She leaned over me, supposedly to wipe the sweat from my brow. But as she moved, I caught her reflection in the convex chrome of the overhead surgical light. It wasn’t a cloth she was reaching for. My eyes, trained to catch micro-movements in chaotic trauma bays, locked onto the reflection of her hand hovering over my IV pole.
Her manicured fingers expertly, silently twisted the dial on my intravenous drip.
Pitocin. The synthetic oxytocin used to induce labor. It was already running at a baseline level, but Khloe had just cranked the valve wide open. A massive, unregulated bolus of the drug was about to flood my veins, forcing my already over-stressed uterus into violent, unrelenting hyper-stimulation. It was a lethal dose for a uterus stretched this thin. It would rip my organs apart.
“Preston!” I gasped, my voice a ragged shriek. “The IV! She opened the Pitocin! Stop the line!”
Preston didn’t even look at the drip. Through his twisted lens, this was just undeniable proof of his domineering wife having a paranoid breakdown, desperate to bully a subordinate.
“Look closely, Elena. This is my OR. I am the attending surgeon,” Preston’s voice dropped an octave, dripping with absolute disgust. “You might play tyrant down in the ER, but right now? You are nothing but a patient. My student is trying to comfort you, and you accuse her of malpractice? Where is your basic human decency?”
“She’s killing me!” I screamed, the first wave of the hyper-stimulated contraction hitting me like a physical wrecking ball. My vision fractured into black geometric patches. It felt as if a giant hand, wrapped in barbed wire, was twisting my internal organs into a knot.
