They both turned and watched as the OR team arrived and the little boy was taken off on the stretcher. As David left to follow Tyler into the operating room, she watched as the couple began to gather their belongings so they could join the rest of their family in the waiting room.
Sarah, like the rest of the staff on the unit watched the clock constantly for the next few hours. News that the heart had been delivered and the surgery was going well so far filtered down through unofficial channels. As the hours passed and they waited for news that Tyler was coming off the bypass machine, Sarah forced herself to make her rounds. She’d stopped by Jason’s room to find the teenager preparing to be discharged home. Unlike the boy she had seen the week before, he now was willing to talk to her as she discussed his post-op care and his need to return for a follow-up appointment.
After checking the clock again when she left Jason’s room she turned and headed down to Lindsey’s room. She’d checked on the little girl on and off during the weekend and she’d been happy to learn that there had been some improvement in her condition. Opening the door to her room she was greeted with a smiling Lindsey who sat up on her bed playing with a pink unicorn with a long flowing tail.
“Now, that is a pretty horse,” Sarah said as she moved some of the child’s other toys off the bedside chair so that she could sit down.
“It’s a unicorn. My momma brought it for me this weekend,” Lindsey said. “Isn’t she pretty?”
“She is,” Sarah said as she reached over and stroked the long rainbow-colored main. “Maybe we could dye Maple’s hair this color.”
Lindsey laughed, and then covered her mouth as she coughed. Sarah bent over and listened to her lungs with her stethoscope, then moved back to her chair.
“I’m much better,” she said to Sarah. “I told my momma that I might get out of the hospital this week.”
Sarah let her hands run through Lindsey’s long curls. She hoped that Hannah had been able to see that the child was being overly optimistic. Even with the improvement from the antibiotics she was getting it would be several days before they would move her out of the critical care unit. Lindsey’s condition was just too fragile to not take every precaution.
Her phone beeped and she looked down to find a message from Tyler’s parents. After she gave Lindsey the promised picture of Maple, Sarah headed down a floor to where Tyler’s parents waited in the surgical waiting room.
“Oh, Sarah,” Tyler’s mother said as she rounded the corner and found both the child’s parents standing in the hallway. “They said they would give us an update in an hour but that was over an hour and a half ago and no one has been out. The last update they gave us they said they were almost ready to take Tyler off the bypass machine. Can you find out what’s going on?”
“Let’s go over here,” Sarah said as she led the distraught mother back over to the area of the waiting room where she recognized some of Tyler’s other family members.
“I tried to tell her that they were just running a little behind,” Tyler’s father said reassuringly, though Sarah saw the way the man’s hands trembled as he gently rubbed his wife’s back.
“Let me go see what I can find out,” Sarah said, praying that nothing had gone wrong in the OR.
Before she could turn from the couple, though, she heard the voice of Dr. Benton as he entered the waiting room, David just behind him. The smile on both their faces told her all she needed to know.
As Dr. Benton discussed the surgery with Tyler’s parents, Sarah walked over to where David stood.
“So how did it go?” Sarah asked, as the two of them moved away from the group that surrounded Dr. Benton.
“It was amazing,” David said, “that moment when we removed the heart was one of the scariest moments of my surgical career so far, but after the new heart was attached and we waited for the new heart to start up...then that first beat and then another. It was like experiencing a miracle.”
“Weren’t you?” Sarah asked as she smiled up at him. They headed back to the doctors’ workroom where they could start requesting all the lab work and other tests that would need to be done on their newest transplant recipient. Sarah was impressed with the questions David had concerning the care Tyler would receive over the next twenty four hours. She had met many doctors in her years working as a nurse and then as a nurse practitioner and she felt that she had enough experience with both really good doctors and some not-so-good doctors to be able to tell the difference. She was already sure that David would be one of the best doctors due partly to his enthusiasm and partly to the empathy he showed for his patients.
While most of the doctors she had worked with showed their patients and their families’ empathy, David had experienced exactly what these families were going through which made him able to help them in ways that other doctors wouldn’t understand.
“By the way, I was thinking maybe I could start those riding lessons next week. That is if you have the time,” David asked as he set a cup of coffee on the desk in front of her.
They had fallen into a pattern of working together where the two of them ended each day discussing their plans for the next day. She was going to miss this when David finished his time learning the part of the practice that she handled.
“Sure,” Sarah said. “How about next Saturday? I’ll check
