to stop the bleeding

this morning a car with four people in it blew out a tire on the 101 south. the teenager sitting in the front seat wasn't wearing his seatbelt and was ejected. he came into my trauma bay with a blood pressure of 80, his heart racing into the 120s. i put the ultrasound on his belly and saw blood. we transfused him, and rushed him to the operating room. ten minutes later, i had a blade to his belly and was cutting him open, from the bottom of his rib cage, to his pelvis bone. 2-3 liters of blood came pouring out. i soaked the blood up, went through sterile sponge after sterile sponge until i could finally make out the anatomy. i placed my hand behind his spleen and saw that it was shattered. i pulled it forward, tied off all of the small bleeding vessels then clamped the main artery and cut it out. the bleeding stopped. his pressure normalized. i inspected everything else scouring the belly for other signs of injury. it had only been his spleen. i closed him up and took him to the icu. the whole thing took less than 2 hours. once i was sure he was stable i wandered out to the waiting room and found his father, a tall, slight man, with worried eyes.

"i'm one of the surgeons," i said.
his look of worry intensified as he anxiously waited for answers.
"your son is fine," i said, "we were able to save him."

as i walked back to the operating room to change my blood-soaked scrubs, i felt i could not contain the strong sense of life and gratitude bursting from me. this was the culmination of so many years of struggle for me. so many years of tireless hours working and reading and sacrificing. to know that without people like me going through such grueling training that that young kid would have died, made it all worth it.