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isshebreathing · 3 years

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I had an unexpected weekend off and it’s too hot to be outside today, so five stories in one weekend is too much for me to catch up with. Thanks everyone for your positive response so far, I’ll definitely keep working on them.

If you are triggered by dark stuff and death fantasy you can skip part 2 and come straight to part 3 without missing anything.

Chronic Asthma Part 3

We were over staffed at the hospital so I volunteered to leave. I had been working so much that my girlfriend Emily and I were like ships passing in the night. She would have just gotten home from her bar tending shift and we could eat dinner in bed then fall asleep watching a reality show like a normal couple would. Emily has a bachelor’s degree in fine art, but she still bartends because it pays more money. I’ve always felt guilty about that, once I was done with med school I would be able to make more money and she wouldn’t have to work. She could tell the men who made passes at her to fuck off without fear of losing precious tips or worse yet, her job.

“Coming home early” I texted “dinner and tv?”

I didn’t get a response

“???????” I sent.

She might have been in bed, when I called her this evening she sounded tired and short of breath, she said she had been running to catch something.

The thought crossed my mind that Emily was not okay. She had had chronic asthma since she was a child as a result of the poor air quality in the Appalachian town she was raised in. Sometimes late at night I would feel her start awake and I knew she was having a nightmare of one of the two times she had stopped breathing entirely in her life.

I pushed the thought out of my head, Emily had always accused me of overthinking things and turning them into a medical crisis, it was a side effect of seven years of med school I guessed.

I sent another text “Fast food tacos?”

I got no response, “she’s probably in the shower,” I said to myself.

My anxiety didn’t fade though, I thought we had food at home we could make. I ordered a car on my phone to shorten the 45 minutes the train would have taken. I tried to get the thought of my girlfriend struggling to breath on the floor out of my head and tried to replace it with the pleasant warmth and surprise I’d see on her face when I came home early for an unexpected date night.

I bounded up the stairs and opened our door, I was surprised that our cat Walter didn’t come to greet me, he must have been confused by my shortened day.

The kitchen and living room and hallway lights were on, and I could see that our bedroom light was on too, but the shower wasn’t running. “Babe, you left the lights on again,” I said frustratedly expecting her to say “don’t mock my fear of the dark” jokingly in reply but I didn’t hear anything.

“Babe?” I said again with no response.

“Emily?” I said louder, now making my way down the hallway.

I turned into our room and saw my worst fears realized, Emily was laying in the fetal position on the floor, face turned gray, inhaler and nebulizer scattered around her. She had an asthma attack that turned into a breathing crisis, she was in respiratory arrest in front of me.

I rushed over to her and put my face close to hers, “Emily,” I said again trying to shake her awake. She looked into my eyes for a brief moment before they rolled back in her head and fluttered closed. I put two fingers under her chin and felt her heart sputter to a stop, she was in full arrest now.

I saw her cell phone on the floor next to the handset I insisted on keeping because 911 services could better trace your address on a landline. I picked up the handset and realized it was already connected. “Ma’am? Ma’am can you hear me? Help is on the way” a dispatcher says calmly on the other end of the phone.

“Yes, I just walked in and my girlfriend is in full arrest, I’m a doctor, I need an ambulance.”

The dispatcher responds but I don’t care what they say. I lay Emily flat on her back and rip off her fitted bar t-shirt. I grab the knife from my pocket and slice off her bra, exposing her graying chest as her large breast flopped to each side. I started compressions and yelled “Emily you have to come back okay.”

Her lifeless body lay unresponsive, rocking inward as I pounded on her chest, “and ten and eleven and twelve” I push away any thoughts of arousal that I feel from her naked body needing me to pump it’s heart for her. “And twenty-seven, and twenty-eight, and twenty-nine, and thirty” I move up towards her head and tilt it back, I try to give her a puff of air, her cheeks puff out but her chest lays still.

I realize her airway is completely blocked and run to get the medical bag I keep in my closet, I pour iodine on her throat and place my knee on her forehead to stabilize her.

I have seen this procedure done in the real world twice, once on a training video and once in my ER rotation, I have never actually done the procedure. My mind goes into a trance, I am no longer a frantic girlfriend I am a medical professional performing a medical routine. I grab a scalpel and make a small slice in the skin of her throat covering her trachea, I make a few more careful slices though skin and fat and muscle taking care not to slice too deep. I take some gauze and soak up the blood as I find the trachea. I put a small slice in the organ and mucus and blood immediately start coming up, I place my two fingers into the hole so I don’t lose it and grab one of the clear plastic tubes I had set out for the procedure, I slip the tube into her trachea as a sickening gurgle lets out all of the fluid that had been stuck in her airway. I snapped on a breathing tube and an ambu bag. I began to breathe for her. Her chest rising each time I squeezed breath into her.

The adrenaline of the initial crisis was fading fast. I was trying to do compressions with one hand and respirations with the other. Emily had told me horror stories about air hunger and how terrifying it was, I needed to help her heart beat and also keep air going to her lungs.

I started to panic because I didn’t know what to do next, do I just keep her partially alive until help comes? How long could she stay this way?

I choked down my panic as the EMT’s rushed in, and took over, I was surprised how aroused I was seeing a man forcefully pump my girlfriends chest while someone else squeezes a bulb to breathe for her.

I snap back into the present as the third medic is asking me questions. “She’s 28 years old, she has a history of asthma, no known history of a heart condition…..”

My mind trails off as the severity of what is happening hits me, I lose my composure and start to sob and I begged, “Emily please stay here with me, please stay alive,”

I watch the scene unfold as the paramedics put two white pads on Emily’s chest, one between her breasts and one On her side. I lose all medical knowledge as I watch a surge of electricity shoot through her body contorting it in an unnatural horror. The shock does nothing, the v-fib that the drugs gave her has turned into a flatline.

I watch in horror as the slip a board under her to raise her chest more, making her large and graying breasts fall further to the side, they snap a machine over her and turn it on, the machine makes an unnatural squeaking noise as it beats on her chest 100 times a minute.

I forget that I am a doctor, I forget my medical training, this isn’t a case in front of me this is the woman I love.

“Are you hurting her?” I ask as the machine pounds into her over and over and over again.

“We need to beat her heart for her,” the paramedic replies.

For a moment I think it’s too much, her hands are strapped to the side of the machine that is violently pounding her chest, making her shoulders shift inwards, her belly bulge, and feet rock inward with each compression pounding into her battered body. A tube sticks unnaturally out of her mouth attached to a blue bulb that someone has to squeeze to make her chest rise with breath. “It’s too much to expect her body to take this to stay.” I think, but thought of living without her snaps me back to reality. I am almost a doctor, a medical professional, I will do anything it takes to keep my girlfriend alive even if it’s with machines.

They load her into the back of the ambulance and despite my protests make me sit in the front with the driver.

I text my colleague in the ER, “headed in with Emily, bad asthma attack to full arrest, get prepped to start life support. I can’t lose her”

“Oh god Jen, we will do whatever it takes” she replies.

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