Dennis

As a young man I shouldered a weapon, went in harms way and took lives. As an old man I work in trauma surgery and save lives. In between I've been a few place and I've done some things................................................If that seems some what boring read on:……………….. We all have bad days at work, but for a real bummer, you ought to have a nine year old girl who’s been ran over by a city bus die on the operating room table on you. {And no matter how good your imagination is you CAN NOT picture how bad that child is torn up.} After an hour and a half of CPR, where the trauma team has gone WAY PAST what is commonly called HEROIC MEASURES, the Anesthesiologist looks at his watch and says. "I say we call it at 0901……………………….Are we in agreement?” ………………………………..The surgeon, Helen, a late 40s black woman and our top thoracic trauma babe, who ALWAYS has a steady hand on the wheel, is still working like a madwoman says, in calm, professional voice despite the fact she crying, “If we can fill up the heart, we can pull out of this nose dive…………………….The Anesthesiologist shakes his head, “The patient is cold to the touch. There hasn’t been a CO2 exchange for a half an hour. The heart is in V-fib. There is no pulse. There are no signs consistent or compatible with life, doctor………………..The surgeon, now crying so hard her scrub nurse is wiping her tears out of her eyes, keeps cutting and clamping at warp speed……………………….The Anesthesiologist, a senior professor by the way, clears his throat and says, “On my authority, I'm calling this code off at 0904 hours……………………The surgeon looks at me. (I’m the person chest compressions at the moment.) I shrug and murmur, “Anticoagulant downward spiral, Helen.”……………………She keeps ..ting and clamping even as I step away from the little girl…………………………..The old man was right, Helen was wrong and everybody in the room knew it. That didn’t stop some of us from weeping………………..Nonetheless the job can be a blast. Love that job. I’d do it for free………………………….Trauma surgery folks are the gunslingers of hospital business. We are the swaggering badasses who see death as temporary set back that we will tidy up shortly. And if we can’t save them nobody can……………………………That is the truth. We’re that good at Harborview. It’s the seventh or eighth best hospital in the nation with four noble prizewinners in medicine. (We are the only level one trauma center of one quarter of the United States. Really.)…………………………………And when the ER people hook up with the OR crew at the red line, you’re looking at about four hundred collative year of higher education with maybe one or two of the people who wrote THE BOOK on their end of trauma surgery and perhaps five or six hundred collative years of experience surrounding the patient like the Pectoral Guard drawing their razor sharp swords to protect a decadent Roman emperor from the barbarian of the east but…we are going toe to toe with death itself…. and we usually win………………………………………………… ………………………You would not believe what a rush it is to have the ER people crash a head-on-MVC down and have it code in the elevator………………………………………..We’ ll be waiting at the red line to take report and take over from the ER folks and when they come blasting out of the elevator we see 98 pound Little Kim (small, strong, black, ER hottie) riding on the gurney giving chest compressions that would do a NFL linebacker proud………………………………………………T hey have two powerful Level One blood pressurizers hooked to the patient pumping four units of blood in simultaneously and an ER nurse with her arm up to her elbow shoving lap packs in the abdomen to stop the bleeding. Every time Little Kim thrust down blood sprays out and there is a trail of blood from ER Bay Two to OR Seven ON THE CEILING. (The RN shoving in the lap packs is so soaked with blood she’ll have to throw her underwear away. AID’S? Hep C? Flesh eating bacteria? Screw that. We WILL save this boy’s life.)………………………….The ER crew doesn’t even slow down at the red line and taking report and switching lines, we all sprint into OR 7 the crash room. Thirty hard chargers scrambling to bring this boy back from an early grave………………………………………………. .Oh yeah baby, it’s rock and roll time and when the music stops…we’re going have the boy’s heart beating again………………………………………………. All that was true and now you know I can write. I’ll be looking for an agent when I finish the vampire script (Lost Boys meet Lost Girls in a more adult setting) If you have any tips please email me at. [email protected] (I have a good range of finished scripts and if you can get a script to Katee Sackhoff, and it or any script I have works out this her, I’ll give you 10%)………………Keep’em alive until seven O five, Dennis………………………………………..PS I’ve had neurosurgeons and thoracic trauma surgeons coughing up hairballs at me like; “Fix it now, Dennis! The patient’s dying! SHIT! “. This is a particular joy when the anesthesiologist and surgeon are both yelling at me at the same time and they’re talking about two different things ("The suction’s down. I’m blind!" "She’s going V-fib! Lidocaine! NOW!"). Then I’m in a race with death and death has a head start. So far I’ve always made the right call. Honestly, I’d love to get out of this business before a baby dies because I zigged when I should have zagged. I really hope this newest script makes someone think I merit a shot at screenwriting.