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Global War of Terror: Stop CPR
Jan. 3rd, 2019 06:36 pmGWOT - Stop CPR
The vet surgeon and I are the last to get up from the meeting.
It's Apocalypse, with meetings. This one was medical logistics - placing yet another request for equipment and supplies that Corporate would promise and I would ultimately have to mug someone to actually deliver. But it is useful to know what we actually need.
She meets my eyes as I fold my laptop.
"Stay a minute," she says, surprisingly.
I do. The laptop can use a little more charge anyway.
"I really don't like you," she says. I think she's trying to start a conversation.
"Go on," I offer.
"We didn't exactly get off on the right foot. And from then on, it's been conflict after conflict after conflict."
I nod warily.
"The worst part is, you've always been right. I can't stand that. I want to ask you this. How did you know?"
"Know what?"
This conversation is a minefield.
"That day I met you."
I think back.
Oh.
###
I've traded the stolen car for a dead employee's sedan. I still have my gear from that first horrible night, when eating dinner with two buddies became a flash from the north and nightmare.
I can be off site for about an hour. I've maxed out my ATM cards on the site ATM. That's given me about a grand of cash to work with.
The nearest big box pharmacy is a madhouse, people carrying out obvious loot, which I therefore bypass. (The alternative is shooting people, which I don't mind, but I need the ammo and there's always the chance of being mobbed and beaten to death.)
There are long lines outside doctor's offices and clinics. There are roadblocks and police with rifles blocking access to the community hospital. They are turning back ambulances.
So I do the obvious thing. I go to the vet hospital.
It's real simple. We are completely out of medical supplies - and everything the site had was oriented towards first aid and emergency medical services. No sutures, no antibiotics, no follow up care. About the only thing we're not out of is antibacterial soap.
That means that many of the wounded and sick we have on site are going to die. I know Stanford is closed. I know Valley Med is off limits to ordinary folks like us.
The front door of the vet hospital is open. I go inside to find, rather to my surprise and somewhat to my horror, that there is a room full of patients waiting.
Human patients, you understand. Injured survivors of the Firecracker.
The entire focus of the emergency medical system had been to triage - sort - the injured into four categories. Those who are going to die anyway, those whose lives might be saved with prompt treatment, those with serious injuries requiring hospital level care, and all the rest.
This was all the rest. Fractures, burns, broken bones, lacerations, embedded glass.
They are waiting because the one staff member present is apparently doing jumping jacks in the back room. Vet exam rooms don't really have room to treat human trauma patients.
The patients make a path for me, my glare and my rifle.
I see a Asian woman in her forties, bloody gloves, stethoscope around her neck, doing chest compressions on a man on a table. She is using a CPR mask connected to medical oxygen to give breaths in between compressions.
I turn the oxygen off.
"Stop CPR."
She doesn't.
"Doctor! Stop CPR!"
She looks up.
"Stop CPR! You have a room full of people who need your help. This man is dead."
She blinks and does another compression.
I put my left hand on top of her joined hands.
"Stop," I say quietly.
She steps back a pace. She looks at me. Really looks. Then she looks at him, the patient she has been trying to save.
He's burned, not badly. He's bruised, not just on his chest but all over. There is vomitus on his chest, on the floor, in a nearby wastebasket. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is sunburned. For values of thermonuclear sun.
"This man is dead. We are four days down. He's already vomiting. He's a radiation casualty. You couldn't save him with a fully equipped hospital and a team of twenty specialists. You are contaminated. Do you have a garden hose?"
"Huh?"
"Do you have a fucking garden hose?" I snap.
Of course she does, it's a vet hospital. She nods.
"Go wash off."
I reach down with my non-gloved hands and roll the corpse off the table. It hits the ground with a callous thud. I ankle drag the corpse down the hall and leave it around a corner in the hallway.
When I come back, the vet has mopped the table and is starting to mop the floor. I stop her again.
"Grab your kit and follow me," I say.
We walk out into the lobby where her handful patients are waiting. I pick up a clipboard.
"Folks, I'm a medical technician," I say, leaving off the word 'emergency' on purpose. "I'm going to triage all of you, right now, in order from left to right."
I pick up a clipboard and start writing down answers. I have zero patience for return questions and even less for bullshit.
Name
Chief Complaint
Respirations
Perfusion
Mental Status
Burn Percentage - Rule of 9s
The third patient I reach is a child. I turn to the doctor.
"Treat her first," I order. There starts to be a reaction in the room. "We will see patients in _medical priority_," I bark brutally.
Child and parents go back. I finish sorting the room. I have a list of eleven names of patients who need care.
I look up and see the rates on the wall, and double them then round up.
"$200 cash, no credit cards, no insurance. Pay or leave."
Two leave. I cross them off. The others pay, except one who can't. I tell her to write an IOU for $200. A couple who already paid look unhappy, but the cash is behind the desk and I am heavily armed.
This is going to cost me some time, but I think it's going to be worth it.
When the parents take the child away, injuries treated as well as can be done under these conditions, the vet comes back in and I give her the next patient.
"Work fast," I direct her.
As the vet is working, I toss the desk and find the keys to the practice. I go back and forth between watching the front and sizing up what I'm going to do next.
Three more patients are seen. Another is fed up with the wait and demands a refund. I give it; he leaves. Idiot. Best deal he'll get all Apocalypse.
I lock the front doors, turn the sign to CLOSED, turn down the lights in front and close the blinds.
The fastest way to get rid of these people is to actually treat them.
We let the patients out the side. She is mostly doing legwork - debriding, suturing, assessment. But she is also giving out medications.
It is not common knowledge, but vets are trained to work on people under disaster conditions. If two nukes don't qualify, I don't know what the fuck does.
The last patient is dismissed. I bring her the box.
"Here you go," I say. She looks inside at the over $2,000 in cash. It's hers, she earned it.
"Without help, how long do you think you'll last?"
She goes over to wash her hands at the sink and discovers that the mains pressure is a trickle. The power has been out the whole time. Phone too.
"I'm going to offer you a job," I say.
"Huh?"
"I work for a place that has a lot of injured and sick people. You pack up all the medical supplies we can carry, you come work for us, we keep you safe and fed, we pay you a full salary and back wages as soon as we can. Or you can stay here and sooner or later one of these patients is going to pull a gun on you, or worse."
There's no law and order. I'm kind of surprised she hasn't had looters already.
I hand her the $1000 from my pocket. "This is your first down payment."
She takes it. She is still staring at me. Not at me, at the trail where I dragged the body away.
"Why don't you just take what you want?" she asks.
"Because stuff is just stuff. Are you a vet or a tech?"
I'm pretty sure she's a vet.
"Vet surgeon," she corrects me frostily.
I almost sag with relief. Oh thank God.
"We need a surgeon, really badly."
"Who is 'We?'" she asks.
I tell her. It's a household name, a Fortune 500 company. CLIENT.
"How many wounded?"
"Over sixty so far, more every hour as people trickle in."
"Oh God. And you took the time to help me here?"
"I'm an EMT, dammit. That means I can stabilize people then watch them die. I did enough of that at Stanford. I came for supplies. I found you. Are you in?"
If she's not, I'm going to have a hard problem. I'm going to have to secure her, put her in the car, load whatever supplies I can pick out quickly, and keep her subdued while kidnapping her back to the site.
But I'm going to do exactly that. I've already tried to sell her on it. I'm not above more dragging.
She takes a deep breath.
"I'm in. What now?"
"Tell me what to load and we load it."
As we are loading out the back, someone smashes the glass in the front door with a crowbar.
"Go away!" I order.
They start laughing.
I fire a single round through the glass and there is a meaty thunk.
Then there is running and screaming.
We pause by the cages. This is a vet hospital; there are several dogs and cats in custody. She waters them and unlatches the cages.
As we drive away, sedan fully loaded, I see a body lying outside the front door.
Not the first man I've shot this week. Sure as hell not the last.
###
"I spent the first night evacuating houses in San Mateo. I spent Day 1 and Day 2 at Stanford pulling hospital security before they shut down. The morning of Day 3 I discovered what was happening elsewhere. I called in and they sent me to CLIENT. That first night was very bad."
She'd treated the casualties who'd lived that long. Not all the people she'd treated survived.
"So I knew everything was a shit sandwich."
"Why didn't you run for it?"
"Why didn't you?"
"I had patients."
"I had a site."
"How did you know I'd come along?"
"I didn't."
"What would you have done if I hadn't?"
I start to roll my eyes, and stop myself.
Her face acknowledges that yes, she asked a stupid question.
"I'm here now."
"And you've saved literally hundreds of lives. And also yours."
"But not his."
"No. We save those we can."
"I blamed you for his death."
"I get that."
"I have other deaths I still blame you for. But I'll let you off the hook for that one."
I nod.
"You know what shocked me most? When you turned off the oxygen."
"I didn't know the site had concentrators. I didn't want to waste the cylinder."
She blinked.
"You think that far ahead."
"At all times. Doctor."
The vet surgeon and I are the last to get up from the meeting.
It's Apocalypse, with meetings. This one was medical logistics - placing yet another request for equipment and supplies that Corporate would promise and I would ultimately have to mug someone to actually deliver. But it is useful to know what we actually need.
She meets my eyes as I fold my laptop.
"Stay a minute," she says, surprisingly.
I do. The laptop can use a little more charge anyway.
"I really don't like you," she says. I think she's trying to start a conversation.
"Go on," I offer.
"We didn't exactly get off on the right foot. And from then on, it's been conflict after conflict after conflict."
I nod warily.
"The worst part is, you've always been right. I can't stand that. I want to ask you this. How did you know?"
"Know what?"
This conversation is a minefield.
"That day I met you."
I think back.
Oh.
###
I've traded the stolen car for a dead employee's sedan. I still have my gear from that first horrible night, when eating dinner with two buddies became a flash from the north and nightmare.
I can be off site for about an hour. I've maxed out my ATM cards on the site ATM. That's given me about a grand of cash to work with.
The nearest big box pharmacy is a madhouse, people carrying out obvious loot, which I therefore bypass. (The alternative is shooting people, which I don't mind, but I need the ammo and there's always the chance of being mobbed and beaten to death.)
There are long lines outside doctor's offices and clinics. There are roadblocks and police with rifles blocking access to the community hospital. They are turning back ambulances.
So I do the obvious thing. I go to the vet hospital.
It's real simple. We are completely out of medical supplies - and everything the site had was oriented towards first aid and emergency medical services. No sutures, no antibiotics, no follow up care. About the only thing we're not out of is antibacterial soap.
That means that many of the wounded and sick we have on site are going to die. I know Stanford is closed. I know Valley Med is off limits to ordinary folks like us.
The front door of the vet hospital is open. I go inside to find, rather to my surprise and somewhat to my horror, that there is a room full of patients waiting.
Human patients, you understand. Injured survivors of the Firecracker.
The entire focus of the emergency medical system had been to triage - sort - the injured into four categories. Those who are going to die anyway, those whose lives might be saved with prompt treatment, those with serious injuries requiring hospital level care, and all the rest.
This was all the rest. Fractures, burns, broken bones, lacerations, embedded glass.
They are waiting because the one staff member present is apparently doing jumping jacks in the back room. Vet exam rooms don't really have room to treat human trauma patients.
The patients make a path for me, my glare and my rifle.
I see a Asian woman in her forties, bloody gloves, stethoscope around her neck, doing chest compressions on a man on a table. She is using a CPR mask connected to medical oxygen to give breaths in between compressions.
I turn the oxygen off.
"Stop CPR."
She doesn't.
"Doctor! Stop CPR!"
She looks up.
"Stop CPR! You have a room full of people who need your help. This man is dead."
She blinks and does another compression.
I put my left hand on top of her joined hands.
"Stop," I say quietly.
She steps back a pace. She looks at me. Really looks. Then she looks at him, the patient she has been trying to save.
He's burned, not badly. He's bruised, not just on his chest but all over. There is vomitus on his chest, on the floor, in a nearby wastebasket. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is sunburned. For values of thermonuclear sun.
"This man is dead. We are four days down. He's already vomiting. He's a radiation casualty. You couldn't save him with a fully equipped hospital and a team of twenty specialists. You are contaminated. Do you have a garden hose?"
"Huh?"
"Do you have a fucking garden hose?" I snap.
Of course she does, it's a vet hospital. She nods.
"Go wash off."
I reach down with my non-gloved hands and roll the corpse off the table. It hits the ground with a callous thud. I ankle drag the corpse down the hall and leave it around a corner in the hallway.
When I come back, the vet has mopped the table and is starting to mop the floor. I stop her again.
"Grab your kit and follow me," I say.
We walk out into the lobby where her handful patients are waiting. I pick up a clipboard.
"Folks, I'm a medical technician," I say, leaving off the word 'emergency' on purpose. "I'm going to triage all of you, right now, in order from left to right."
I pick up a clipboard and start writing down answers. I have zero patience for return questions and even less for bullshit.
Name
Chief Complaint
Respirations
Perfusion
Mental Status
Burn Percentage - Rule of 9s
The third patient I reach is a child. I turn to the doctor.
"Treat her first," I order. There starts to be a reaction in the room. "We will see patients in _medical priority_," I bark brutally.
Child and parents go back. I finish sorting the room. I have a list of eleven names of patients who need care.
I look up and see the rates on the wall, and double them then round up.
"$200 cash, no credit cards, no insurance. Pay or leave."
Two leave. I cross them off. The others pay, except one who can't. I tell her to write an IOU for $200. A couple who already paid look unhappy, but the cash is behind the desk and I am heavily armed.
This is going to cost me some time, but I think it's going to be worth it.
When the parents take the child away, injuries treated as well as can be done under these conditions, the vet comes back in and I give her the next patient.
"Work fast," I direct her.
As the vet is working, I toss the desk and find the keys to the practice. I go back and forth between watching the front and sizing up what I'm going to do next.
Three more patients are seen. Another is fed up with the wait and demands a refund. I give it; he leaves. Idiot. Best deal he'll get all Apocalypse.
I lock the front doors, turn the sign to CLOSED, turn down the lights in front and close the blinds.
The fastest way to get rid of these people is to actually treat them.
We let the patients out the side. She is mostly doing legwork - debriding, suturing, assessment. But she is also giving out medications.
It is not common knowledge, but vets are trained to work on people under disaster conditions. If two nukes don't qualify, I don't know what the fuck does.
The last patient is dismissed. I bring her the box.
"Here you go," I say. She looks inside at the over $2,000 in cash. It's hers, she earned it.
"Without help, how long do you think you'll last?"
She goes over to wash her hands at the sink and discovers that the mains pressure is a trickle. The power has been out the whole time. Phone too.
"I'm going to offer you a job," I say.
"Huh?"
"I work for a place that has a lot of injured and sick people. You pack up all the medical supplies we can carry, you come work for us, we keep you safe and fed, we pay you a full salary and back wages as soon as we can. Or you can stay here and sooner or later one of these patients is going to pull a gun on you, or worse."
There's no law and order. I'm kind of surprised she hasn't had looters already.
I hand her the $1000 from my pocket. "This is your first down payment."
She takes it. She is still staring at me. Not at me, at the trail where I dragged the body away.
"Why don't you just take what you want?" she asks.
"Because stuff is just stuff. Are you a vet or a tech?"
I'm pretty sure she's a vet.
"Vet surgeon," she corrects me frostily.
I almost sag with relief. Oh thank God.
"We need a surgeon, really badly."
"Who is 'We?'" she asks.
I tell her. It's a household name, a Fortune 500 company. CLIENT.
"How many wounded?"
"Over sixty so far, more every hour as people trickle in."
"Oh God. And you took the time to help me here?"
"I'm an EMT, dammit. That means I can stabilize people then watch them die. I did enough of that at Stanford. I came for supplies. I found you. Are you in?"
If she's not, I'm going to have a hard problem. I'm going to have to secure her, put her in the car, load whatever supplies I can pick out quickly, and keep her subdued while kidnapping her back to the site.
But I'm going to do exactly that. I've already tried to sell her on it. I'm not above more dragging.
She takes a deep breath.
"I'm in. What now?"
"Tell me what to load and we load it."
As we are loading out the back, someone smashes the glass in the front door with a crowbar.
"Go away!" I order.
They start laughing.
I fire a single round through the glass and there is a meaty thunk.
Then there is running and screaming.
We pause by the cages. This is a vet hospital; there are several dogs and cats in custody. She waters them and unlatches the cages.
As we drive away, sedan fully loaded, I see a body lying outside the front door.
Not the first man I've shot this week. Sure as hell not the last.
###
"I spent the first night evacuating houses in San Mateo. I spent Day 1 and Day 2 at Stanford pulling hospital security before they shut down. The morning of Day 3 I discovered what was happening elsewhere. I called in and they sent me to CLIENT. That first night was very bad."
She'd treated the casualties who'd lived that long. Not all the people she'd treated survived.
"So I knew everything was a shit sandwich."
"Why didn't you run for it?"
"Why didn't you?"
"I had patients."
"I had a site."
"How did you know I'd come along?"
"I didn't."
"What would you have done if I hadn't?"
I start to roll my eyes, and stop myself.
Her face acknowledges that yes, she asked a stupid question.
"I'm here now."
"And you've saved literally hundreds of lives. And also yours."
"But not his."
"No. We save those we can."
"I blamed you for his death."
"I get that."
"I have other deaths I still blame you for. But I'll let you off the hook for that one."
I nod.
"You know what shocked me most? When you turned off the oxygen."
"I didn't know the site had concentrators. I didn't want to waste the cylinder."
She blinked.
"You think that far ahead."
"At all times. Doctor."
