Today’s Grimm Tale

by Diana L. Gustafson

If it hadn’t been for the black bear, I’d have arrived on time for my evening shift in the Emergency Department at the Royal Jubilee Hospital. My nursing supervisor has grown tired of my thin excuses for tardiness and missing shifts. Behind her back, we call her “The Dame,” because she reminds us of the old woman who locked Rapunzel in the tower. She is both wicked witch and fierce protector of “her girls,” who face off against the myriad evils that cause injury and death to the hundreds of unfortunates who crowd her hectic ED.

I promised The Dame I’d do better about the late thing. I can’t afford to lose my job. Yet, here I am, late but not late. My barely breathing body is on an ambulance gurney being maneuvered by two burley paramedics through the automatic sliding doors, along the hall reverberating with screams, coughs, and groans, and into a resuscitation bay where The Dame and three colleagues wait.

“What have we got?” I recognize Mary’s voice. Calm and commanding. She’s the new ED doc hired earlier this year. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t recognize me. I wouldn’t recognize me either. My lips feel like two hunks of raw liver. Clumps of blood-clotted hair dangling from a flap of scalp are plastered to my cheek. Rapunzel, Rapunzel. Let down your long hair.

The paramedic with the ginger beard drones like he’s reading a grocery list. “White female. Mid-thirties. No ID. Attacked while hiking the Galloping Goose Trail. Airway deviated to the right with a sucking chest wound sealed for transport. Tachy at 145. BP 50 palp. Multiple wounds to head, chest, and back. Significant blood loss at the scene.”

Calm voices float over the orderly chaos. Three bodies move in practiced choreography; their powerful muscles shift my shivering body from the gurney to the emergency room stretcher. Heart monitor electrodes click onto the sticky pads on my chest.

Rose, my towering friend with a shock of pink hair, tapes damp pads over my eyeballs that bulge lazily on my fractured cheeks. I feel safe as her gloved hands roam my cooling body in search of open wounds.

As Fern snaps a pulse oximeter on my left index finger, she fingers my wedding ring. “Oh, my God. This is Nadia. I’d recognize this rock anywhere.” She clasps my hand. “I knew it was only a matter of time.” Her voice is a mix of surprise and sadness, quickly followed by a growling anger.

I want to say, “It’s okay, Fern. It’s just me, your favourite accident-prone pal.” But I can’t speak. Dirt and blood drip down the back of my throat.

Mary’s words slash through the shock that balloons in the resuscitation bay. “Nadia, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” My brain fights to send a message to my fingers. Nothing moves. I think my arm is broken. Or maybe it’s my collarbone. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put me back together again.

“Okay, Nadia. You know the drill.” Mary’s hand rests on my forearm. “First, we’ll put a tube down your throat to help you breathe. Then, we’ll insert a chest tube. We’ll give you some light sedation so you won’t feel anything.” She’s talking to me like a patient and not like one of her colleagues. Hansel, I will not abandon you. The illuminated flints will guide you home. Her garbled words translate into whispered snippets of fairy tales.

“Okay, everyone. Let’s keep it together and get this woman stabilized for surgery. I suspect we’re looking at a lacerated liver. Rose, call for a portable neck and chest x-ray. Type and cross for six units of blood. Fern, hand me a 6.5 ET tube.”

Not too big. Not too small. Fern picks the ETT that is just right for Goldilocks. The laryngoscope snaps open. Fern swings a brilliant white light above me. The better to see you with. No. Different fairy tale. A cool rush of drugs races up my arm toward my brain. Nothing is making sense.

The light goes out. I rapidly descend into the ever-after. The Goose Girl falls into the bottomless wishing well. Falling deeper and deeper into peaceful nothingness.

The sinking jerks to a stop and a loud voice shatters the silence. “All clear.” Electricity scorches every nerve in my body. “Again.” A symphony of alarms rattles my ears. Pain pierces my chest as I inhale. Air and blood gush like a turbulent river through the chest tube that punctures the space between my ribs.

I hear the voice of my saviour. No, not that one; this is a Grimm tale. That one was nowhere to be found as flesh was ripped from my bones. Nowhere to be found any of the other times I feared for my life.

It’s the voice of the ginger-bearded woodsman who found me on the trail gasping and grasping for life. “I heard your call for help.” He’d aimed his rifle. The gunshots had echoed along the forested trail as the bear escaped to the underbrush.

Wait. That’s not how the story goes. The woodsman carried an axe, not a gun. He saved the girl, but not from a bear; he cut Little Red Riding Hood unharmed from the belly of the Big Bad Wolf.

As I hover near the ceiling, three good fairies jostle for position around the stretcher. I think Cinderella is dying. Merryweather, never willing to give up, brings the surgeon up to speed. Flora, with her pink hair, hangs a unit of blood, and Fauna prepares to push the stretcher.

Then I feel it; a needle pricks my skin and my brain spins another tale. The rapid rhythm of my heartbeat counts off a hundred days, or maybe it’s a hundred years. Sleeping Beauty slips into a blissful slumber.

One cardiac arrest, two surgeries, three units of blood, four fractured ribs, and a partridge in a pear tree.

It’s days later and I’m ready for visitors when The Dame stops by my hospital room. My supervisor wastes no time getting to the point. “You’ve suffered a major trauma. I insist you see a counsellor as a condition of your return to work.”

This is not what I want. I want to go back to work. I need to go back to work. To forget all this ever happened. “Anyone would be a bit traumatized after an experience like mine.” I wrestle myself to a sitting position, trying not to wince, and inch my legs over the edge of the hospital bed. The effort makes me cough. I brace the wound stitched across my abdomen.

“Look at me.” I want to sound strong and confident, but my voice quivers, and I feel woozy. My hands smooth over the wispy remains of blonde hair covering my tender scalp. “This isn’t the look I was going for.” Shaving my long golden locks was the unavoidable cost of surgery to repair the scalp avulsion that had exposed my brain. “Hair loss is hardly a reason to see a therapist.” I laugh in a weak attempt to ease the mounting tension.

The Dame widens her stance. She controls my attention like a hemostatic clamp on a ragged artery. “You know it’s more than that, Nadia. You think we haven’t seen the breadcrumbs?”

I stare at her defiantly and interlace my fingers in a tight grip. The summer sun glints off the huge diamond in my wedding ring and splashes a prism across my thin blue hospital gown. An uninvited thought erupts. Once upon a time, a young girl met a handsome prince who asked her to marry him. She said yes, and he promised they’d live happily ever after.

The Dame won’t stop talking. “You were found by a jogger on the Galloping Goose Trail.” Her words, like the North Wind, make the bed tremble, and the walls whisper. “There was no hunter, Nadia. No bear. No bear attack. Just a tragic story you needed to tell yourself in those early moments.” She reaches for my shoulder, but I shrug away her compassion. “Your secret wasn’t a secret to anyone at work. Anyone who cared about you.”

I feel naked. The Emperor has no clothes. The Dame pulls her cellphone from her pocket and holds the screen toward me. My truth is exposed. It’s all over the Internet: Man charged with attempted murder of his wife on the Galloping Goose Trail.

Another Grimm tale. Perhaps I need to live alone, far from the handsome prince. In a tower, in the middle of the woods. Where I can grow my hair long again. Where The Dame and the girls can visit, and we can upload stories to social media about ways to feel safer among the bears.