By Susie Branagan, BSN, RN
The storm had a name by Tuesday, which is how you know it will be a real one.
It was a fishing town before it was anything else, and it still is when the weather comes. The harbor is the reason the place exists, and the working boats are tied three deep along the wharves all winter, and the whole town can tell you the names of the ones that never came back. There is a granite monument down by the water with those names on it and it is a long monument. People who grew up there can point to the names they are related to.
By Wednesday afternoon the boats were doubled up on their lines and the trap stacks along the wharf were tarped and weighted, and the water was already coming over the causeway and freezing where it landed. Anybody who works out on that side watches that road all winter.
Our hospital sat on the far end of it. We were the small one, the satellite, the community building that keeps a town from having to drive forty minutes with chest pain, and everything we could not handle went across the water to the big house.
A hospital gets ready for a storm the way a boat does. We got the census down as far as we could, moved who could be moved and sent home who could go home. Cots went into the education room. Dietary put sandwiches out at four because nobody knew when the next delivery would make it across. The pharmacy tech who lives down by the fish pier brought her dog, and nobody said a word about it, and that dog spent the whole night under the desk being the most useful employee in the building.
The light went out of the sky at four thirty the way it does in February. Then the wind came up out of the northeast and the whole building started making the noises it only makes a few nights a year, and everything out the window went white and sideways.
The next few hours were almost pleasant, the way the beginning of a storm shift can be. Report went fine. Everybody had already done everything they could think of to do, so we passed meds and answered bells and stood at the windows between rooms watching it come in off the water. Somebody’s husband called to say the power was out at their house. Somebody else’s kid was sledding in the dark. The unit felt full in a good way, all of us in there together with nowhere to be.
We lost power at seven fifty.
There is a half second before the emergency lighting catches. The whole floor goes black and your eyes have nothing, and then the fixtures come up in that thin brown-yellow and give you a building you have never seen before. Shadows in hallways that do not have shadows. The corner of every room, gone. A hundred feet of corridor lit like the inside of a jar.
Then the sound left.
A hospital hums. It is air moving and pumps running and something behind every wall doing its job, and you stop hearing it your first week and you never hear it again until it stops. It stopped. What came up underneath was the wind on the glass; it had been there all along and none of us could stop hearing for the rest of the night.
The monitors came off wall power and started chirping, all of them, out of step with each other. Nine call bells inside two minutes.
Danny was in the third room down.
He was twenty-two. He had come in for a burst appendix two days earlier, which is the most ordinary reason a young man ends up on a medical floor. He was also three years out of the Marine Corps with a PTSD diagnosis that was in his chart if you went looking for it and was not flagged anywhere anybody would see it in a hurry.
He had been fine. That is the thing about it. He had been polite and funny and a little bored, and he had a girlfriend who brought him a hoodie because the room was cold, and I had spent maybe ninety seconds a shift thinking about him because he was considered an easy patient.
I got to his doorway and stopped, because he was not in bed.
He was on the floor on the far side of it, down between the bed and the window, with his back against the wall and his knees up. He was breathing like somebody who had just run, and he had the blanket bunched against the side of his head over his ear.
He was not asleep. His eyes were open and moving and they were tracking things across that room, from the door to the window and back. Terror in his eyes.
“Danny,” I said, careful not to scare him. “I am your nurse, the lights went out because of the storm, we are on the 3rd floor, and you are safe.”
He came up off that floor and got a fistful of my scrub top and pulled, and I went down hard onto one knee with my shoulder into the door frame, and his forearm came across my back and pushed me lower.
“Get down. Get down, get down, stay down.”
He was not attacking me. He had a hand on my back holding me under whatever was coming through that window, and he was trying to save my life. He was pushing my head down and telling me to stay quiet, and there was a boy in the room who had done that before, and this time it was me under his arm.
I pressed the button on my badge with my chin against the floor tile and his hand on my spine.
I have pressed that button on ordinary nights and heard the desk come alive behind me before I got my arm back down.
That night there was nothing. I pressed it again. Nothing. No tone. Nothing at the desk. Only the wind, and the chirping, and a twenty-two-year-old thinking he was protecting his best friend in battle.
So, I did what nurses did before there were buttons, which is that I stayed on that floor and used my voice.
I did not tell him he was safe again. He would not have believed me, and I would have lost him. I told him the things that were true and small. That it was February. That it was snowing outside. That the noise was the wind on the window and the beeping was the monitors switching to battery. I asked him what his mother’s name was. I asked him what his girlfriend’s name was, and that one got through, and he said it, and then he said it again like he was checking it repeatedly.
His hand came off my back somewhere in there. I got up onto both knees and we stayed like that, the two of us on the floor of a dark room, until his breathing came down.
An aide came by with a flashlight. Nobody sent her. She was walking the hall answering call bells like everybody else, and she saw the two of us down on that floor and stopped, and between us we got him back up onto the bed.
The lights came back at two in the morning. All at once, the way they do. Fluorescents, monitors resetting, doors sighing, the air handlers starting up like none of it had happened, and the building started humming again as though it had never stopped.
That duress system had worked. It worked the day before the storm, and it worked the day after. It worked every time anybody pressed it for as long as anybody could remember, and it was tested, on schedule, with a signature on the form.
The receivers that carried the alerts lived in a closet on normal building power, with a battery unit underneath them meant to hold everything up until the generator took over. The annual test was done by dropping to a generator and confirming the alerts still went through. They always did. That test passed every year it was ever run.
Nobody had ever unplugged the closet.
The batteries in that unit were somewhere north of eight years old with a life expectancy of three to five, and they had been sitting there quietly holding a charge they could not deliver. When the power actually dropped, the generator came up for the operating rooms and the emergency department and the elevators the way it was designed to, and it did not reach that closet, and those batteries carried the receivers for something under a minute.
So, the thing worked in every condition except the one it was there for.
Nobody was lazy about it. There was a form and there was a schedule and there was a guy who did the job the way somebody told him to do it years ago. He was not testing the wrong thing on purpose. He was testing the thing on the sheet.
What I could not shake afterward was how sure I had been. I had worn that badge for years and I had told new nurses to keep theirs on straight, and every night I ever pressed anything the lights had been on. My whole confidence in that system came from nights when nothing was wrong with the building.
A system worth having watches itself. Every device on it checks in, and when one stops checking in somebody’s screen lights up that hour, and it tells you a battery is going before the battery goes. It runs on its own power, not the building’s, and it knows how much of that power is left and says so. You should never have to find out that the device on your chest is dead while you are on the floor of a dark room with somebody’s arm across your back.
The storm is not what I hold against anybody. Storms do that. What I hold against us is that for years we tested that system with the lights on and wrote down that it passed.
I saw Danny in the morning, in the daylight, sitting up in his girlfriend’s hoodie with a tray in front of him.
He told me Reyes had been in the room with us.
He said it the way you would tell somebody that your brother stopped by. He said, “Reyes was on the far side of the bed the whole time and had the window covered, so that I was able to get down! He always pulls through!”
I did not ask who Reyes was. I did not have to. There is a particular way a twenty-two-year-old says a last name and no first name.
There is a version of nursing where you correct that, and I have never once watched it help anybody. Some of these men do not come all the way back. They keep talking to people who are not standing there, and they will keep talking to them for the rest of their lives, and me telling him that his friend was not on the far side of that bed does exactly nothing except teach him not to tell me things.
So, I said it sounded like Reyes had his back. He said yeah. He said it twice and looked out the window for a while.
I asked whether that happened often. He said sometimes. I asked whether he had anybody he talked to about it and he said not really, and there it was, the only useful thing I got out of that entire night.
That is the whole of what I could do for him. He left still believing that a dead man kept a window covered for him in a dark room on an island in February, and I am not the person who was going to take that away.