T/W: Minor character death, graphic depictions of resuscitation (To avoid, skip the part between the asterisks.)

It was a nice, chilled Tuesday afternoon, from the outside the hospital looked relatively calm. The only noticeable thing that was different was that the visitor’s car park was a little busier than usual. The smoking area outside the ER was a bit busier too, a whole hoard of adults dressed in slings, bandages, crutches and wearing hospital issue gowns puffing away in the breeze. However, on the inside of the department, it was utter ing chaos.

Baekhyun and Jongdae hadn’t had a break all day, and a queue had formed in front of their desk for the first time in a long while. They were both taking in new patients, the phone was left to ring on its own. Jongdae watched as the patient counter increased and the wait time skyrocketed.

Between patients, he heard Baekhyun mumble. “Did everyone really decide to either get deathly ill or wounded on the same ing day?”

Jongdae shot him a worried look. “The wait counter is up at four hours, and that’s the minimum.”

“ing, . Next!” He called over.

“Hi, what’s the reason for your visit today?” He asked, giving a half-assed smile, before taking in everything they said, for the millionth time that day.

Literally everywhere was busy. They’d had a three-car RTC come in and the control centre hadn’t asked them if they were capable of taking all the patients, so they were at maximum capacity with countless others in the waiting room. It was horrid. Kyungsoo had been running from majors to minors, from critically ill patients to doing stitches and casting compound fractures. Junmyeon had got it the worst, two of the patients in the first car were young children, one with query rib fractures and the other was currently in surgery, having plates put into their arm.

Sehun was looking after four different patients pretty much solo, a woman who’d had a suspected , a motorbike crash patient, a neutropenic cancer patient and a teenager suspected to have overdosed. It was probably the most stressful day of his life, no number of placement hours could ever prepare him for a day like this. Literally, everyone was up to their ing eyeballs in stuff to do, in his head, he tried his best to prioritise the tasks at hand.

Both his patient and bike crash patient needed to go to CT, so he put through a call. The porters would come and take them when they were ready. His neutropenic patient really needed to be in a room of his own, simply being in a room like this would overwhelm his immune system, so the next port of call was to try to find him a bed in a cancer ward where they’d have single bedrooms. He dialled the extension, reaching the receptionist. “Hi, this is Doctor Oh from majors, I have a neutropenic chemotherapy patient here and I’m trying to find them a single room, is there any possibility that he can be moved up to your department?”

The woman on the other end of the phone sounded stressed herself, humming as she checked the bed rota. “I can have them brought up in a couple of hours, we’re just waiting for patient transport to come and pick someone up who has been discharged.”

“Perfect, I’ll give you my pager number, please message when the bed becomes available and I’ll have them brought up.” Sehun scribbled the ward number on the patients' notes, before hearing his name being called.

Chanyeol was waving to him from the minors corridor, he definitely didn’t look as happy as he normally did. “I need a hand doing a reduction, no one else is free.”

He could practically hear himself screaming internally. “No problem.”

It was just too much, there just wasn’t enough staff to safely take care of all the patients being admitted. Soojung was doing observations for every patient being admitted, and Sehun felt a pang of guilt that she’d been left alone. As he entered the bay, he saw a teenage boy on entonox, waiting as a nurse prepped the plaster cast strips. His mother scolded him, but by the sounds of it the boy didn’t care, he was off his head on ketamine, gas and air.

Chanyeol was lining himself up alongside the broken leg, testing the waters by touching the boy’s foot. “Can you feel this?”

He didn’t even respond, his eyes had slipped shut, entonox piece falling out of his grasp. Sehun turned to wash his hands and glove up whilst Chanyeol tried it once more, pinching the boy’s skin harder this time, getting no reaction at all. “I think he’s good to go.”

Sehun joined him, standing on the opposite side. “Right, I need you to grab his foot and pull, hard. He won’t feel a thing, trust me.”

Positioning himself at the end of the bed, feet spread he lifted the boy’s leg, seeing the rather visible and cringe worthy break below the knee. Quite an unusual place for a break, especially when the bone in that area was denser. “Is he going for surgery?”

Chanyeol was standing opposite Sehun, grip around the knee joint area. “Oh, absolutely. He’s for sure going to need pins.”

“Shouldn’t he go in ASAP?”

Chanyeol tutted. “Yeah, he should, but there are so many patients needing pins and plates that there’s an actual waiting list. This is the best we can do for him until he can get into theatre. Trust me, I’m not too happy about it either.”

Humming in acknowledgement, he looked up and waited for Chanyeol’s signal. “As you’re pulling I’m going to push slightly to the left, which should line up the bones again. We’ll have an X-Ray done to double check then he’ll have a cast put on. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Go on three,” Chanyeol braced himself, checking that nothing was behind him. “One, two, three.”

Pulling on his leg, Sehun heard the boy stir, he let out a moan, but honestly, Sehun would have expected him to scream. He really needed to have some of what he had.

“Keep pulling keep pulling keep pulling!” Chanyeol pushed hard, and it looked horrible. Bones were probably the one and only thing which made him cringe, especially visible fractures. “Okay stop, that’s the best we’re going to get.”

He let go, looked up at the boy and saw he was completely out cold. Good. “Let me know if you need me to come back, I have to go back to majors.” Chanyeol just gave him a nod as he paged for X-Ray to come back down.

Going back into the blindingly bright light Sehun heard his voice being called yet again. Now he really did want to scream. His throat was so dry, he was desperate for a drink of water, and he’d felt the urge to piss for the last hour, but there was no way he could take a break with the department in this state. He turned around, trying his best to smile, seeing Kyungsoo, apron and all, beckoning him to come back to minors.

“I have three people waiting for stitches, can you give me a hand?”

Sehun kind of grimaced, gearing up to say he was busy, but Kyungsoo read the expression and waved him off, going back behind the curtains. Sehun let out a little sigh of relief, before booking it back to majors. His drink and bathroom break would have to wait, he had way too much to do.

--

Stocking up normally took a short amount of time, but Tao felt like they’d been at the base for hours. After visiting a palliative care patient, and after using some of the urgent response equipment, Tao and Amber had returned to base to pick up some basic supplies. They’d got pretty much everything, but they could not for the life of them find the 10mL syringes. Tao had started packing up and cleaning the back of the bus up whilst Amber went on a more thorough search in the stock cupboards.

Bags zipped up, bins emptied and equipment decontaminated, Tao took a seat at the back, feeling his phone buzz a few times in his pocket. After a cheeky glance for any of the higher-ups which might have been wandering around, Tao deemed the coast clear and decided a little look wouldn’t hurt.

Oh, maybe it would.

Kris ♡

> Are you still mad at me?

> Please stop avoiding me, I just want to talk to you

> I miss you

Clearing the screen as aggressively as he could, he huffed, moving from the back of the bus to the coffee station. That guy really ed with his blood pressure.

Just as he’d filled up a cup of green tea he saw Amber walking around the corner with a huge smile on her face. She held up the paper packages for Tao to see, earning a solid thumbs up from him. “Someone put them in the 5mL section, that’s why we couldn’t find them.”

*** She walked straight past and headed to the back, stuffing them into the pockets of the urgent care bag before zipping it up and packing it away in the right place. Heading to the cab he heard a beeping coming from the monitor. Amber took the driver’s seat this time as Tao quickly set their status to green. Immediately after a job came through, one which had them both feeling nervous.

Tao read the monitor as Amber set the lights going, setting off as fast as she could. “Cardiac arrest, CPR in progress.”

“No other information?”

“Not yet, that’s all it says.”

“. Okay.”

From the looks of the navigation system, they were only five minutes away, but the only problem was that it was entering rush hour. The target time to reach a category A call, such as a cardiac arrest, was eight minutes, if they could reach them within that time the chance of the patient's survival increased. Tao radioed in to control while Amber aggressively honked the horn at people who weren’t moving their cars fast enough.

“6362 to control, we’re currently en-route to a cardiac arrest call, which crew is going to be first on scene?”

“ing move, you ! Do the lights and sirens mean nothing to you?” Amber shouted, beeping once again.

“Control to 6362, currently the other crew will be first on scene, you will arrive after. Advanced paramedics are currently unavailable at this moment.”

Tao sighed. “That’s all received, thank you.”

“No AP?” Amber asked, looking a bit confused.

“No AP,” Tao shook his head, processing and formulating a plan in his mind.

After hitting a free stretch of road, they were making good progress towards the address. They both went through what bags each of them would carry, Tao making sure Amber was okay with taking most of the stuff, as Tao was the Paramedic and Amber was the technician, unfortunately, she’d be doing most of the grunt work.

They pulled up at the address, a rather large and lavish house just on the outskirts of the city. The other crew had parked closer to the drive, so they parked behind. A young woman was waiting at the door for them, looking anything but okay. Grabbing all the bags they rushed to the door. “Which room?” Tao asked.

She covered , choking back tears. “Upstairs, room on the left.”

As they walked up the stairs, Tao could already hear the noises of the AED’s preprogrammed phrases. When they entered the room on the left, they were both greeted by the chaotic scene of CPR in progress, a paramedic they both knew called Hongbin, and Kris doing chest compressions.

It honestly couldn’t get any worse.

The patient was a man, a middle-aged one. He looked like he’d been dressed in his pyjamas, but they’d been haphazardly cut away from his chest, exposing the skin. Two white pads had been placed on him, and a thick tube was sticking out of his mouth. CPR truly was brutal.

Under his breath, Kris counted to thirty, stopping compressions. “Pulse check.”

Hongbin felt for a pulse, failing to find one. “No output.”

Hongbin continued, as Tao and amber gloved up. “Fifty-eight-year-old male, he was found unconscious and not breathing by his wife. He was supposed to wake for his night shift but never came down.”

Stepping over to Kris to get ready to take over, Amber dumped the bags she was carrying. Tao kneeled across from Hongbin, waiting for the machine to feedback to them. Tao daren’t look around the room, he didn’t want to see anything which would make him break his composure. “Analysing… Please wait… No cardiac output, shock advised.”

Hongbin leaned back. “Everyone clear, please.” Tao watched as they all raised white, gloved hands into the air.

The patient jerked, an unnatural movement which used to make Tao jump himself. It hadn’t done for a while now, after the first few cardiac arrests you got attuned to the raw, unfiltered harshness of it.

“Shock delivered. Analysing…”

The seconds seemed to stretch on for minutes, he could hear Kris catching his breath as he let Amber take over his position. Tao reached for the advanced life support bag, digging to find the adrenaline in anticipation of…

“Continue chest compressions.”