The Donors Read Free Page B

flu—super-sensitive skin, muscle aches and nausea. A few hours of sleep and he would be like new. All he had to do was give a quick report to the senior ER resident relieving him and he could get out of here.
    He looked at his watch. Six-fifty p.m. Ten more minutes and his shift would be over. Dietrich would be right on time, maybe a little early. He plopped down on the cheap, stained couch in the ER resident lounge and stretched his stiff legs onto the coffee table, which balanced precariously on three remaining legs. His aching back cracked as he attempted to unlock the knots, then settled back and took a sip of his lukewarm coffee.
    Jason wondered for the thousandth time whether he had made the right choice for his career. In general, it gave him grueling twelve-hour shifts of monotonous, clinic-style care, punctuated only occasionally with something exciting or interesting. Even then he was involved only transiently, until a doctor from another specialty arrived to assume care and admit the patient.
    He had never been a thrill seeker and it wasn’t the lack of excitement that wore on him. He enjoyed the trauma patients and cardiac arrests; it felt good when he did his job well, but he was also perfectly content to pass on the follow-up care and move to the next patient. He often joked that he had chosen ER because of his attention deficit disorder. Once the hyper-acute phase of medical trouble ended, he got bored.
    No, the level of excitement and mental stimulation seemed just about right. The emotional impact of human tragedy he waded through daily at work didn’t bother him either. In fact, what scared him these days was how little that seemed to affect him. A few years ago, as a student and intern, he invested himself completely in the lives of the patients he encountered. He remembered more than a few times lying in bed after work, weeping softly at the thought of a patient he had cared for who had died despite his best efforts. These days he couldn’t remember the last time he had felt that way. More than a few times he had turned angry or annoyed when a patient’s problems (often from their own stupidity) interrupted an otherwise pleasant—which these days meant quiet—shift.
    Jason sipped the bitter coffee from his cup and shook the thoughts out of his mind. He looked again at his watch. Two minutes ‘til. Where the hell was Dietrich? The end of a shift was no time to make a big life assessment. He looked at the now-nasty drink in his hand and tossed it with a plunk into the institutional wastebasket beside him. A middle-aged moan—
    Where the hell did that come from? I’m only twenty-nine years old.
    â€”hissed out of him as he grabbed and dropped the remote in his lap without turning on the TV, which hung suspended in the ceiling corner.
    Jason closed his eyes and reluctantly let his thoughts wander to Nathan Doren and just where he was right now. Probably up in the burn ward, getting his first painful debridement. The thought made his throat tighten. It was no mystery to him why this child brought back his long-absent empathy. He unconsciously rubbed his right thigh, the break long ago mended, and kept his mind on Nathan and his mother, not on his own past.
    The patient, the poor five-year-old boy, would get Fentanyl and some Versed, he remembered from his rotation on the Burn/Trauma Service. The Fentanyl would help the pain and the Versed would hopefully keep him from remembering whatever pain the narcotic couldn’t dull.
    It’s not really about the pain though, is it? It’s the fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of being hurt again by a grown up. Fear of letting down my mom.
    Jason wiped a tear from his cheek with some annoyance and rubbed his thigh again. He remembered his mother crying beside him while he looked in drug-dazed terror at the large drill they assembled to screw a pin through his flesh and into his bone. He remembered hatred of his bastard