chapter 2
fiction
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
to choke off. I looked up at the nurse. She had been reading
the strip as well, upside down, as cardiology nurses can.
“You gonna move him?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Write me some orders.”
“I’ll write you orders. Just get him to the Unit. Quickly,” I
added, with a backward glance through the door of 14.
I
DIDN’T GIVE MONGAY much thought the rest
of the evening, beyond getting him scheduled as
an add-on for the Cath Lab the next day. Around
two in the morning the three of us — my partner
Sasha, the intern Jeff and I — were gathered at
one end of the long counter, pushing stacks of paper around
and trying to count up the score. We were on admission
twelve for the day, we decided, but couldn’t remember who
was up next. I was digging in my pockets for a coin to flip
when my pager went off. I swore as I tugged it from my belt,
expecting to find yet again the number for the ER. I found
instead the number for the CCU, followed by “911”. At that
moment the overhead paging system called a code in the
CCU. The three of us ran.
It was perhaps thirty yards to the CCU, but by the time
we got there three of the six nurses on shift were in Mongay’s room, one at the head squeezing oxygen through a
bag-valve mask, another compressing his chest, a third
readying the crash cart. I had a moment’s awareness that
something was unusual — the whole thing looked too
emptily staged, some kind of diorama in the Museum of
Human Misery, but the scene only appeared that way for
an instant and then we were in it and perspective fell
apart in a surge of activity.
Sasha and I had never made any formal arrangement
about who did what in a code. I was the first one on the