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DEREK
If I ever hear the words Pickle Award again, I’m really gonna deck someone.
DYLAN
Can you keep that energy for when you come home tonight? Seems like we could figure out some ways to channel it.
Derek shifted his weight in his swivel stool.
DEREK
Stop giving me boners while I’m working.
DYLAN
Whoops. Guess you’ll have to stay behind that desk for a while. Off to marinate. Tootles.
DEREK
Tootles is a stupid word.
DYLAN
Kay.
A call came in on the staticky EMS dispatch radio. “Twenty-six-year-old pregnant female with a possible right patellar dislocation. Arriving in ten minutes.”
As Derek entered the pre-arrival into the computer system, he thought about all the least-arousing things he could imagine. Once he could stand without embarrassing himself, he went to warn Joni. It wasn’t that ERs didn’t like pregnant people. It was just that sometimes it turned into a clusterfuck tug-of-war with labor and delivery if a very pregnant person came in with something that seemed possibly not pregnancy-related, which the ED doc then decided was pregnancy-related, leading to many unpleasant phone calls before the on-call OB would accept the patient. It sucked.
A dislocated kneecap should be straightforward though. But shit, to have that kind of injury any time was awful, and during a pregnancy would be brutal.
The stretcher rolled in with a tiny young woman on top of it with two curtains of black hair hanging down as she braced herself over her an enormous belly. Her leg was splinted.
Derek blinked. “Michelle?”
His youngest sister forced a tentative grin at him before she held up her hands and wiggled her fingers over her belly. Just like Amy had. Just like his mom had. “Surprise.”
“You’re…”
“Pregnant? I think so. At least, all the signs point that way.” As the stretcher bounced on the threshold, her grin shifted into a grimace. She took the kinds of deep breaths she’d used while trying to master a difficult ballet move.
“Michelle…”
She spoke through a clenched jaw. “I’m fine. It’s not that bad. The bouncing is… not ideal.”
Derek tried to minimize the jostling of the stretcher. “Your kneecap is literally in the wrong place.”
“Could be worse.”
“It could be worse like it’s still attached to your leg?” Derek guided the ambulance stretcher back to the private room he’d assigned.
“Well, yeah. I think that would be a lot worse.” Tense tendons flexed in his sister’s neck.
“You okay to move to the bed, ma’am?” the medic asked.
Michelle’s eyes darted from the medic to Derek, forehead wrinkling and lips tight as she nodded. “I think so?”
Derek twitched his head at the medic. “You stabilize the knee. I can move her myself. If that’s okay with you…?”