Category: Doctors and Nurses

The 37% Solution

The door to 221B Baker Street didn’t answer Jonny’s knock, so he answered it himself with a hairpin and a bad feeling crawling up his spine. The stairs groaned like an old stool pigeon as he climbed, Nurse Alex Price right behind him, her heels quiet, her eyes sharp, her London calm about to be shattered. He’d ditched Boris earlier, left his precious pug in the care of England’s most celebrated brainbox so he and Alex could tangle sheets and forget the world for a few blessed hours. What waited for them upstairs was a crime scene without the courtesy of a corpse. Holmes and Boris lay sprawled like fallen idols, arms riddled with track marks, mouths slack, eyes rolled back to places no mind should visit without a passport. A bottle sat on the table, nearly empty, its white promise betrayed. Alex didn’t need to touch them. One look told her the truth. They were flying. High as church bells on Sunday. Jonny’s heart cracked like cheap glass. “I knew it,” he howled. “I knew leaving my pug with that pipe-smoking maniac was begging for heartbreak.”

“Your deduction is unsound,” came a voice from the gloom, clipped and wounded with disappointment. Watson stepped forward, mustache stiff, eyes colder than a London fog. “This isn’t your common Soho snow. Look at the label. Seven percent is the ceiling in this city, and that concoction is strong enough to wake the dead or put legends to sleep.” Jonny’s jaw tightened as the pieces clicked together, ugly and perfect. “Van Nuys,” he said, the word tasting like rust and regret. Watson nodded. The room seemed to sag under the weight of it. Boris, sweet, stupid, brilliant Boris, had gone home for his poison and dragged Holmes along for the ride. The two greatest minds in the room were unconscious, and the dumbest truth lay naked on the table. Jonny stared at his fallen partner, praying the line between genius and grave hadn’t already been crossed.

Operating Room Nurse

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.