Pascal's Wager by Nancy Rue Page A

me from doing anything except stare at the ceiling. As far as I could tell, I had a lump on the side of my head and a gash on my right forearm. Why this necessitated traction was beyond me.
    â€œDo you think my mother is in shock?” I said.
    â€œHard to tell.”
    â€œHard to tell? Three paramedics and several thousand dollars’ worth of medical equipment and you can’t detect a simple thing like shock? Was her breathing shallow, pupils dilated? Isn’t that basic First Aid?”
    â€œWhoa, girl,” the paramedic said. “Look at your blood pressure go up. She’s getting good care. They’ll fill you in at the hospital.”
    I gave the ceiling my blackest look. “No wonder you put people in these straitjackets—it’s to keep us from smacking you when you make idiotic statements like that. My mother should have been telling
you
characters what her injuries were. Now, do you think she’s in shock or has there been brain damage?”
    â€œBrain damage? Now that’s hard to say.”
    â€œForget it,” I said. “Just forget it.”
    â€œYou need to try to stay calm. You’ve just been involved in a serious accident—”
    â€œYa think? What was your first clue?”
    â€œShe’s a little cranky” he said to his partner as they were unloading me in front of the emergency room.
    I wasn’t any more cheerful in the ER when no less than sixteen people surrounded my gurney in the trauma room. I told them all in no uncertain terms that I had never lost consciousness and that I could have
walked
to the hospital if they hadn’t strapped me to the stretcher like a mental patient.
    â€œAll I want to do is see my mother and have somebody tell me what injuries she sustained. I don’t want stitches—I don’t want a CAT scan—I don’t want an MRI, for Pete’s sake. I just want to know about my mother!”
    I didn’t calm down, despite the eye-rolling that was going on above me, until Ted Lyons came in. By then they’d determined that I had one subdural hematoma on my head—in other words, a bruise—and one laceration on my forearm that would require a few stitches.
    â€œWe’ll get somebody in here to suture that up,” a nurse said to Ted—not to me.
    â€œI don’t want sutures,” I said through clenched teeth. “I want to see my mother, and if I don’t, somebody’s head is going to roll.”
    â€œShe’s already on her way to surgery,” Ted said. He put a freckled hand on my shoulder and guided me firmly back onto the gurney.
    There wasn’t an inch on Ted Lyons that hadn’t been liberally sprinkled with freckles. You could even see them up into the scalp of his thinning red hair. Though balding, he still had a boyish face that grinned down at me.
    â€œYou McGavock women are mean as snakes,” he said. “Stay put and I’ll tell you what’s going on with your mom.”
    â€œAnd could you please take this thing off my neck before I go into some kind of meltdown?”
    â€œNo. I’m liable to get slugged by a nurse. They’ll take it off. Just relax.” Then Ted perched himself on a stainless steel stool beside my gurney. “Your mother has an open fracture of the femoral diaphysis—the large bone in the thigh—and the protective musculature is also displaced, which all means there’s been significant bleeding and the potential for infection. Typically, patients with that type of injury heal well. These days they get them right up on their feet so they don’t risk the complications associated with prolonged bed rest.”
    â€œSo they’re doing surgery just to set the bone?” I didn’t even attempt to compete with the jargon he was throwing at me.
    He nodded. “They’re doing some intramedullary nailing—putting in pins.”
    â€œOuch.”
    â€œShe’ll get