Relief (nurse)

Tammy took a few deep breaths before she entered room 403.

“Good evening, Mr. Cartwright,” she said business-like, as polite as she could manage given the inevitable response.

“Go fuck yourself, you fat cow. I’m in pain, give me morphine.”

She was sure he wasn’t in as much pain as he should have been. According to his chart, he was probably faking. She hoped he wasn’t. If everything he said was wrong with him was correct, he had but days to live.

“Let’s see what we can do,” she said, and took the man’s arm. He tried to pull away, but she grabbed onto his wrist and held it in place. The man was weak from all this time in bed.

Taking his blood pressure and pulse, she counted the seconds on her watch, ignoring his expletives.

“Whore! Slut! Jezebel!”

She told him to hold still. Some of his IVs were coming loose, and she didn’t want to go through the fuss of sticking him again.

He swung his free arm across the bed and with his exoskeleton hand latched onto her breast. Tammy took a step back. He’d pulled out his tubes. She’d have to fix that before she left.

Taking a pair of tourniquets, she grabbed the man by the wrists and told him in no uncertain terms that he would hold still. She tied his arms to the railing, and he soon stopped resisting. He became quiet. As Tammy squirted some saline out of a needle, she did her best to ignore the man’s arousal, an incidental medical condition. She scowled.

He would get his morphine. She stabbed him in the vein, pretending she could hurt him. He would be so easy to kill.

“Goodbye, Mr. Cartwright,” she said, pretending.