Note: This chapter is written for the book True Believer where the whole book was written like one long poem. The chapter below was just mirroring the format. If you choose to write an additional chapter for one of our books you'll want to mirror the format of the book you chose.

Forest…

ENG 271

Final Project

 

LaVaughn’s Later Days

 

I let out an involuntary yawn, long, drawn out, honest

the kind of yawn that says you don't even remember what sleep is.

It’s the beginning of Monday and I’ve been up since the end of Saturday.

When I was a little girl, I spent my time

complaining about not having money to spend

 

Now, I’m a trauma surgeon and

I have the audacity

to complain about not having the time to spend my money.

 

My son didn’t take out the trash before school and

my daughter left her cereal bowl in the sink full

of milk.

 

My feet hurt and my patience is surely close

to running out.

 

This is the third overnight this week.

Time stands still when a beating heart

on the operating room table is depending on you

to make sure it keeps on beating

 

but the hours still pass and

your feet know exactly how many minutes

its been since you last sat down

 

I kick my shoes to the side of my bed

and draw my curtains, muting the light

of Monday morning.

 

I collapse on my bed and

don’t even bother changing clothes.

Sleep is my only thought.

 

My tired mind, body

and soul puts up no fight.

 

 

I drift, too tired to even dream.

 

 

The rattle of my pager vibrating on the night stand.

puts an abrupt end to the dreams I was too tired to even have in the first place.

This isn’t abnormal, but I’m still reluctant.

It’s still Monday.

My day off.

I fell into my slumber at breakfast

and now I was being thrown out of it just after what the rest of awakened world

would be calling lunch.

 

I reach for my phone and dial the hospital’s trauma center back and before I can even utter

“this better be good,” to Loretta the senior nurse she says in few words

everything that she could have said

and nothing that I wanted to ever hear.


“High school shooting. Mass casualties expected,

the ambulances can’t get ‘em here fast enough, Loretta says.”

 

I’m groggy and only one of my eyes has decided to open.

 

“How many? What else do we know?, I’m not on-call today,” I mumble.

 

“LaVaugn, it’s your—,“ Loretta hesitated.

 

Loretta was a seasoned nurse and didn’t know what hesitation was.

Something wasn’t right.

 

“Loretta, you’ve never minced words, now isn’t the time to start,” she has my attention.

 

“… the gunman opened fire at the basketball game your son was at. The away game at the school downtown,” Loretta spat the words at me fast. “He’s alive, LaVaughn. But they already got him in surgery, they couldn’t wait.”

 

I have never been so awake in my life.

 

I send my children to the what they call “the good school” uptown

to avoid all of what I had to endure my whole time in high school.

The metal detectors. The bi-weekly bomb threats and all to frequent shootings.

Now this.

 

I can’t feel my legs, but somehow they’re moving me out the door.

 

I burst into the doors of the hospital and move down the same hallway

I stroll down every morning.

Not today. Today, I’m running.

Running into a battle field.

 

No matter how many years you work the trauma floor,

there are some sights and sounds you will never be prepared for.

Loretta has been a nurse for thirty one years and she still says

she ain’t seen it all.

 

I tap my toes and bite my lip in the elevator.

This elevator is always slow, but today

today it was glacial. The slowest it has ever moved.

The silence on the elevator is deafening like

the way it gets real quiet right before a thunderstorm hits.

 

Then the doors slide open and the thunder

hits me.

 

“I have a male, late teens, critical condition, aggressive abdominal hemorrhage”

“Female, mid thirties, bed number 42, pregnant, fading fast, book me an OR!”

“Two DOA, beds 28 and 19”

“I need a crash cart!”

 

If I could paint a picture of what I thought war looked like,

this hospital floor would have been worse.

 

 

My son is on this floor, clinging on to his life

and I’m expected to throw myself into and play god

for everyone else except him.

 

I don’t know if it was adrenaline or just instinct,

but I grabbed the first chart off of the first bed I saw.

This is it LaVaughn. This is why you became a Doctor.

 

 

I flash back to my high school

a long long time ago.

I hear the shells hit the floor of the linoleum hallway of my high school.

The distant screams and sounds of slamming doors

the echo of lost hope reverberating.

 

Even if your grades made the cut,

you were lucky if you lived to see your diploma.

 

We we’re the lucky ones, we weren’t in the hallway when

the gunman decided the lives in the hallway weren’t worth living.

Those bullets could have ended it all for me

like it did for the freshman girl who was in the wrong hallway

at the wrong time.

 

I come back to reality

and I have to catch my breath to catch up with the moment.

 

Everyone’s moving. I’m moving.

Nurses are running. Surgeons are pushing beds and yelling orders.

It’s all a hurried blur.

It’s a long line of victims,

all too young to be here.

 

Not that anyone will ever be old enough to deserve a mass shooting,

but the fact that these are kids with long lives ahead of them, with dreams.

It makes it harder.

 

Another surgeon moves with haste down the line of kids

Some conscious, some not.

Some with a parent or a friend by their side.

He’s looks at each patient for a split second and decides whether or not

they can be saved.

 

If he leaves a puts a red sticker on their bed, there’s hope. If he doesn’t

it’s already too late.

 

He has to move fast and in that second,

he decides who has a chance at life and

who doesn’t.

 

This is nothing new, this is how the trauma floor works,

but we rarely work in this quantity of patients and not usually all this young.

 

I’m looking at my neighbors kids.

I’m looking at my son’s ex-girlfriend.

I’m looking at the girl who my daughter shared a cubby with in kindergarten.

 

In the medical world, we try to keep

conflict of interest

to a minimum.

 

These kids are the kids who played on my street until

their mom’s called them home for dinner on school nights.

 

These kids are my kid’s friends.

One of these kids—is my kid.

 

I still don’t know if he’s alive or not and

I don’t even have time to speak up

because I’m too busy giving CPR and saving a young mom

and her unborn baby boy fight for their lives.

 

I sent my kids to the “good school”. 

I made the right choice.

How could this happen. This can’t be happening.

 

After all I struggled through growing up and

going to the school with limited resources.

Working my way through medical school to

pave the way for a brighter future for my kids.

 

Dedicating my life to saving other lives.

This is how it ends?

 

The God that I have just started to really believe in has this

in his plan?

 

He gives me this gift. This inate skill to take a fragile, dwindling life and

nurture it back to health. But he let’s my son get shot.

 

He shields me from being shot in the halls of my high school, only to have my

son shot at his own basketball game?

 

I continue with compressions on the young pregnant girl but

I know she’s already gone.

 

“Time of death, 22:06,” I somberly relay to a nurse standing alongside me.

 

I’m sleep deprived.

I don’t know if my kids are alive.

I’m scared and I’m angry.

I have lives to save, but I can’t focus.

 

“LaVaughn!” the chief of surgery yells my name over the chaos of screams, telephones rings and frantic medical jargon filling the room. “I need you in this, are you in this? Where’s your head at, LaVaughn? I’ve got kids dying here! Delegate!”

 

I come to again. I realize where I’m at and what I need to do. I move in and

do what I do everyday. I save lives. Today though, I’m not the one saving lives.

My hands are moving, but I don’t know who is telling them what to do. I’m on autopilot.

 

Why would someone

do this to

my son?

 

My James.

My baby.

 

How could someone, especially so young, harbor so much

hate in their heart

that they would wake up and decide to open fire on

innocent kids?

 

I didn’t understand it when I was growing up

and there was nothing that was going

to make me understand now.

 

“Excuse me, M’aam?” a deep voice from behind me bellows.

 

I turn around and find two police officers.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind officers, you’ll need to make it quick,” I say to them.

 

“Ma’am are you, LaVaugn? Mother of James?”

 

The officers had my attention.

 

“Yes!, Yes, I am!,” I quickly diverted my attention from the patient’s medical chart I had been analyzing. “Is he okay! What do you know! Don’t just stand there, is he out of surgery?”

 

“Ma’am,” the officer hesitated. “Your son James is alive and well.”

 

I didn’t think my heart could flutter so high in my chest,

my baby

he would survive this.

 

“Ma’am,” the officer continued.

 

“Your son is the shooter.

he opened fire on a gym

full of people and,

we need you to come with us.”

 

Just as quickly as my heart rose,

it sunk.

 

It sunk,

and it shattered.

 

My baby had survived,

but I now wasn’t sure I would.

 

 

Words: 1664


Last modified: Saturday, 14 April 2018, 4:37 PM