Mind the Bleep

16 | Three Days Later

Three days later, at Caliana's subsequent scheduled on-call shift at Little Oaks Hospital, Isaac was nowhere in sight.

After that fervent make-out session at Little Oaks Zoo, and Caliana's ensuing confession, the Zookeeper had scuttled into the cloakroom advising the two of the completion of the CT scan, and thus Isaac's reaction was left hanging in the air that night. Caliana would be fibbing if she said she didn't wonder whether the interruption had served as a blessing in disguise.

In the interim, she had made no contact with Isaac, and she'd been more than slightly dejected when she'd reached for her phone several dozen times between preparing for the Research conference only to find that none of her messages or calls were from him. She wondered whether their moments together would have any bearing on their scheduled trip to Petras, Greece for the conference next week.

Now as she stood outside the shared office, gaping up at her blinking reflection from his golden nameplate, she felt a comparable wave of anxiety bloom within her stomach, as it had done when she'd first stood in this exaction location to introduce herself to Isaac, nearly five weeks prior. She drummed her knuckles against the frame a second, and third time but when no riposte arose, she ploughed the door open but found the room empty; devoid of any human presence.

She dragged her phone out from her scrubs pocket, the action causing her lanyard, now embellished with a string of badges and keys to rustle with the motion. She tapped out a quick message to Isaac, and less than one minute later, a singular response came: "Sick."

"Is that it?" She whispered to herself. The monosyllabic response was opened to rows upon rows of interpretations; was he sick as in riddled with illness? Or sick as in sick of Caliana?

She juggled with the prospect of replying, but instead, set her phone back into her pocket with an exasperated sigh. She twirled on her heel and sprinted up the three flights of stairs to the Acute Medical ward for which she'd been allocated for the day.

The flavour of the day was shortness of breath and headaches, and fortunately for Caliana, the hefty workload coupled with the merciless ringing of bleep 101 held back any unwelcome thoughts of Isaac.

"Urgh!" She mumbled under her breath as she reached for her bleep as it rang for the fiftieth time, only three hours into the shift. But before she was able to dredge over to the nurse's station to answer the call; a shrill cry belonging to a woman echoed across the ward. She swerved around, catching the drawn murky meringue-coloured curtains of cubicle four.

"Everything okay in here?" She yanked the curtain back in one swift motion and found a woman – mid-to-late-fifties, scrunched against a chair, the back of her hand firmly pressed against her eyes, and her teeth bared. Caliana's eyes darted down and saw a rather-shaky-looking Dawn crouched on her knees in front of the patient, eyes glued to the patient's wrist and blonde locks matted against her forehead with anxiety-induced sweat as she attempted an arterial blood gas procedure, unsuccessfully.

"Everything is not okay! This woman is trying to kill me! I don't think she has a clue what she's doing." The patient roared out; her eyes widened beyond belief.

"I'm so sorry it's painful. But...we really do need to get this blood result. It'll tell us how the oxygen levels are in your arteries, so we can find out exactly how to treat your breathlessness." Dawn clarified slowly, before muttering under her breath. "Of course, it'd be easier for us both if you stopped moving so much." But as Dawn flexed the needle nearer to the patient's wrist, it became crystal-clear to Caliana that it wasn't the patient who was failing to remain still, but rather that Dawn's hand appeared to be jerking from side to side, leading to her repeatedly missing the entry point of the artery.