When she got back to the trauma bay, the monitor read fifty-two over twenty-eight.
“He’s crashing!” a resident cried out.
“I see it.”
Elise didn’t hurry. She tore the box open.
“Prep his right groin.”
Using the ultrasound to guide her, she slid a needle into the big artery at the top of his leg. Dark red blood pulsed back into the syringe. A thin wire went in. Then a plastic sheath, about the width of a pencil lead.
Fifteen seconds.
“Measure from his groin to the bottom of his breastbone,” she told Dana. “That’s my depth. Mark the catheter.”
Dana stretched the long thin catheter along Redd’s body and pinched it with her fingers at the right spot. Her fingers were shaking now.
Elise’s weren’t.
Elise fed the catheter up inside Redd’s body, up through the biggest artery he had, until Dana’s pinched thumb touched the edge of the sheath.
“Zone one. Confirmed.”
She attached a syringe to the end of the catheter.
“Inflating.”
She pushed the plunger. Saline flowed into the tiny balloon at the tip of the catheter, deep inside Redd’s chest. The balloon swelled and sealed off the main artery like a cork in a bottle. Stopping the blood from pouring out into his belly. Sending it to his heart and his brain instead.
On the monitor, the blood pressure line went flat for a second.
Then it climbed.
Fifty-eight.
Seventy.
Ninety.
One hundred four over sixty.
Color flooded back into Redd’s face like someone had turned on a light inside him.
“Balloon up at fourteen-oh-six,” Elise said, glancing at the clock. “We have thirty minutes to get him under a knife. After that, everything below the balloon starts to die.”
Dr. Hadley’s voice came out as a whisper.
“Zone one REBOA. In an ER bay. I’ve only ever read about it in journals.”
“Now you’ve seen it.”
Elise pushed the TXA into the IV line herself.
“Open OR two. I’m operating. You’re assisting.”
“You’re not credentialed here,” Hadley said. It wasn’t an argument. It sounded almost like a question.
“Dr. Hadley.”
Admiral Keene stepped forward.
“She is credentialed under my authority. Open the room.”
Hadley swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”
Across the trauma bay, Staff Sergeant Frost groaned. Blood had soaked through the edge of the bandage on his leg.
Elise glanced over.
“The tourniquet stays on. Nobody touches it. Chief, four units of blood for him. Then call orthopedics and vascular. He keeps that stump, and he keeps his life.”
“Understood,” Hadley said.
He sounded like a completely different man.
A lab tech came skidding into the bay, out of breath.
“Doctor! The blood bank only has two units of whole blood. Two. That’s it.”
“Two?” Hadley said. “We used to keep twenty.”
“Our whole blood program got canceled last quarter. The contract with the regional supplier. It was ending anyway, and somebody didn’t renew it.”
Elise went very still.
“Who canceled it?”
Every head in that room turned toward Commander Dane.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.