pushing it down and praying
you’d been working day shift for as long as you’ve been working in ‘the pitt’. during your first rotations, everybody swore that night shift was when the real emergencies happened. that if you truly wanted to learn, you would work whilst the rest of the city slept. you tried it and hated it. no amount of coffee or very cheap protein bars were able to keep you awake all night. it absolutely had nothing to do with the fact that all of your best friends also worked the day shift, obviously.
it makes your job easier if you work with your friends, people you actually get along with. it takes the ease off a particularly difficult case if you have your best friends across the hall. somewhere between intern year and now, the five of you began renting out a small home not too far from the hospital. it worked out cheaper for all of you to share a place together as oppose to all renting an apartment each that was way out of budget. there’s never enough mugs, somebody's always missing a charger and the fridge was rammed to the top with takeout containers.
between working together and living together, you practically all lived in the skins of one another.
not that any of you minded.
you just wished whitaker would stop eating the yoghurt you specifically bought for yourself.
the emergency department had a way of reminding you constantly how fragile life is. people come through the doors on the worst day of their lives, and you’re expected to carry their burden for them. having your people beside you made this job a whole lot easier.
which is exactly why dr.robby’s email had felt like a punch in the gut. it landed in your inbox with a painfuly innocent subject line: ‘shift schedule update’. there weren’t enough physicians or nurses working the night shift. patient numbers were climbing and people had to be moved. you attempted to fight your case at first, politely when you saw him next shift. you tried to get him to see that working the day shift was easier for you, your patients were in the top care when you weren’t falling asleep at their bedside. he did listen to you, he let you fight your corner before he looked at you in your eyes, and smiled in that maddeningly patient way of his and left with a simple, “you’ll survive.”
“hey, sweet girl!” dana’s the first to welcome you into the ED, pulling you into an awkward side hug due to the backpack hanging off your shoulder and your half-empty starbucks cup in your hand. “how you doin’?”
“been better,” you admitted with a tired smile, shrugging your shoulders at her. “latest victim to the nightmare shift.”
a laugh escapes from dana’s lips as she looks at you with a sympathy only she can muster. over the years, she’d become almost like a mother figure to you. she understood how hard it was for you at the beginning to move across the country and start working in a totally new place. she took you under her wing without ever expecting anything back.
she never complained about a cigarette here and there, though.
“robby got you, huh?” she shakes her head.
“very much against my will,” you sigh, taking a sip from the cup. “how’s it looking today? i texted vic and trinity, but they were spectacularly unhelpful.”
dana sighs, looking out at the full emergency department. “you know this place.”
the pitt wasn’t ever a quiet place. there hasn’t been a quiet day in this building since the day it opened it’s doors. monitors constantly beeped from every direction, stretchers piled up the hallways with people waiting for impatient beds that simply didn’t exist. the waiting room was constantly overfilling, from people that needed critical care to those that could simply fix their issue with some medication from the cvs down the road.
if pittsburgh had a heartbeat, it’s somewhere in the walls of this hospital.
“what’re saying about me?” trinity appears behind you, her voice as dry as it usually was. you turn to find her looking exactly as you found yourself looking most days after a 12 hour shift. the concealer under her eyes had long stopped working for the heavy, dark bags.
“you look beautiful as always,” you smiled sarcastically at one of your best friends, throwing her a wink. “i was telling dana how much i love you and how i’m going to miss you whilst i’m stuck in this place all night.”
“the biggest,” you grin before looking back at dana who had shifted herself to behind the nurses desk, busying herself with something on the computer. “see you later, love ya!”
you and trinity found your way to the breakroom, weaving yourself in and out of medcarts placed sporadically in the hallway, sending glances of understanding at all of the nurses and doctors who shared the same exhausted expressions on their faces.
trinity drops onto one of the plastic chairs with a groan.
“finally signed everyone out,” she stretches her arms above her head and lets the palms of her hands rests against her hair. “just hadto finish my charting and i can escape this hellhole.”
you unpack your bag, sliding your lunchbox with your dinner inside onto the middle shelf before sticking a bright yellow post-it note on top.
MINE. TOUCH AND I WILL KNOW :)
“robby’s gotta be doing it on purpose, y’know?” she mutters. she’d spent every resting moment of the day texting you about this case she’d been put on with langdon. a 6-year-old kid had come in with a head wound and, apparently, robby thought it would be perfect to put two utter nemesis’ together on it.
“what?” you glance over your shoulder at her.
“putting me on cases with langdon.”
“you think robby’s putting you on cases with langdon because he knows you hate him? that doesn’t make sense,” you question her, a frown on your face. you know of the extensive history between trin and langdon, and how despite his attempts of rekindling things with her, she didn’t believe a word he says.
“because he’s also an ass. you of all people should know that.”
“who’s an ass?” dennis questions as he walks in the break room, peeling off the blue gloves before throwing them into the trash can. “i am so tired,” he sighs as he throws himself in the seat next to trinity.
“trin’s convinced that robby’s putting her on cases with langdon on purpose,” you shrug at the boy before joining them at the table.
“i mean…” dennis shrugs, looking between the two girls.
“do not encourage her,” giving him a deadpan look before slurping the remenants of your drink.
“i’m just saying it’s not impossible.”
“i think you’re forgetting that i must be the one he hates the most because i’m the one he’s banished to night shift, not any of you,” you shake your head, like you’re angry with the whole situation all over again.
“oh please,” trinity scoffs as she rips open one of the granola bars you brought for the group. “you’ve survived worse.”
“the tinder incident,” dennis didn’t hesitate to remind you of. you drop your head to the table with a groan, embarrassment over the incident finding you all over again.
“we agreed to never mention that again.”
“we definitely did not,” trinity laughs, as if this situation was the funniest thing to ever happen to any of them. maybe to her it is but to you, it is mortifying.
a couple days before your first shift at the pitt, you’d been mindlessly swiping through tinder in bed one night and matched with a very, almost scarily, attractive trauma attending named jack.
okay, you didn’t match. you only liked him. it made you feel better about the situation if you make it seem like it was a joint thing between you and him and not just you.
then, you’d shown up to work to discover that tinder jack was, in fact, dr. jack abbot who you have to now work with until further notice. he never acknowledged it, at least not to you he didn’t. you still pray that he’s forgotten about it.
trinity only knows because you drunkenly admitted it a few weeks later, when the four of you had way too many tequila shots. mel only found out after very directly, and very loudly, asked why you became a social awkward disaster anytime dr. abbot was in eye sight.
“he sent me a text this afternoon,” you announce to the pair, pulling your phone out of the scrub pocket and turning your phone around and showing them both the screen. freshly out of the shower, still humming the words to an old one direction song when the text comes through your phone fits the criteria for a cardiac arrest.
“...that’s it?” dennis looks at you and the phone, as if he was expecting something else. something better to fill in with the tinder incident.
“literally what did you expect?”
“i don’t know,” he shrugged. “can’t wait to see you tonight, gorgeous?”
“i hate you,” you laugh as you throw a crumpled up napkin off the table directly at him. “it’s so awkward,” you sigh, “everything with him is so awkward.”
“you make it awkward,” trinity states matter of factly as she stands up from the chair, smoothing her scrub pants down. “you literally have no idea how to flirt.”
“you can’t talk when the tension becomes impossible to breath through when you and garcia are in the same room,” you shoot back at her, a smirk riddled on your face.
“she’s not wrong,” dennis pipes up, resting his head in the palm of his hands. he looks as if he is only a mere seconds away from falling asleep on the wooden table.
“you better shut the fuck up, huckleberry, if you want a ride home,” trinity shouts over her shoulder as she leaves the breakroom.
“i’m sorry! i didn’t mean it!” he’s quick to his feet, chasing after santos with his figurative tail in between his legs.
“don’t watch love island without me!”
the day shift was beginning to thin out, mel and victoria the last to say goodbye to you before making their way home. the exhausted doctors are slowly replaced with happier looking, brighter doctors ready to tackle whatever the night shift was planning to bring in.
you lingered at the nurses station, straightening your ID badge for the fifth time in the small amount of time you’ve been sat here.
“relax,” your head shoots up as you hear dr. shen’s voice appear from in front of the desk. his image mirrors yours identically when you entered the department; backpack hanging off his shoulder and an ice coffee in his hand, given his is from dunkin as he refused to go anywhere else. “you look like we’re about to put you on the frontline.”
“i feel like you are,” you sigh, slouching in the spinning chair.
“did not miss your dramatics,” he shakes his head at you as he takes a sip from his straw. “it’ll be fine, you’ll love it.”
you send him a wide smile full of sarcasm, before he walks away and leaves you alone. with just minutes to the official start of night shift, not that you’re counting, you can hear dana’s rusty accent from across the room.
“evening, abbot,” she smiles at the older man. he walks in with a stainless steel travel mug in one hand and a very worn, military backpack on his shoulders. the greying hair on his head had clearly lost a battle with the pittsburgh wind on his way from the parking lot. you watch as they talk amongst each other. jack listens way more than he speaks, taking in every word dana says like it comes straight from the bible. he rests a hand gently on her shoulder before heading deeper into the department, his eyes already scanning the patient board above the nurses’ station.
there has always been something about jack that attracted you to him. well, there had to be for you to send him a like on tinder, right? he held himself so manly, so dominantly. the way he ordered the night shift around, or when he’d come in with a job from his SWAT volunteering job that he does and suddenly owned the whole emergency department.
something about him has always put a fire in the bottom of your belly.
“well,” his voice is thick with the smug smirk on his face as he approaches you. he looks unfairly put together for somebody ready to face a 12 hour emergency shift. “you made it.”
“oh yeah, unfortunately,” you have to consciously force your mouth to form words as he looks down on you. he shuffles his body weight from one leg onto the other, resting against the desk. “robby finally got his way, got me off his day shift.”
“he mentioned it,” he rubs the bottom of his face, the slight stubble rough against his skin.
“so, you guys have all been conspiring against me?” you joke with him, raising your eyebrows which earns a chuckle that hits you straight in your core.
“can neither confirm nor deny that one,” he shrugs. “i think you’ll like it over here,” his face sterns as he looks down at you. all previous humour had left the conversation.
“you’re supposed to say that.”
“i just so happen to believe it, though.”
it’s 1:30 before you get a chance to sit down again once the ED starts busying up again. you’d seen patient after patient after patient, not having the chance to take a breather since you started. your feet throbbed with every step and the muscles in your back cried out in pain for you to stop bending over stretchers and transferring countless patients from stretchers to beds. your dinner in the fridge has long gone forgotten, probably disappeared to the stomach of one of the doctors if they’re anything like the day shift.
you’ve barely had time to breathe.
teenager with a broken wrist after falling off a skateboard in the middle of the night.
elderly woman with sepsis.
a college kid that thought he’d be able to backflip after a dozen tequila shots.
with a heavy sigh, you throw yourself onto the spinning chair in the nurses station. the same one you had adopted before your shift. rolling your neck against the head of the chair until it gave a satisfying crack and a wave of relief swims through your body.
“doing good?” jack abbot’s voice creeps up from behind. you glance sideways at him, a tired smile on both of your faces.
“well,” you sigh, bringing your hands up to rub the sharp pain that had been forming behind your eyebrow for the past hour. “i’m alive.”
“i’ll take alive,” he sits himself down on the chair next to yours, with much more grace than you did. he bends the knee of his prosthetic leg a couple of times, his eyebrows furrowing together as if he was in pain. you don’t press him about it, knowing you weren’t on the level with him where you need to be speaking about his disability. “you eaten?”
“was going to until i got called into that GSW in trauma two,” your body recoils at the remembrance of that particular case from just a couple hours ago, and the blood that still stains your scrubs. “that’s if someone hasn’t already claimed it as their own.”
“go eat,” his voice is so full of order that it makes something in you want to follow his orders. like his word is law. “it’ll help that headache,” he looks at you as if he can read your mind. but to a doctor, especially of his caliber, it’s very obvious that the constant look of hurt on your face and the repeated rubbing on your temples was probably a diagnosis in itself.
before you can answer the older man, or find the words to say to him, a hurried nurse runs past the two of you with a clipboard under her arm and a tube of blood in her hand. “dr. abbot, can you sign off on these cultures?”
“i’ll be there in a second,” he nods at the nurse before she returns to the patient room she came from. with a breath of either pain, or exhaustion, he halls himself off of the chair and adjusts his scrubs. he takes a moment to look down at where you’re sitting with your body slumped in the chair, probably giving every chiropractor in the country a panic attack. he pulls a granola bar out of his scrub pocket, pushing it towards you with a raise of his eyebrow. “eat.”
you frown at him, shooting a look between him and the granola bar.
“part of my emergency stash,” he shrugs at you, flashing another one out of the same pocket.
“you keep an emergency stash of granola bars in your scrub pocket?” you let out a giggle, picking the bar up off the desk. peanut butter. your favourite.
“i’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive.”
“DR. ABBOT TO TRAUMA ONE. DR ABBOT, TRAUMA ONE.”
“dinner,” he points at you with his index finger, a stern look on his face is undercut by the amusement in his eyes. you send him a mock salute.
he shook his head at you, muttering something that sounds like “smartass” as he makes his way to the trauma room.
you watch his back from where you’re sitting, able to see the way he orders the whole room about. peeling the wrapper of the granola bar back, listening to the distant rhythm of his trauma, the reversing of an ambulance outside, voices calling out medicine orders and for the first time all night, your pager remained blissfully silent and nobody calls your name.
it wasn’t much, just a snack from your older attending’s scrub pocket. that’s all it is. no need to read any more into it.
