Hero

Prologue

The nurse stood above the young boy watching his heart beat and his lungs expand and contract through a large surgical incision that went from his upper chest to his abdomen. All the critical veins and arteries had already been cauterized, stapled and sutured. The surgeon had left just minutes after finishing his last cut to attend to other patients, leaving her to close the incision.

There had been a drive-by shooting on Columbia Avenue. Five teenagers had been shot not including her patient. Two of them were already in the morgue. DOA. The other three were in the adjoining operating rooms. She could hear them screaming. There had been seven other shootings that night. A typical Saturday night. She’d barely had time to wash the blood of one victim from her hands before the next was wheeled in. It was like being a battlefield nurse. West Philadelphia, like South Philly, and North Philly, had become a warzone.

Only when the ER was busy like this did the doctors leave the nurses to close up their patients for them. Plus, they trusted her. She was one of the best ER nurses on the staff, next in line to be head nurse. She had never lost her cool, never been overwhelmed by all the blood and death and gotten emotional like some of the other nurses. She had always remained in control, professional, calm and efficient, if somewhat aloof.

She stood above the boy holding the needle, the cat gut and surgical staples. The anesthesiologist had already packed up and left as well. There was only one other nurse in the room, counting sponges and towels to make sure that none of them had been left inside the patient.

The boy could not have been much older than sixteen. Already he had gang tattoos covering much of his upper torso like a Yakuza body suit. Only these were not of ornate dragons, samurais, or koi, these were a confusion of tombstones, guns, biblical passages, crucifixes, quotes from hip hop songs, and names and pictures of dead friends and past lovers. He was a walking billboard for the thug lifestyle.

Interspersed between the tattoos or directly in the center of some crudely drawn skin art, were bullet and knife wounds, and surgical scars, some weeks old, some years old, and three that were brand new, newly stitched, along with the latest incision still gaping wide where the surgeon had gone in to remove several bullets and stitch his intestines back together.

The boy’s arm was in a cast from where a bullet had shattered both the radius and ulna in his forearm. The nurse had seen him before. She had helped put the plate in his arm that was now holding his shattered bones together as they healed. She could even recognize her own stitches among his many surgical scars. He was a frequent flyer, a regular customer.

Just weeks ago he’d been on this exact same table, the victim of a drive-by shooting. She’d done her duty then and helped put him back together. Now he was back. Only this time, he was the shooter. He’d been shot by the police as he’d tried to flee the scene. The other teenaged criminals and innocent bystanders she could hear crying out in pain from the next room and those who had ceased their crying and now lay cooling to room temperature in the post mortem room, were all his victims. She had helped give him life so that he could take the lives of others.

The nurse picked up a scalpel from the tray beside the table. She looked to see where the other nurse was… back turned, still counting sponges… then she dropped the scalpel into the open incision. She began to hum as she slowly stitched the wound closed, wondering how long it would take before the scalpel in the boy’s gut cut him open again. All it would take was for him to move the wrong way and he could puncture or lacerate some internal organ or artery. She wondered how long it would take him to die from internal bleeding. Or whether he would die of infection first. She hoped it would happen far from the hospital. She hoped it would happen before he could pick up a gun again.

The nurse finished stitching up her patient. She turned to the other nurse who had now completed her inventory and was mopping blood from the floor and throwing away all the bloody gauze.

“He’s all done now. You can take him to his room.”

She walked out of the room and into the hallway.

“Nurse! Nurse! We need you over here! We’ve got a hemo pneumo. He’s drowning in his own blood!”

The nurse turned to look at the patient, another gangbanger as heavily tattooed as her last patient, same cornrowed braids, same gold teeth, no older than seventeen; they could have been brothers. He was convulsing on the gurney as two EMTs attempted, unsuccessfully, to apply pressure to the wound in his chest and staunch the flow of blood. She could hear the boy’s lungs sucking air into his thoracic cavity. She could hear the bubbling sound as his chest cavity filled with blood and air, slowly collapsing the lungs. She turned and walked away.

“Nurse! Where are you going? He’s dying!”

She turned and smiled at the two EMTs.

“Good. One less to worry about. I quit.”