Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 67000 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67000 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
My hand went back into my pocket, and I felt the roll of money there, making my heart race even more.
I needed to get rid of it. Fast.
When I’d started doing this a few months ago, it’d been a way to get the director to take the crime that was happening down in the ER seriously.
Then when he’d all but ignored it, I’d decided that if I had to, I’d pay for the stupid security myself.
And I’d done it by stealing some money here and there from people who didn’t deserve it.
Truthfully, I was feeling morally gray right now, and I wasn’t sure how to reconcile that.
My gaze firmly on the floor, I opened the door to the bathroom, and immediately went upstairs to the postpartum floor and smiled my way into getting four cans of formula.
I came back down to the ER with my loot, and smiled as I made it into the woman’s room.
Her eyes were heavy and slightly dejected when they came to me but lit up upon seeing the cans of formula.
“These were about to expire,” I said to her. “They’ll last you well into the end of next month, according to the expiration date, but I managed to sneak one of the cans that doesn’t expire until the end of the year, too. Just in case. I’m going to put these in your hospital bag, okay?”
The baby, who had been sleeping quite soundly until I’d walked in, woke with a jerk and started looking around.
I winced. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t have any bottles,” she murmured.
“Oh!” I snapped my fingers and reached into my pocket, pulling out the two smaller bottles that I’d managed to snatch from there, too.
“And this one,” I said as I showed it to her. “Fits onto a water bottle. You can feed the baby just with this alone as long as you can find a water bottle.”
The mom’s eyes finally warmed.
The baby started to scream then, and I said, “These are small, and I have no clue how much the baby’ll eat since you’ve been breast feeding and all, but they’ll do in a pinch, right?”
The mom nodded, sitting up, and wincing as she did.
God, I couldn’t even imagine how an infection like that would feel in my breasts. Poor mom.
“Looks like your antibiotics are almost finished, too,” I said as I checked all the lines. “I’ll go let your nurse know.”
Feeling somewhat better about everything, I headed out to the main ER and found that there were a bunch of nurses gathered around the nurses’ station.
I headed in that direction and stopped the nurse in charge of the mom’s care.
“Hey,” I said to her. “Your patient’s IV is almost finished. I got her lined up with some formula, but she’s gonna need a bigger bag to take it all home.”
“She’s gonna need more than that,” Jasmine murmured. “The poor thing. She’s homeless and is living in a shelter. She works two jobs to make ends meet, and if my guesses are correct, I think she’s running from someone.”
That was awful.
But it got my mind to thinking…
“Hey, your lunch is up, Ellodie!” the charge nurse said from the middle of the huddle.
“What’s going on?” I asked Patricia, the charge nurse.
“Cops are here asking questions,” Patricia rolled her eyes. “Patient in room three assaulted a nurse.”
Anger boiled in my gut.
This was exactly what I was fucking talking about.
Working in this emergency room was becoming ridiculously unsafe.
Even worse, it was par for the course.
I’d yet to work in a hospital, or do clinicals during my schooling, that cared even an iota about their employees. It was as if they were just ambivalent. This was income to them. They just saw dollar signs while the rest of us nurses saw patients.
The director needed to get his head out of his ass before everyone went on strike, which was what they were considering, and had been talking about for the last week.
This nurse getting hurt might be the final straw.
“Who was hurt?” I asked.
“Billy,” Patricia answered.
“Was it his patient?” I asked. “Or mine?”
“Yours,” Patricia answered. “He came back in from X-ray and got belligerent when Billy went in there to help get him situated and saw him wearing colors from the other gang.”
“What?” I asked.
We all had to wear uniforms.
There was no way that he was wearing any gang’s colors.
Literally, all we could wear was blue scrubs.
“My underwear,” Billy said as he came up. “Apparently, the teal and orange of the Breakers gang.”
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” John, another nurse that didn’t usually work our shift, said as he crossed his arms. “We’re lucky it was a male, though. Imagine if he pushed Ellodie like that. She would’ve wound up through the wall and into the other room.”
Billy pulled his shirt up to show me the bruising that was already starting. “Oh my God.”