Visitors were asked to write a short story on modern celebrity. The winner would get star billing on the Steffi site as well as having Andrew Crofts as a mentor to help work up the story into a novel, find an agent, publisher and so on.
Short Listed: A Spot in the Limelight
By Gianna Scannell
“The television crew will show up tomorrow in the Emergency Room, doctor. They’ll be there at six-thirty in the morning, and want to meet you before they start shooting.”
I had just walked in my office when my secretary made her announcement.
She was sitting behind her small desk, her shoulders backed to a spectacular view of the St. John River. The day was bright, that I remember. But frankly, I don’t remember if it was spring, summer or fall. They were all the same to me.
Endlessly boxed in a supersized hospital, I spent my time tending to patients whose life was often held by a thread -running from patient to patient to boost failing lungs, regain lost airways or quell massive bleeding. That was my life as a trauma surgeon.
But this was different. This was my chance for fifteen seconds in the limelight. A break in my routine, the opportunity to be famous. Who knew, maybe someone would spot me and ask me to do more television. Fat chance, and beside, when would I have the time?
“I’ll be there,” I replied.
The next morning three alert, preppy young men and a nice-looking woman in her early thirties met me by the double-doored entrance to the Trauma Center. They were a breath of fresh air when compared with the tense, absorbed and goal-oriented expressions of medical personnel. They wore jeans and short sleeved shirts, but their casual attire didn’t disguise their focus. They were here to absorb the atmosphere; to probe, dissect and record the lives of people caught in a medical tornado. They were here to film a show.
And the more drama, the better. Television no longer was satisfied with fake emotions. People wanted the real thing.
The cameraman held his heavy camera equipment while the woman clipped a microphone on the front of my uniform and slipped the small transmitter in my back pocket. My fifteen seconds of fame were about to be recorded for national TV. The show was very popular. It was called, “Trauma: Life in the ER”. I was excited, and proud that my place had been selected for the show.
“You want action?” I boasted, “You’ll get it here. We treat over four thousand trauma patients a year.”
“We know,” one of the men, a tall, slim, long and dark-haired guy said in a monotonic tone. He didn’t seem impressed. May be he has seen worse I thought, though I couldn’t imagine anything as bad as our traumas.
It wasn’t an hour and my beeper went off, right in the middle of rounds in our Intensive Care Unit, always filled to capacity with traumatized victims, their swollen bodies attached to a respirator, tubes coming out from every orifice. I stared at the hated device that kept beeping annoyingly, in a monotone: 1111-1111-1111, it read.
Someone was critical.
We ran out of the Intensive Care Unit. A member of the Team had already called the elevator. But it was so slow. Where was it, stuck on the second floor, kept open so two administrators could gossip about the latest development on Campus? Cursing the imaginary administrators, the residents and I took the stairs and leaped through the steps to the Trauma Center.
I had forgotten about the cameras.
But the crew was already there, waiting, ready, eager. On came the lights, the camera pointed to the entrance doors. The air was thick with tension. Who was about to be rolled in? How bad was the situation?
Then the radio cracked a report.
“A van rolled off the freeway at high speed, multiple times. No ejections. Two serious, one critical. Will be there in three minutes.”
Three long minutes to prepare our tools: check the laryngoscope light, make sure it’s working. Intravenous equipment, Ambu bags. Are the monitors on? The crash cart available? Which beds are they going to take, nurse? Doctor, you stand there, in charge of airway. I stand here, at the foot of the bed.
And then the doors opened.
The little body lying on the stretcher was so small, barely two feet long. She was strapped to the backboard; her neck disappeared underneath her cervical collar. A blanket covered her naked body.
She was almost ten months old, we learned, and she wasn’t breathing. The paramedics pushed oxygen in her through a transparent mask fitted over her nose and mouth.
Within seconds a tube was passed into her breathing pipe. Intravenous lines pierced her tiny arms. Monitors went on her chest. Her heart was working, but she barely had a blood pressure.
While the cameras recorded her face, I looked at her. Her eyes were sunken, her lids closed, her head horribly swollen. I placed my gloved hand on her head, and the feeling of loss overcame me. There wasn’t a bone in her skull that wasn’t broken. I couldn’t begin to imagine how smashed her brain really was.
The CT scan told us that, a few minutes later. Her brain was dead. She was dead. My fifteen seconds in the limelight were her fifteen seconds in the limelight: the last fifteen seconds of her life.
The indifferent expression of the TV cameraman had all but disappeared.
“Do you do this everyday?” He asked, pale.
“Every damn day, and you know what? I’m getting pretty tired of it. It’ robbing me of my life, bit by bit, every time it takes away the life of one of my patients. But I’m not done. Now I have to tell this little girl’s father that she is no longer with us.”
“May I come with you?”
“At this point, I really don’t care. Do what you want. But please be discreet.”