As soon as the syringe was empty, Jazz withdrew the needle and replaced the cap. She then pulled the pillow from under her arm as Laurie stirred, moaned, and popped open her eyes.
"Bon voyage!" Jazz whispered. With the pillow in her right hand poised for action and the syringe in her left, Jazz then bent over Laurie because she thought Laurie had mumbled something. Jazz started to ask her to repeat herself when Jazz recoiled in shocked surprise at the sound of the door to the room being slammed against its doorstop. In the next instant, an apparent maniac dashed into the room. Jazz was momentarily dumbfounded by the sudden, whirlwind arrival in the silent and dimly lit environment, particularly because she was tense and engrossed in what she was doing, and also because she thought she'd been so careful to avoid surprises. Except for taking a reflexive defensive step back, Jazz was momentarily paralyzed.
"How is she?" Jack barked as he rushed to the foot of Laurie's bed. His breaths were coming in noisy heaves. His hair was dripping and plastered to his forehead. He appeared like a wild man with an unshaven face, red eyes, wet clothes, and soggy shoes. He leaned with both hands on the metal foot of the bed as if exhausted but quickly revived. It was apparent he immediately didn't like what he saw. His eyes darted to Jazz, who had not answered him. He saw the pillow and the syringe in her hands. His attention reverted back to Laurie, who was softly moaning and fighting weakly and futilely against the wrist restraints.
"What's going on?" Jack demanded. He rushed around the side of the bed to Laurie's right, across from Jazz. "Laurie!" Jack yelled. His hand briefly clutched Laurie's wrist, but then shot up and gripped Laurie's forehead to keep her from moving her head from side to side. "What the hell are the restraints for?" Jack cried, but he didn't wait for an answer. On closer inspection, it was apparent Laurie was in a worsening, desperate state and possibly agonal. Her face reflected a mixture of terror, confusion, and pain.
"Hit the lights!" Jack yelled. "Call a code!"
Jazz still didn't respond other than to take yet another step back, stunned by the unexpected events.
"Fuck!" Jack screamed at the nurse's paralysis. His voice reverberated off the sleeping hospital's walls. He needed help fast, but he didn't want to leave Laurie alone even for a few seconds.
In frantic, desperate frustration, Jack yanked the bed away from the wall. Its locked wheels made a screeching sound on the composite flooring. After pushing the night table to the side, causing the collection of objects on its surface to crash to the floor in a clatter, Jack squeezed himself between the head of the bed and the wall.
With his foot, Jack released the wheel locks. Gritting his teeth and allowing a battle-like yell to escape from his lips, he pushed the bed farther from the wall, yanking out its power cables in the process. With a grunt, he angled the rolling bed toward the door. It picked up speed, and although it hit the door and then the opposite jamb, they were glancing collisions and didn't interrupt his forward progress. In seconds, he was out in the hall, and using all his strength, he got the bed rolling at a good clip down the hallway toward the bright lights of the nurses' station.
"Call a code!" Jack shouted at the top of his lungs as he pushed. An unfortunate housekeeping cart loomed in the way, but Jack ignored it. The bed with Laurie in it had considerably more inertia, and the hapless cart was bowled over with a crash, spilling its supply of individual hand soaps and other material out onto the floor. Next came a walker, which was nearly crushed by the bed's momentum. "Call a code!" Jack yelled again. Nurses, nurse's aides, and even ambulatory patients began appearing in doorways to see Jack streak by.
Jack tried to slow the bed down as he closed in on the nurses' station with only partial success. The bed caromed off the counter, taking with it all the charts that had been left on the top, as well as a vase of cut flowers that had yet to be delivered to one of the patients. In the bright light, Jack could see how bad Laurie looked. She was ghostly pale and unmoving. Her eyes, with dilated pupils, blankly stared up at the ceiling.
Stripping off his wet coat and jacket and letting them fall to the floor, Jack moved to Laurie's side. After quickly determining that she was definitely not breathing and had no pulse, he pulled Laurie's chin back, pinched her nose and sealed his mouth over hers. He breathed into her several good breaths, then vaulted up onto the bed and began closed-chest cardiac massage. Seconds later, several nurses were at his side. One produced an Ambu bag and began respiring Laurie, carefully pacing herself with Jack's compressions. She inflated Laurie's lungs after Jack had applied five compressions. Another nurse wheeled over a bottle of oxygen and connected it to the Ambu bag.
"Has a code been called?" Jack yelled out.
"Yes," the nurse said who was breathing for Laurie.
"Well, where the hell are they?" Jack demanded.
"It's been less than a minute since they've been called."
"Damn, damn, damn," Jack sputtered through clenched teeth. He was out of breath from the running, the pushing, and now the compressions. Silently, he lambasted himself for having left Laurie, even if it had been her suggestion. He should have parked himself outside the PACU as he had threatened. From his position looming over her, he could tell her color was a tiny bit better prior to starting the CPR, so they were making a little progress. "What are her pupils doing?" Jack asked the nurse who was bagging her.
"Not a lot of change."
Jack shook his head in frustration. "How long does it usually take for the resuscitation team to get here?" he yelled between compressions. If what he had suspected had happened to Laurie, her life was clearly in the balance until resuscitation team arrived, and even then, he didn't know what the chances were. One thing he was dead certain of: CPR alone wasn't going to hack it. She had to be treated.
As if an answer to a prayer, an elevator door opened out in the lobby and a cardiac crash cart rattled out. Accompanying it were four medical residents, two women and two men who came running. The leader of the pack was Caitlin Burroughs, who looked as if she had been in Shirley Mayrand's medical-school class for gifted toddlers. If Jack had seen her on the street, he would have thought she was a high-school senior, not a senior medical resident. The men looked young, too, but not nearly in Shirley or Caitlin's league.
One of the residents immediately took over the Ambu bag from the nurse. Two of the others started attaching EKG leads. They obviously knew how to work as a team.
"What's the story here?" Caitlin barked, checking Laurie's pupils.
"Hyperkalemia," Jack shot back.
"That's a rather specific diagnosis," Caitlin exclaimed. She spoke in a rapid, staccato fashion. She might have looked young to Jack, but she exuded confidence that could only have come from experience. "How do you know her potassium is too high? Is she a renal patient?"
"No renal disease," Jack snapped back. He wasn't one hundred percent sure Laurie was suffering from high potassium, but he was a hundred percent sure that if they didn't act immediately, and it turned out that she was hyperkalemic as he suspected, they'd lose her for certain, and she'd end up a statistic in her own series. "It would take too long right this minute for me to tell you how I know, but I know," Jack continued emphatically. "We have to treat for high serum potassium, and we have to do it now! This second."
"How come you're so sure? And, by the way, who are you?"