“Nurse Olivia? Is there a nurse Olivia somewhere around here?”
I turn to the door of the nurse’s station to glance from where I’m preparing to take a blood sample.
I see the lab coat and a posture of someone unused to being ignored. There’s no need for me to bother with the lab coat, so I dismiss it and turn back to my patient.
I smile at the little boy staring at me wide-eyed. He’s sitting on a bed, legs dangling, while I’m on a stool. We’re just about eye level.
“You’re doing great, sweetie,” I rumble quietly amidst the din.
It’s too crowded right now, and it sucks I have to sit with a pup in the hallway, but I’ve already requested to get the first room opening up. Until then, I act as if this is perfectly reasonable, not because it is, but because nothing makes a visit to the A&E worse for a child than upset nurses.
It’s my responsibility to make the boy feel safe when he’s in my domain.
A stretcher rolls by in the next hallway. Someone’s phone is going off. Someone runs past us, behind me and through the locked door to the waiting area. Monitors beep from every direction.
“Could you do me a giant favour?” I say as I clean the bend of the elbow. “It’s important and I need to know.”
“What?” the boy asks.
“Tell me, if you look at that poster by the shouting angry man, how many blue birds are there on it? I can’t see it from here.”
The pup looks unsure and I smile encouragingly. There’s nothing to be scared of after all.
When I see the child counts, with the help out his beta mother, I insert the needle when the muscle of the arm relaxes a little more.
“Eleven?” he asks, unsure right as I pull out the needle.
I actually have no idea. I haven’t counted the bird-like shapes on it. That’s the beauty of it — there’s no actual answer because it’s all abstract.
“You’re right, it’s eleven,” I say. “Good job and thanks for reminding me,” I say as I place a plaster with hydras on it.
Before I began, I explained what I would do and let him pick which plaster pattern he wanted once I was done.
The more agency a child can have, the better. At the A&E, they tend to be left with virtually none.
I pull off the gloves while he’s busy studying the plaster, and his beta mother quietly asks him what types of hydras they are. I throw the gloves away.
“I will be back in a while, okay, sweetie? I need to give your blood to our magicians at the lab who will help me figure out what’s wrong, and then I’ll come back. If you have questions about your body or anything you see, I’ll listen to all of them then. If something happens, you can ask any nurse to get Nurse Leo for you, and I’ll come running.”
I look at the mother and offer a nod when she indicates that she understands what will happen next.
Standing up, I bring the labelled sample to be sent to the lab immediately. Only then do I return to the nurse’s station.
By the door, I see the lab coat. Still waiting. He is tapping his foot impatiently as if inconvenienced by the fact he’s choosing to stand there.
I pause before I enter through the door. “What’s the matter, doctor?”
“I’m looking for a nurse named Olivia.”
The doctor gives me a look and then pointedly looks past me at a nurse updating someone’s journal.
What the fuck did I do to you?
“Olivia?” another nurse, returning to the station as well, asks in confusion.
I take the papers off her hands and flip through them as I enter the room.
“Which Olivia?” I hear her ask the doctor. I jot down a couple of notes on a pad.
“How would I know? Just Olivia.”
“We don’t have any Olivias on shift today,” I say. “Hey, Vicky,” I turn to the nurse who brought the charts and results, “the doctor on call denied the suggestion for an ECG for that patient in five. Did the doctor explain why?”
Nurse Vicky enters the room. “It didn’t make sense to do, they said. Nothing indicates any cardiac involvement.”
I click my tongue. “Call cardiology and have them come down here, anyway. We can’t wait for the bloodwork. I listened twice already, the pain pattern is wrong, and it doesn’t smell like an infection.”
Nurse Vicky picks up the phone. “On it.”
“After that, could you take their vitals for me again? I want that patient monitored closely.”
“Sure.”
I then turn to the doctor. He’s probably a good two inches shorter than me. It’s enough to make him have to tilt his chin up. “How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for an Olivia.”
“That would be me, doctor.”
I hear a soft “oh” from Vicky as the realisation dawns to her.
“No, it’s not,” the doctor says.
“With all due respect,” I say calmly, “yes, it is.”
“You don’t look like an ‘Olivia’,” he says and ad gives me a quick once-over. “Or even a nurse.”
I raise an eyebrow, because I’m dressed in the scrubs of a nurse. Not the same colour as most of the A&E nurses on shift today, clearly, but that’s besides the point.
I don’t call him out on it, and merely show him the work badge hanging off my waist. “I’m nurse Olivier. Surname. Now, how can I help you, doctor?”
He open and closes his mouth, “Why is it you?”
“I’m on shift, I’m a certified nurse, and the only one you could be referring to. If that’s all, perhaps the doctor should return to his own post.”
“I needed… There was…”
I wait patiently for him to tell me what he needed — or rather complain about, from the looks of it.
A male nurse knocks on the frame to the nurse station window. “Olivier, there you are! Strength requested, please.”
“All right,” I move past the doctor and jog with the other nurse to one of the examination rooms.
“Hey!” the doctor calls after me.
Too late, I’m clearly busy.
“What’s the situation, Nicholas?” I ask.
“Weight and muscle.”
So adult alpha patient being trouble, likely male.
“Sedatives?”
“None administered. No pain relief of any kind, either. However, we’re unsure if the patient has taken anything of their own volition.”
“Understood.”
Nurse Nicholas opens the door to the room and I enter first. I let out a calming rumble before I can even see the patient. A volatile alpha is, in my experience, the people who need to most calming.
And who, really, would know that better than I?.