The Repeat Year (4 page)

“Don’t move your head around so much. Otherwise the braid will be crooked.” Kerrigan pressed her palms firmly against Olive’s temples.

Olive laughed. The braid would most likely turn out crooked no matter what, but she didn’t mind. It was strange thinking of Kerrigan as the girl in the Goo Goo Dolls T-shirt dyeing her hair in the dorm bathroom eight years ago. She hadn’t known it at the time, but Kerrigan had felt just as lonely and out of place as she had. They had become best friends overnight, in the effortless way of small children, trusting in the confidence of their instincts, never imagining that one could hurt or leave the other. How had she forgotten how essentially
good
Kerrigan was?

She wanted to hug her friend for the hair braiding, this spontaneous act of tenderness. She felt taken care of. So much of her time she spent tending to others. It was nice to have someone looking after
her
needs. It had been a long time since anyone saw to that. Probably not since Phil. She remembered his offer of pancakes and the light brush of his fingers against her bare abdomen.
Come back to bed.
Despite herself, she shivered.

“Did I get your ticklish spot?” Kerrigan’s fingers fluttered against the nape of her neck.

After the caffeine and therapeutic hair braiding, Olive felt almost human again. She parked in the staff parking near Dane County General’s emergency entrance and took the elevator to the second floor, ready to face Tina’s wrath and the bustle of the day shift. She craved the repetitive tasks of her job. Drawing a blood sample would restore normalcy to her world. Watching the steady green waves on a cardiac monitor might help her forget the agitation of her own heart.

Tina ambushed her with a chart before Olive had even locked up her backpack. She watched reproachfully as Olive struggled to squeeze the backpack into the narrow locker. Then they set off at a clip through the semicircular ward to one of the patient rooms.

“A new patient came in last night,” Tina called over her shoulder. Olive struggled to keep up with her. “Sarah Hutchinson, a nineteen-year-old UW student with bacterial meningitis. We’ve started her on vancomycin and meropenem. Her temperature and white count are a little high, but almost back to normal. There’s an ICP monitor to check for any brain swelling. Her father is in the waiting room. He’s very anxious, but I convinced him to get some rest. He’ll want you to call him back in here after rounds.”

They halted just outside the young woman’s room. Each of the patient rooms in the ICU had a floor-to-ceiling window so the nurses could keep an eye on their patients at all times;
fishbowls
, the rooms were called. Olive stared in disbelief at the girl’s familiar lanky figure beneath the pale blue cotton sheet. Sarah Hutchinson. A nineteen-year-old University of Wisconsin student. Majoring in dairy science to take over the family farm one day. An only child with a dead mother and an overprotective father. Olive listed these details off in her head as surely as if Tina had provided them.

She stepped inside the room and drew close to the girl’s bedside. Sarah Hutchinson’s hair was the color of sun-bleached prairie grass. A patch had been shaved for the insertion of a thin plastic tube, the ICP monitor, into a bolt in her skull. Instinctively, Olive raised her hand to touch her own hair. She remembered how horrified she had been at first by the ICP monitor and its invasiveness, the way it wormed its way into the brain, which Olive had come to view as the last place of privacy in the human body. Tubes invaded throats, catheters probed bladders, IVs snaked their way into veins and arteries in hands, arms, and thighs, yet the brain felt sacred to her, which was why she had avoided neurology as a specialty.

But now she knew that Sarah, in her unconscious state, felt no pain from the ICP monitor’s presence. She also knew that the teenager would recover quickly and leave the hospital within a few days, with no signs of permanent brain damage. She could almost see the yellow balloons Sarah’s father had tied to the handlebars of the wheelchair in which he had delivered her from the hospital. Sarah Hutchinson felt like a cousin. Olive leaned close to her expressionless face; even her blond eyebrows and eyelashes looked colorless and shy.

Olive’s momentary paralysis prompted Tina to step into the room. “Hey,” Tina said gently, misinterpreting her stillness. She touched Olive’s elbow. “She’s going to be okay. She got here just in time.”

Olive turned around, but Tina was already heading to their next patient’s room.

“Mr. Paulson came in on New Year’s Eve from Green Glen Nursing Home. A seventy-nine-year-old diabetic suffering from pneumonia. It’s amazing he’s lived this long; I don’t know what they thought they’d accomplish bringing him here. It seemed just plain cruel to intubate him. We’re trying to wean him off the ventilator now. You know how that goes.” Tina closed the charts with a conclusive snap that seemed to dare Olive to ask her questions and detain her any longer.

“Thanks,” Olive said. She wanted to apologize for her tardiness and give Tina a valid excuse, but what could she say?
I’m sorry, Tina, but I woke up in 2011, when I thought I would be waking up in 2012, so I confused my work schedule?
Or
I’ve already lived this year, and reliving it is just a little disorienting for me, so could you please just cut me some slack?
But before she could construct any kind of apology, Tina left.

Only a few tufts of white hair covered Mr. Paulson’s flaky scalp. He hadn’t left as much of an impression on Olive as Sarah Hutchinson had, which made her feel a little guilty. She felt sorry for the man her memory had blotted out, or, perhaps more accurately, the man who had become lumped in with the hundreds of nameless, faceless elderly patients who came to the ICU with pneumonia every year. Their wrinkled, distorted features once handsome, their diminished bodies commenced a trip backward through time, returning first to infancy, and then marching onward to their death. Olive was there to make their trip more comfortable, or sometimes, if necessary at a family member’s request, prolong the time until they reached their destination.

Already running behind, she hurried to take his vitals. The troupe of residents on their rounds would be inquiring after her patients soon, and she hated measuring how much urine was in a Foley catheter in front of an audience. She tallied Mr. Paulson’s fluid balance and was almost out the door before she remembered the most important part of nursing, as Gloria, the compassionate nurse who’d mentored her, had put it.

She covered Mr. Paulson’s tubing-free hand with her own. His skin felt like worn flannel. “Mr. Paulson, I’m your nurse, Olive, and I’m going to be taking good care of you. We’re going to have you back to Green Glen in no time, watching baseball or cardinals at the bird feeder, or whatever it is you like to do there, okay? Okay.”

Talking to the unconscious patients had once seemed like an exercise in futility to Olive. She had felt awkward and theatrical, like she was holding a conversation with herself. But now it came second nature to her, and it helped remind her that her patients were real people with real stories, not just bodies to be bathed and cared for.

A cluster of white coats stood outside Sarah’s room. Without realizing it, Olive scanned the group for Alex. He wasn’t among them. She was grateful.

Dr. Su, the attending physician, smiled when she saw Olive approach. “Your patient?”

Olive nodded and ducked into the room. Being thrust back into the beginning of her ICU career off-kilter like this made her feel incompetent and unsure of herself.
You’ve had over a year of experience in this,
she reminded herself.
Just chill out. You know what you’re doing.
Even if no one else thought she did. And of the five people in the room—six, including Sarah—Olive was the only one who knew for certain what would happen to the college student. Although she didn’t write off Sarah’s recovery as an inevitability. Everything still had to be done vigilantly. No care or treatment could be neglected. That thought steadied her hands as she measured Sarah’s blood pressure. She rattled off numbers to Dr. Su and her residents, and after a brief discussion, they went on their way.

She stood at the foot of Sarah’s bed for a moment and allowed herself to appreciate the weirdness of the situation. The forward momentum of the past twenty-four hours came to a screeching halt. She’d had repeat patients before—like poor Mrs. Gertler, whose body had rejected her new kidney and needed to be put back on dialysis—but never in such a literal way. She tried to imagine what Sarah had done last year after her hospital stay. She tried to imagine her studying for an economics exam or cheering at a Badger game but couldn’t. To Olive, Sarah somehow existed only in this hospital bed, in this blue-speckled gown, with a patch of her white-blond hair missing.

“Miss Hutchinson, I’m your nurse, Olive,” she started, and then didn’t know what else to say. She patted the girl’s bony foot through the sheet. “You probably don’t remember me, but we’ve met before. You pulled through then, and I promise I’ll help you pull through now.”

She looked up to see Mr. Hutchinson’s lanky figure obscuring the window. The stubble on his face and dark smudges under his eyes confirmed Tina’s report that he’d spent the night at the hospital. He wore ribbed corduroy pants and a denim shirt and held a furry winter cap in his hands. Olive remembered the intimidation he had inspired in her last year. Now she saw him only as a man filled with sorrow and remorse. She knew he blamed himself for his daughter’s sickness. He hadn’t wanted her to go to college for reasons like this.

Stepping into the room, he was immediately on the offensive. “The other nurse said I could come in here around half past eight. She said someone would come get me, but nobody did.”

“It’s been a busy morning,” she said. “But you’re more than welcome to sit with Sarah now.”

Mr. Hutchinson took the seat next to his daughter’s bed. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s doing well. Her heart rate and blood pressure are strong, and her white blood cell count and temperature are steadily becoming more normal.”

“Aren’t there any doctors around here? No offense, but I’d rather hear this from a doctor.”

“Sarah’s physician, Dr. Su, just checked in on her, and agreed that she’s doing quite well.”

“Is he still around? I’ve got a lot of questions.”

“She’s conducting her rounds right now. She should be back soon, if you’d like to speak with her.”

“Yes, I would. And why are there bubbles in Sarah’s IV tubing? Couldn’t one of those bubbles go straight to her heart and kill her?”

Olive straightened out a kinked length of tubing and flicked away the bubbles. “They’re quite harmless.” She was surprised by the way her earlier feeling of enlightenment was swiftly being eroded. She felt like strangling him with the tubing. Yet when she turned around, she saw he had his head in his hands. He rubbed his forehead vigorously. She knew what was coming next. Olive watched Mr. Hutchinson expectantly. She felt like she was waiting for an upcoming monologue in a play she’d seen before.

“I didn’t want her to go to Madison,” he began, head still in hands. “I didn’t go to college, my father didn’t go to college, and we did just fine on our farm. And now all of a sudden, folks are telling us we need some fancy college education to run a dairy? Heck, our cows don’t need a diploma to know how to produce milk. But Sarah wanted to go to school; she wanted to make our farm more profitable, and I was stupid enough to let her go. And look where it got her!” Here he got choked up, and his next words came out strangled. “Deathly ill. Lying in a hospital bed like her poor mother, God rest her soul.”

Olive was ready to offer him what solace and reassurance she could. She had never before known with such certainty the right thing to say to a patient’s family member. “Mr. Hutchinson, letting Sarah go off to college was very generous of you. It shows how much you love your daughter. Don’t think of it as a mistake. Sickness can come at any time or any place. And Sarah’s strong. I know she’s going to recover soon and be back to her old self. I have a very good feeling about that.”

Mr. Hutchinson looked up at her and instead of relief in his eyes, she saw anger. “You don’t know that. That’s what they told me about my wife ten years ago, and she died within the week. So don’t you make me any promises you can’t keep.” He stood up and looked as if he’d like to stalk out of the room, but thought better of it because he didn’t want to leave Sarah. “Where’s that doctor? Can you bring that doctor to me?”

She had been naïve to think that her reassurance would mean something to Mr. Hutchinson. He simply viewed it as the same kind of hollow promise that other doctors and nurses made. He didn’t have a grain of trust in Olive and wouldn’t believe in his daughter’s recovery until he witnessed it with his own eyes. If that meant staying at her bedside for the next three days, he would do it. She didn’t blame him, and yet she longed to tell him about the yellow balloons and give him something to which he could cling.

Olive was relieved to take her lunch break at one o’clock, even if she had no one to take it with. At this point in the year, she was still the new girl who hadn’t quite broken into their cliques. With the stress of her morning, she didn’t mind sitting alone at a round table in the hospital cafeteria. Instead of trying to make polite conversation, she had a moment to finally let down her guard and do some serious wallowing in the horrifying implications of reliving this year. She didn’t think she could come back here day after day, night after night, and see the same patients over again in their various stages of dying. It was all too cyclical. It all felt so pointless. But maybe there was more to it. Maybe she was supposed to use her foreknowledge of the year to save lives. The thought was both exhilarating and exhausting at the same time.

There were two voice mail messages on her cell phone: one from her mom, the other from Phil. Hearing his voice felt like swimming up to the surface after being underwater for a long time. She pressed the phone to her ear and tried to remember this was someone she had broken up with and lived without for the past ten months. Someone who had pushed her away. Someone who had been incapable of giving her a second chance. How could he still have such an effect on her? She felt betrayed by her own feelings.