Happy Operating Room Nurse Day!
Jonny M. didn’t so much arrive at the Van Nuys Hospital emergency room as collapse into it, slumped on a gurney with a head injury that looked like it had been delivered by a choir of sledgehammers. The docs on duty froze like amateurs at a nightclub raid. Only one creature in the Valley had the paws steady enough, the heart cold enough, and the brilliance fierce enough to crack open a skull and make sense of what was inside: Boris the pug, Jonny’s trusted partner in crime-solving and, on nights like this, the only neurosurgeon worth his weight in dog biscuits. With a grim nod and a surgeon’s cap perched between his ears, Boris barked his orders and assembled a surgical team worthy of a miracle.
Boris chose each member of that team with the care of a jewel thief picking which diamonds to pocket. But the operating-room nurse? That poor sucker had to be whichever body was on shift. Tonight it was Jennifer Brooks — the blonde knockout in a white mini-skirt nurse’s uniform who had walked out of her dime-a-dance past and into a profession that still didn’t trust her. The staff whispered about her behind clipboards and coffee cups, but fate didn’t give a hoot about reputations. It had tossed her into the eye of a storm, and Boris needed hands, skilled or not. With no better option, he thrust her into the center of the action.
For the first hour, the surgery glided along like a well-rehearsed ballet, if ballets came with more scalpels and less grace. Boris worked with uncanny precision, his tiny paws moving like lightning. But Van Nuys Hospital had its quirks, and one of them slithered straight out of a wall crevice — a desert rattler, coiled anger and venom. Before anyone could shout, it struck at the nearest warm target under the drape, sinking its fangs into Jonny’s exposed and defenseless grotesquely misshapen wang. The room froze. Even the heart monitor seemed to hold its breath. In this hospital, such incidents were bizarrely routine, but this time the dose of venom was catastrophic.
The team stared at each other, pale and panicked, until the truth dropped like a brick through a skylight. Only one person present had the right training — the real-world, desperate, back-alley experience to drain a tainted taint the old-fashioned, messy way. Jennifer Brooks. She had done things in her former life to survive the nights, things the hospital board would never put in a handbook, but those same nights had taught her how to save a man on the brink. Her eyes narrowed, her jaw set, and in that moment she wasn’t a dismissed dancer or a forgotten blonde — she was the last line between Jonny M. and the long, dark ride home. And she wasn’t about to let him take it.