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CODEBLUE
020. SUPERSTITION
season two, episodes twenty and twenty-one
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JOANNA RHODES' DAY HAD BARELY BEGUN AND IT ALREADY SUCKED. It was not even eight a.m. and she already had to tell a husband that his partner had passed away in surgery. And as luck would have it, Joanna wasn't the only one. Burke -- who was operating without his own scrub caps -- and she had lost this emergency valve replacement patient; Bailey lost a Whipple patient; Christopher and Addison lost a woman who had just given birth to twins; and Emily and Derek had a tumor removal gone terribly wrong.
"It's eight seventeen and there were already four deaths," she muttered to Christopher as they watched Burke pace around nervously as he talked to dry cleaning.
"I've never seen him so worked up about anything before," Christopher whispered.
"There are ten. Music notes. Colorful patterns," Burke said on the phone. "They were sent out last night."
The Chief, who was analyzing the surgical board of the day, noticed Burke's presence and said. "Sorry about your valve replacement."
Burke blinked. "The laundry misplaced my scrub caps," he said as if that was the real underlying issue.
Webber turned to Christopher, Joanna, and Rose, the scrub nurse. "There's some foolish talk about fatality clusters in threes and sevens."
Burke, still on the phone, spoke, "Are you sure they weren't sent to another hospital?"
"How many electives have they canceled today?" Webber asked the trio.
"Three so far," Joanna answered. "Including my gender reassignment surgery," she added with a slight pout. "I'm going to have to double interns so they can all get OR time today."
"And what have the surgeons' reasons been?" Webber asked.
"Because I prefer my own caps!" Almost as if answering Webber's question, Burke snapped at the person on the phone, grabbing Webber's attention.
The Chief turned to him. "You're not pushing surgeries because you don't have your caps, understood?"
Burke looked slightly offended. "I didn't push any surgeries," he said, before getting back on the phone. "No, no. The question is: when will you find them?"
Webber turned to the trio again. "No one changes that board unless they talk to me. No one."
As he and Burke left, Christopher and Joanna looked up at Rose. "So, from the top of your ten-year-long expertise, do surgery casualties come in clusters?"
