Worth It

      “She needs a liver transplant if she’s going to survive,” Dr. March said, clutching her clipboard to her chest. She wore a worried expression as she delivered the post-op report in the small hospital room. “Mr. and Mrs. Summers, it is extremely unlikely that your daughter will find a donor in time, given the extensive blunt trauma to her liver.”

           Kayla Summers heard all this from where she sat at the foot of her sister’s hospital bed. She watched her parents who stood at Madison’s bedside, her mother holding back sobs as she clutched Madison’s limp hand. She was unconscious and still recovering from the emergency surgery she had been rushed to almost immediately after the EMT’s brought them to the hospital.

           Kayla’s eyes swelled with tears as she remembered the accident.

“KAYLA WATCH OUT!” Madison yelled, pointing to the road.

Kayla whipped her head and slammed on the brakes. The deer had come out of nowhere – and Kayla had been driving 70 mph.

It happened so fast Kayla didn’t think it was real.

One second they were driving, and the next they were swerving. The car lost traction and started to skid into the next lane. Kayla fought for the wheel but couldn’t regain control -the road was too slippery. Ice, she realized with dread. Of course there would be ice on the road in October. It was Minnesota.

Madison braced herself against the door as Kayla pumped the brakes, her knuckles in a

death grip on the steering wheel. The brakes stopped working and the car starting spinning.

Madison screamed suddenly, and Kayla whipped her head to the passenger window, eyes going wide as she took in the sight of a semi-truck barreling straight for them.

Then everything went black.

Kayla snapped back to the dark hospital room, the beeping of Madison’s heart monitor piercing the heavy silence. Kayla followed Dr. March’s gaze to the machines monitoring Madison’s vitals and watched as the doctor cast her head down. “We’ll be lucky if she makes it through the week,” Dr. March said, softly.

Kayla stood up from her seat, suddenly sick to her stomach, and strode out of the hospital room. Finding a bathroom and locking herself in, Kayla turned to the sink and proceeded to dry heave. Tremors racked her body and she tried to steady herself, her arms hugging the cool porcelain, panting as a cold sweat drenched her body.  

Dr. March had all but condemned Madison to her death bed, hanging all of their hopes on the futile chance of a liver donor. Within the next week.

The anger, grief, and guilt that tore through Kayla coalesced into a new wave of nausea, forcing her to look up at the mirror and face her reflection.

 Her blue eyes were dim and sullen. Her blonde hair was muted and tangled, even if the blood had already been washed out. Her fair skin was now marred with a small assortment of cuts and bruises, but no stitches or broken bones. Her eyes cut to her reflection’s abdomen. And no bleeding liver, she thought scornfully.

It was by some cruel twist of fate that the car accident had brought her sister to the brink of death while Kayla went nearly unscathed. Tears streaked down Kayla’s face as she let the guilt wash over her. What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?

Three days after the accident and there was still no donor.

“I’m fine, really,” Madison said, her face was pale and gaunt. Her curling brown hair sprawled around her pillow like a halo. Dark circles lined her green eyes that seemed to dim more with each passing day.

Kayla looked at her incredulously from where she sat at the side of her hospital bed. “Maddy, you are not fine. You look like a Tim Burton character,” she said.

Madison laughed hoarsely, jostling her IV tube. “Corpse Bride or Jack Skellington?”

Kayla leaned over and flicked her nose. “Both.” Madison grinned, her lips pale.

A stab of guilt hit Kayla. I did this, she thought.

Madison fiddled with her hospital bracelet. “The nurses say that I just need to make it to Thanksgiving. Lots of traffic and slippery roads,” she said, looking up at Kayla, grinning. “Easy pickings for us donor patients.” Kayla would have killed herself and given Madison her own liver if she could, but she wasn’t a match. She had checked.

“You know what? I take it back,” Kayla said, smiling through the guilt that was rising like bile in her throat. “Definitely Corpse Bride.”

Madison just laughed.

Kayla jabbed the button on the vending machine across the hall from the nurse’s station. A series of whirring machine noises followed and then a solid thump. Kayla reached down to pick up her Diet Coke, gripping it tightly as she made her way back to Madison’s room.

It hurt to breathe just looking at her sister, at what Kayla had caused. She had put Madison in this position, and now they were waiting for an organ that would never come.

Walking back, Kayla observed the nurses and doctors that scurried about in their blue and green scrubs. She was thinking about how they resembled ants when she spotted a man in a grey uniform seated in a chair against a wall, situated between two closed rooms. He had a gun holstered to his belt and wore a badge that Kayla read as she neared him. “Minnesota State Penitentiary” is said.

Kayla was wondering which room he was supposed to be guarding when she heard two nurses gossiping in a corner, stealing glances at the prison guard.

Kayla lingered at the water fountain nearby and strained to hear what they were saying.

“…guy in there killed over ten people,” the nurse in blue scrubs said in a hushed whisper.

The other nurse in green scrubs leaned forward and said even quieter, “I heard he’s on death row. He’ll be gone come Thanksgiving.”

The nurse in blue scrubs huffed a laugh. “Looks like somebody wanted to get to him before the syringe did. His chart here says that he got stabbed by a toothbrush,” she said.

A serial killer who was on death row? Kayla glanced down the hall toward the guard and wondered which room held the prisoner. Rushed to a hospital to be saved, only to return to a prison and die.

What a waste of organs.

Kayla paused. Unless…unless he died here. Then Madison could have his liver. Kayla shook her head. That would never happen. He probably wasn’t even a match. Kayla glanced at the nurses, and the charts they held in their hands. Madison’s sickly face flashed in her head and the guilt was like a punch to the gut.

“Well I’m off to lunch, wanna join?”, said the nurse in the blue scrubs, the one with the prisoner’s chart.

The nurse in green scrubs pushed off the wall. “You betcha.”

Kayla watched as they reached the end of the hallway and deposited their charts in a holder hanging off the wall. Kayla waited until they were out of sight, then strode to where the holder hung at the other end of the hallway.

She stood in front of the holder full of charts. Which one was it? Kayla glanced behind her at the door numbers the prison guard sat between. 153B and 154B. It had to be one of those two. She turned back to the charts and pulled out the one closest to her. She flipped up a page and looked for the room number. 153B. That must be his.

Using her finger, Kayla quickly scanned down the pages until she found his blood type. O-negative, she read. Kayla’s eyes widened and her head shot up to look across the hall. She looked at the door to 153B and imagined the criminal handcuffed to his bed. Imagined his working liver. Kayla’s hands shook as she put the charts back in the holder and walked away, her heart beating wildly inside her chest.

The serial killer was a universal donor.

Kayla walked back to Madison’s room, still reeling from her discovery. Kayla shook her head. It didn’t matter -it was a one in a hundred chance that the serial killer would just die in the hospital. Kayla stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets. Even if he wanted to die, he couldn’t do anything handcuffed to a bed.

Kayla stopped in her tracks as she felt her hand close around the cylindrical container in her jacket pocket. She slowly pulled it out and looked down at the bottle of pills in her hand. This was her dad’s jacket. He kept his pain meds on hand in case his knee was acting up. Kayla remembered him warning her not to take them by mistake. Too many and you could overdose.

Kayla looked back in the direction of where she had come from, and looked down at the pills again, a plan already formed in her head before she could debate it. He’s a serial killer, a voice whispered in her ear. He’s going to die anyway. No one would miss him.

Kayla shook her head. She would be just as bad as the serial killer if she did this. Kayla rounded the corner to the hallway where Madison’s room was, when she heard shouting coming from inside.

“Charge to two-hundred,” Kayla heard someone say as she raced into the hospital room, heart pounding, and took in the scene before her. Nurses and doctors were working frantically around her sister as Dr. March held a pair of charged paddles in her hands.

Kayla watched as she brought them down onto her sister’s chest.

Madison’s body convulsed from the shock, but her eyes didn’t open.

“No change,” said a nurse watching the monitor. Kayla looked for her parents and saw them standing by the door, her mother clutching onto her father like a safety raft.

“Charge to three-hundred!” Dr. March said, shouting now. Jerking her head back to Madison, Kayla held her breath as Dr. March brought the paddles down again.

This time Madison’s eyes shot open. Both Kayla and her parents watched, relieved, as she gasped for breath.

“Heart rate rising,” said the nurse. Kayla heaved out a breath as she watched the steady beep of the heart monitor start to rise again.

Kayla stepped aside as more nurses and doctors rushed into the room. Her parents had just corned Dr. March, asking her what the hell had happened, when Kayla silently slipped out the door.

And made her way to the B wing. To where a murderer and his liver lie waiting.

Kayla reached into her jacket pocket and gripped the bottle of pills. There was no decision to make.

It took two days of standing behind a water fountain to track the serial killer’s feeding schedule. Kayla had watched closely as a blonde nurse with a ponytail brought a tray of food into room 153B every day at 12:15pm. She noticed that each day before bringing the food in, the nurse would stop by the nurse’s station to talk with whoever was on duty, setting her tray of food down on the counter in the process. That was where Kayla would make her move.

Like clockwork, Kayla watched as the nurse strode around the corner with her tray of

food, slowing down to survey the nurse’s station and see who was working.

Sure enough, the nurse recognized someone and smiled as she headed over to the counter, setting down the tray of food.

Kayla observed all this from where she stood by the water fountain, her Diet Coke in one hand, and the napkin that held the pills she had crushed into a fine powder in the other. With a deep breath, she pushed off the wall and walked determinedly toward the nurse’s station until she reached the counter.

           “Excuse me,” Kayla said as she leaned over, heart racing, “but could you tell me how to get to room 435A? I’m a bit los- Oh, I am so sorry!” The Diet Coke spilled across the counter near the food tray and leaked over the edge, dripping onto the floor.

Cursing, the nurse in the blonde ponytail quickly leaned over the counter to grab a few tissues and knelt to the ground.

           “Here let me clean this up,” Kayla said, as she pulled her napkin from her pocket, dabbing it next to the food tray, her hand hovering over the soup bowl.

           Kayla’s heart thundered in her chest as the nurse stood up with a handful of tissues saturated in Diet Coke. “Be careful next time,” she said, annoyed. She dumped the tissues in a trash can and turned to grab the food tray, making her way to room 153B.

           Kayla watched until the nurse had closed the door behind her before she pushed off the counter of the nurse’s station and strode for the nearest bathroom so she could heave the contents of her stomach out into the toilet. 

           What if he didn’t eat the soup?, Kayla thought as she frantically paced the length of Madison’s room, biting her thumbnail. What if he did?

           “You’re going to tread a hole in the floor,” Madison said. Kayla paused her pacing and looked up at her sister who was watching her curiously from the bed.

           Kayla smiled. “Maddy, you’re the one who’s gonna make a hole in the floor if you don’t lay off the hospital JELL-O,” she said.

           Madison smiled and opened her mouth, likely to make another retort, when Dr. March strode through the doorway and surveyed the room.

           “Where are your parents?” she said, out of breath, like she had run there.

           Kayla walked to her, worried. “They’re eating lunch downstairs. Why? What’s wrong?”

           The doctor looked to Madison, and then back to Kayla. “Because,” she said, “Your sister is getting a new liver.”

Kayla leaned against the doorway and watched, smiling, as Madison’s friends and family talked and laughed in the now crowded hospital room. Balloons and flowers were everywhere, and get-well cards lined the windowsill, congratulating Madison on her new liver.

Kayla has spent the past few days convincing herself that it was worth it. That a serial killer’s life for Madison’s was worth it. And as Kayla looked at the healthy glow on Madison’s face, laughing and breathing easily, she was nearly convinced.

Kayla tensed as she sensed someone approach and turned to see Dr. March come to stand next to her at the doorway.

“She looks healthy,” Kayla said.

Dr. March smiled. “She is. The new liver is accommodating nicely.”

           Kayla hesitated, then asked, “Can you tell me who the organ donor was?” She thought that if she heard the serial killer’s death confirmed, it might give her some sense of closure of what she’d done to save her sister’s life.

           Dr. March considered. “Well, I suppose, since her husband didn’t sign an anonymity form,” she began.

           Kayla started. Her?

           Dr. March continued. “The organ donor was Ella Fields, a 33-year-old female and a lawyer. She was actually just down the hall in wing B, recovering from an appendectomy, but somehow she overdosed on Vicodin.” She shook her head, sighing. “We’re having the nurse who administered her meals questioned, but otherwise it’s a mystery to how the drug got in her system.”

           Dr. March looked to where Madison laid in her bed, sitting upright and talking animatedly with her hands, and smiled sadly. “She was o-negative, too. Universal donor.”

           She looked to Kayla again. “Kayla, are you alright? You look pale.”

           But Kayla wasn’t speaking.

She was frantically thinking back to when she had first handled the nurse’s chart. She thought back to the gossiping nurses. They had both put their charts in the holder.

Her mind raced. One of them definitely had the serial killer’s chart, but the other nurse-. Kayla swallowed.

           The other nurse must have been treating the patient in the very next room, Ella Fields.

           Kayla’s breath was shallow now as her blood ran cold.  She laid her hand over her throat and sucked in a breath. She had read “o-negative” and put the chart down, not bothering to look any further.

Head spinning, Kayla turned to face a Madison, her eyes drifting to her sister’s abdomen as if she could see straight through it to the evidence of her crime.

           She couldn’t get the air in her lungs fast enough.

Hyperventilating, Kayla grabbed the doorframe for support as Dr. March gripped her arm, asking what was wrong. Kayla couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t hear anything save the roar in her head. What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?