narcotic in the fleet. One dose would have been enough to keep Felix pain-free for up to six hours.
Taken together, they could have ended his pain for good.
The condemned lieutenant hadn’t used either dose, so they were brought back to sickbay just as Ishay was finally ending her shift.
Doctor Cottle shook his head. “You’re damn lucky. The Admiral would’ve had your ass over those. What were you thinking?”
She held up a hand to stop him. “The Admiral bleeds red like everybody else.” That’s what I was thinking.
Cottle lit a cigarette while muttering inaudibly about the injustices of the universe and the frakwits who try to fix them. Finally, he sighed. “Get some rest, Ishay, we have a lot of work to do tomorrow.”
fin
Title: Do No Harm
Rating: T for medical gore
Characters: Layne Ishay, Doc Cottle, Felix Gaeta (briefly)
Word Count: 3,300
Summary: The story of a mutiny, a medic, and the three patients who stayed with her.
Sickbay was a blur of chaos, activity, and barely controlled panic. The wounded filled every bed. More lined the walls or sat groaning in the aisles. Ishay’s world had narrowed to this cramped tunnel of blood and screams, life and death. Outside, a battle raged, but in here mutineers and loyalists alike found treatment for their wounds, if there was any treatment to be had.
Her hands brisk, her eyes dry, Ishay zipped a body bag closed. She dropped a set of dogtags into a small plastic bag, clipped it to the toe tag, and nodded to the two orderlies to take it away. At that moment, two civilians staggered through the door with a third man supported between them. Ishay glanced around the Medical Bay. Doc Cottle was in the back performing emergency surgery with a pocket knife and a pair of forceps, and his other aides were engaged in triage, trying to stop the bleeding where they could, save what lives could be salvaged.
Making up her mind, Ishay strode towards the newcomers. “No guns, gentlemen; you can leave them by the door.” The panting civvies didn’t seem happy about that. Ishay arched an eyebrow. “Or shall I get Doctor Cottle over here?” Without a word, the mutineers slung the rifles off of their backs. Ishay’s breath caught and she took an involuntary step backwards, but they merely engaged the safeties and propped the weapons on an old umbrella stand. Ishay swallowed and nodded to the bed a dead man had just vacated. “You can put him there.”
The civilians stumbled to the cot and lowered their man onto the blood-stained sheets. Ishay winced at the lack of sterility, but there was nothing she could do.
The wounded man moaned loudly as his comrades set him down. Across the aisle, a loyalist Marine glared daggers at the civilians, but held her tongue. No one was willing to challenge the delicate truce that declared sickbay neutral ground. Nobody said it, but at that moment Doc Cottle commanded more respect than Gaeta, Zarek, and both Adamas combined.
Ishay grabbed her clipboard, flipped to a clean sheet, and started the triage. The new patient was conscious, semi-alert, and very reactive to pain stimuli. She scratched a few notes.
“What’s his name?”
One of the uninjured civvies looked at the other, who seemed to search his memory. “Ah . . . Lucas. Lucas Zimmer.”
That was a Sagittarron name, which meant this fellow was likely from Dogville, a notion supported by his patched, blood-soaked shirt. Ishay took up a battered pair of scissors and began to cut through the coarse fabric, praying it wasn’t the only shirt he owned. Of course, judging by the quantity of blood on it, he might not need it much longer anyway.
“How was he wounded?”
“A sidearm-I think. We were trying to defend a munitions locker and came up against a couple of officers.”
“Just one shot?”
“We think so.”
Ishay wiped away the blood as best she could. It wasn’t looking good. The bullet had entered between the lowest vertebrosternal ribs on his right side. Chest wounds could be devastating, and Ishay doubted this man could survive emergency surgery. Steeling herself for the worst, she eased the man into a sitting position-ignoring his ragged scream-and peeled the ruined shirt away from his back. Blood poured from an ugly hole just below his shoulder blade. Ishay breathed a sigh of relief. An exit wound was very good news.
Zimmer only grunted slightly as Ishay lowered him to the bed. His face was pale and gleamed with a sheen of sweat. Ishay looped a blood pressure cuff around his arm and took a quick reading. She bit back a curse at the result. This man was going into shock.
She scanned the room desperately. Nurses and orderlies were congregating around Cottle’s makeshift operating theater, a sure sign that his surgery wasn’t going well. Ishay spotted an orderly resting his head against the wall. “Petersen. Petersen!” The young man looked up, one hand clapped over his mouth. His eyes were red. Ishay didn’t have time to hold hands. “Get me a bag of saline and a unit of O-Neg stat!”
The man-boy, really-seemed to shake himself, nodded jerkily, and headed for the refrigerated locker on unsteady legs. Leaning over Lucas Zimmer, Ishay swabbed his forearms with alcohol and began the arduous process of inserting intravenous catheters into blood vessels constricted by dehydration. When Petersen returned, she slapped the bags into place, reached for a stethoscope . . . and froze as the patient suddenly convulsed, gasping for breath. Fortunately the paralysis lasted only an instant before her training kicked in and she pressed the stethoscope against his ribs. She listened carefully for a moment, then bit back a curse.
“Petersen,” she fished in a drawer and drew out a mask attached to a collapsible plastic bag, “Ten breaths a minute. I’ll be back as quick as I can.” Looking slightly faint, the orderly pressed the mask against the man’s face and began to pump air into his failing lungs. Ishay all but ran through the infirmary, edging past Cottle’s many attendants. “Doctor,” she began, “Can you spare a minute? I’ve got an acute pneumothorax in . . .” She trailed off when she caught sight of Cottle. The doctor was up to his elbows in a young Marine’s abdomen, a leaking artery clamped between two slippery, latex-covered fingers.
“This kid’s hemorrhaging, Ishay. Chest tubes are on the top shelf. You’ve got the ball.”
“I . . . understand, sir.”
Her hands trembled as she rifled through the familiar supplies. A scalpel . . . a hard plastic tube as thick as her thumb . . . a preloaded syringe of morpha . . .
“Ishay . . .” Judging by the note of panic in Petersen’s voice, Ishay was out of time. For the thousandth time that shift, she swallowed her doubts and hurried back to her patient.
Zimmer’s fingertips were beginning to turn blue. Petersen looked ready to pass out. Ishay didn’t have time to worry about either problem. Elbowing past the orderly, she ran her fingers over Zimmer’s blood-slicked side, feeling for the gap between two ribs. It was too easy; like everyone else in the fleet, this kid was one missed meal away from emaciation. A quick glance at the mutineer’s face revealed that he had passed out. It was now or never. She lined up the scalpel. Just like in the instructional vids . . .
An incision. Not too deep, not too long.
Muscle fibers wound tightly together. Ishay couldn’t remember all of their names, and frankly, she didn’t give a frak.
The chest tube met resistance, but not much-Zimmer was so painfully thin.
Gauze and tape clung to Ishay’s dripping red fingers.
His skin was clammy. He smelled like gunpowder and sweat. Ishay pressed the stethoscope against his chest once more, holding her own breath as she listened to his lungs . . .
There.
Exhaustion kept the relief from her face as she leaned back and wiped the stethoscope clean. She swallowed.
Another nurse’s voice dragged her back to reality. “Ishay! We’ve got a bleeder over here!”
With a decisive snap, she removed her bloody gloves and grabbed a new pair from their ever-dwindling supplies. “Petersen, go get a pulse ox from Monroe. She’ll show you how to set it up. Get a line on him and let me know if his O2 stats don’t hit 90%. Then put a standard field dressing on that wound and take his vitals every fifteen minutes.”
“So . . . he’ll be okay?”
“Too soon to tell.”
“But . . .”
“Ishay!”
Her mind already on the next patient, she spun back to Petersen. “His frakking lung collapsed. Provided that doesn’t happen again, he doesn’t bleed internally, doesn’t catch an infection, and doesn’t have any bullet fragments in his chest, then yes, he’ll be okay. Maybe.”
Petersen’s jaw snapped shut, and Ishay instantly regretted her brusque tone. It wasn’t as if she didn’t intimately know the mindset of the terrified and overwhelmed aid. As an afterthought, she grabbed Zimmer’s IV line and injected the standard dose of morpha. She refused to look at his face. She hoped this kid would live. A chest wound was a terrible way to die.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
As Ishay’s double shift stretched into a triple, the steady stream of new patients slowly dwindled to a trickle. After word of Zarek’s surrender came down, they were briefly swamped with slightly wounded patients who had holed up waiting for the fighting to stop. For the most part, though, the seriously injured had either made their way to sickbay or never would.
More than six hours after the announcement came, the exception to that rule came crashing through the doors, supported by two of her fellow crewmen. The woman was young, military, and bleeding from two freshly made bullet holes. Ishay quickly tied off the suture she was applying and hurried over, trying not to stumble. “What the frak happened?”
The man on the left grunted. “Couple of diehards holed up in a storage room off the hangar deck. She goes looking for her tool belt . . . bang.”
The woman struggled to raise her head. “My . . . fault . . .” Her words were slurred but audible. “Wasn’t . . . paying . . . ‘tention . . .”
The patient was cognizant. Ishay made a mental note. She carefully modulated her own voice, striving to convey both compassion and professionalism, privately reflecting that both were worth their weight in shit. “How do you feel, Petty Officer?”
The young woman drew a slow breath. “Dizzy . . .”
Ishay quickly scanned the room, confirming that nothing had changed since she last checked five minutes earlier. Every bed was full. She grabbed a pillow and a sheet from a cart in the corner.
“Right this way.”
The ragged sheet did nothing to soften the cold, steel deck, but it was the best they could do. As one of the men lowered the new patient’s head onto the pillow, Ishay directed her questions at him. “What happened to the shooters?”
He smiled bitterly. “We’re under orders to requisition a couple of body bags.”
Ishay knew she should feel something at those words. She knew. Her voice was hollow. “Storage is in the back. Last drawer on the left. Make a note on the clipboard.”
The men grunted an assent and departed as Ishay mechanically cut away the green uniform. Her fingers ached as she inserted what had to be the thousandth IV of her shift. The other woman flinched and shivered, and Ishay cursed herself for being so tired she forgot to talk to her patient.
“Don’t worry, Petty Officer. Let me just get this capped, then we’ll see about getting you a bed. Maybe even a doctor.”
The wounds stood out against her tanks: an entry wound just below her right collarbone and an exit wound near the top of her shoulder. There wasn’t much blood. Maybe this one had gotten lucky.
“Cold . . .”
Ishay staggered to her feet and wove her way back to the linens cart. It took a few moments, but she managed to find a blanket with only a few drops of blood on it. On her way back to the patient, she stopped an orderly. “Get Dr. Cottle.”
“He’s with Anders . . .”
“He can spare five minutes.”
“Yes sir.”
The young petty officer (they were all young-too young) seemed paler than she had just moments ago. Ishay draped the blanket over her and looped a blood pressure cuff around her arm. Weariness kept the dismay from her face. The patient was breathing regularly, and her pulse was still strong. She might still pull through.
The smell of cigarette smoke accompanied by a soft hand on her elbow announced Cottle’s arrival. The doctor knelt beside the wounded petty officer, apparently not caring that his surgical gown was contaminated. As Cottle checked the patient’s vitals, Ishay removed a pulse oximeter from the finger of a more stable patient. When she returned, the doctor was listening to the patient’s heart and shaking his head.
Ishay cleared her throat. “Her blood pressure’s down. I was about to start a transfusion.”
Cottle blinked. “Don’t bother. We ran out of donor blood a half hour ago.”
“Then . . . then I’ll check the records, find a new donor. We could do a direct transfusion . . .”
Cottle shook his head more vehemently. “Wouldn’t do any good.”
“Doctor . . .”
“Her BP is dropping too fast. It’s probably a nicked aorta.”
“So . . . surgery then . . .”
“Ishay.”
“Could try a graft . . .”
“Ishay.”
“I’m saying, we can’t just . . .”
“Ishay.”
She closed her mouth reluctantly. For a moment, the only sound was the slow beep of the oximeter. Too slow.
“You’re sure there’s nothing . . .”
“Nothing.”
After a moment, he sighed and reached into his pocket. Ishay held up a hand to stop him. “I’ll do it. They need you back in surgery.”
The old doctor slowly got to his feet, squeezed Ishay’s shoulder reassuringly, and walked away. Ishay lowered herself to the ground by the patient’s head and reached for the tool she’d used far too often: a simple black marker. Her hand was steady as she drew two intersecting lines on the young woman’s forehead. A black X. A lost cause. If the woman knew what the mark meant, she gave no sign. Her eyelids fluttered weakly.
Ishay swallowed hard. “Just sit tight. A few more minutes . . . and we’ll see about that bed.”
“It’s . . . okay.” The woman’s voice was soft. “Don’t worry . . . ‘bout the bed . . .” Her breaths were becoming more labored. Her head rolled to the side. “Someone’s having a baby . . .”
Ishay looked away as the patient’s eyes fluttered shut. She didn’t flatline then and there-this wasn’t a TV movie. But, from the slow beat of the pulse ox, Ishay knew she wouldn’t wake up.
Though there were a thousand other things she should have been doing, the medic took a moment just to close her dry eyes. A chest wound was such a terrible way to die. Without thinking, she turned her head to see what had captured her patient’s attention moments ago. She almost wished she hadn’t.
Tucked neatly under the bed beside them sat a disassembled fetal monitor, forgotten in the confusion. Right here. Just weeks ago, Ishay had stood right here chatting with Gaeta, commiserating over prosthetic dysfunction and Cylon gynecology. And now . . .
The oximeter blared a tinny alarm. Ishay silenced it with an almost violent slap. For a moment, the only sound was her own breathing. Then the cacophony of coughs, groans, and mechanical beeps resumed.
Ishay leaned her head against the cold bulkhead. What have you done, Felix?
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Ishay’s triple shift stretched into a quadruple, and still her work was not done. She finished changing a bandage and made her way to the pharmacy counter, stepping carefully around Petersen. The young orderly had finally passed out an hour before and now sat propped against the wall with a dextrose IV in his arm.
She didn’t even need her key to open the controlled substances locker; there was such demand for morpha that they’d given up on locking it away hours earlier. Ishay stared at the pain-killer for a moment, but reached instead for a bottle of stimulants.
Two pills. No more than the recommended dose. Ishay swallowed dutifully and waited a few moments while the stims dispelled some of the cobwebs from her head. At least now she could blame the tremor in her hands on the caffeine.
The announcement had come over the wireless just moments ago. The Admiral had reviewed the cases of Tom Zarek and Felix Gaeta and pronounced the judgment that everyone knew was coming.
Ishay squeezed her eyes shut and wished it was so easy to block Zarek, Adama, and Gaeta from her mind. Because of those men, she hadn’t slept in two days. Because of them, her sick bay was full of the wounded and the dying. Because of them their supply of body bags was grossly depleted. Because of them . . .
And yet . . .
Her eyes were drawn inexplicably back to the morpha bottle as phantom gunshots rang out in her head. A chest wound was a terrible way to die.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
“I’m sorry, but no one is permitted to see the prisoner without advance authorization. Admiral’s orders.”
Ishay stared back at the Marine with eyes that could almost have belonged to a corpse. “The prisoner is also a patient, and he’s due for his next dose of painkillers.” The Marine’s face flashed with anger, but Ishay just arched an eyebrow. “Unless you’d like to countermand Doctor Cottle’s orders?”
He gritted his teeth. “Two minutes.”
Ishay stepped past him before he could change his mind.
The quarters beyond were dim, even by Galactica’s low standards. It was a moment before Ishay’s eyes adjusted enough that she could make out the bent form of her patient.
Lieutenant Felix Gaeta sat hunched over a metal table, his head resting on his hand as if it cost too much energy to hold it up. His eyes were red-rimmed, but he managed a smile when he saw Ishay. The woman hesitated. She hadn’t given much thought to what she would say.
“How’s the leg?” She managed finally.
Gaeta blinked, reacting possibly to the obvious futility of the question. Still, he ran a hand over the scarred stump where his right leg once was and shrugged. “It’s fine. It’s . . . good, I mean . . .” he trailed off. “How are things in sickbay?”
Now it was Ishay’s turn to look away and shrug. “Under control. Really, it’s . . . fine.”
“We made quite a mess.”
“Nothing we can’t handle.”
They both winced at the lie.
Ishay swallowed. “Anyway, I’m here because . . . your leg. I brought you some more morpha. You’ve been requesting it since . . .” She held out a paper bag.
He took it with a furrowed brow. “My prescription ran out weeks ago.”
“Well . . . we made you a new scrip.”
He peered into the bag and froze. “Ishay, this is . . .”
“The dosage is the same as before,” she cut him off, “I trust you remember how to administer it?”
“Well, yes, but . . .”
“Then, I really should go. We’re quite busy.”
“But . . . you shouldn’t . . . I can’t . . .”
“Felix.” She waited until he met her gaze, then shook her head sadly.
His expression softened. “Thank you, Ishay.”
She looked away. “Call me Layne.”
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
A few hours later, the medicine came back to Layne in the same white paper bag. She stared at the capped syringes with tired eyes. Two doses of morpha: the most powerful narcotic in the fleet. One dose would have been enough to keep Felix pain-free for up to six hours.
Taken together, they could have ended his pain for good.
The condemned lieutenant hadn’t used either dose, so they were brought back to sickbay just as Ishay was finally ending her shift.
Doctor Cottle shook his head. “You’re damn lucky. The Admiral would’ve had your ass over those. What were you thinking?”
She held up a hand to stop him. “The Admiral bleeds red like everybody else.” That’s what I was thinking.
Cottle lit a cigarette while muttering inaudibly about the injustices of the universe and the frakwits who try to fix them. Finally, he sighed. “Get some rest, Ishay, we have a lot of work to do tomorrow.”
fin