One Breath at a Time
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1
FORWARD AID STATION — CAMP BALDWIN, OUTSIDE FALLUJAH
APRIL 2004
Blood had soaked through both knees of Gabriella’s trousers, and she didn’t notice.
“Pressure’s dropping. BP’s sixty over palp.” Lance Corporal Reyes had his fingers on the wrist, watching the monitor, watching her.
“He’s tamponading.”
Gabriella’s hands didn’t stop moving. Scalpel, then the Finochietto retractor, then her hands themselves, working between the ribs of a twenty-two-year-old machine gunner named Delgado, who’d taken shrapnel through the right side of his chest twenty minutes ago and whose heart had stopped beating two minutes ago and had not, since that moment, restarted.
“Talk to me, Doc.”
“Pericardium’s full. I’m releasing it.” The membrane around the heart parted under the scissors, and dark blood welled up and over her gloved fingers, and underneath it, Delgado’s heart sat there—still, swollen, drowning in its own blood.
She cupped it in her palm. Began to squeeze.
“One ... Two ... Three...”
Around her, the aid station had gone quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when everyone in it understands they are watching something they were never trained to expect to see. Two other corpsmen stood at the foot of the table with bags of O-negative ready. A Navy doctor—an actual surgeon, flown in from the BAS at Camp Fallujah twenty minutes too late to do this himself—stood at her shoulder, hands folded, not touching anything.
“Come on,” Gabriella said, to the heart in her hand, in the same voice she might have used to coax a stalled engine. “Come on.”
“Four ... Five...”
The heart twitched.
“There it is.” Reyes, leaning forward. “Doc, there it is—”
It twitched again, then settled into a rhythm—weak, fast, uneven, but a rhythm—and Gabriella kept her hand cupped beneath it, feeling it beat against her palm like something small and frightened finding its feet.
“Sats coming up,” the corpsman with the monitor said. “Eighty-eight. Ninety-one.”
“Pressure?”
“Ninety over sixty and climbing.”
Gabriella exhaled. She hadn’t realized she’d stopped breathing.
“Pack it,” she said, “and get him on the bird. He needs a real OR and he needs it in the next forty minutes.” She stepped back from the table, finally, and looked down at her hands—red to the elbow—and at her knees, soaked through, and felt the ache in her shoulders that always came after, the way a held breath comes out all at once.
The Navy surgeon was looking at her with an expression she’d seen before, on other faces, in other aid stations. Not quite disbelief. Something closer to recalculation.
“Where’d you learn that?” he asked.
“MASH rotation. Landstuhl, before that. I’ve done six.” She was already reaching for a basin to wash her hands, already moving on, because Delgado wasn’t the only patient and wouldn’t be the last one today. “Seven, now.”
“HM2 Stoica’s done more thoracotomies than half the surgical residents I trained with,” Reyes said, to no one in particular, with the satisfaction of a man repeating a fact he enjoyed repeating. “Don’t let the islands on her collar fool you, sir. She’s better than her paygrade.”
“I gathered.” The surgeon was still watching her hands. “Stoica. Romanian?”
“My parents, yes. I was born in Constanța.” She didn’t look up from the basin. “Naturalized when I was four.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.