My spirits were high as I drove East on Interstate 90 late that morning. I had everything in the world to look forward to. My residency in emergency medicine was nearly at an end, bringing a close to almost thirteen years of college, med-school, and intensive specialty training. Soon I would start making the big bucks and could begin paying off the huge loans that had resulted at a rate that was more than a pittance. More importantly, I would be on my own at last, blessed with all of the privileges and responsibilities that went along with it. I looked forward to the challenge. Life was shaping up.

My mood was enhanced by the mission I was embarked on. I was heading from Seattle, where I'd gone to school and trained, to Spokane for a job interview I had scheduled for the next day, an interview for a staff position as an emergency physician at one of the hospitals. The interview was pretty much a formality. I was a shoe-in for the job. They had recruited me after all. Starting salary was just over one hundred and fourteen thousand a year (of course, fully twenty-eight percent of that would go for malpractice insurance alone. ER docs are second only to obstetricians in insurance rates), which beat the living shit out of the thirty something thousand I made as a resident. The end was in sight at last, and with it, salvation.

I was motoring my tired and battered Toyota pick-up at about seventy miles an hour, thinking about how the first thing I was going to do upon employment was dump the damn thing and buy something expensive, like a Mercedes or a Lexus. I had just entered the foothills west of the Cascades, climbing towards Snoqualmie Pass. I kept a semi-worried eye on my temperature gauge as the elevation increased. The old pick-up hadn't been on a trip such as this in a few years, since the last time I'd had time to go skiing. But it seemed to be holding steady as the landscape changed over to pine trees and patches of snow on the ground. The CD player I'd installed last year (one of the few luxuries I'd allowed myself) was pumping out track four of Rush's Moving Pictures, a song called "Limelight." I was singing along happily.

The windshield in front of me suddenly erupted in a spider's web snarl of cracks as the safety glass shattered before my eyes. There was a small hole at the center of this snarl. The sound was flat, undramatic, but still I jumped, adrenaline flooding my body. Vaguely I felt a burning sensation in the center of my chest but I paid it no attention, thinking, if anything, that it was a result of having the crap scared out of me.

What the hell had happened? I wondered, trembling a little. Was it a rock thrown from a truck? It couldn't have been. There was nobody closer than a quarter mile in front of me. Since it was now hard to see out the window, I started to pull the truck to the right shoulder, wondering what I was going to do now. I couldn't keep driving this way, with a snarl of cracks and broken glass obscuring my vision. But I had to get to Spokane. Formality or not, it wasn't a good idea to miss a job interview.

The burning in my chest, instead of going away, deepened steadily until it felt like someone had lit a blow-torch in there. I put my hand up to rub what seemed to be the center of the discomfort and felt dampness beneath my fingers. Confused, wondering what I might have spilled on myself, I brought the hand up and looked at it. My fingers were covered with blood.

Adrenaline flooded me once again. Afraid of what I'd see, I looked down at my chest, confirming the vague suspicion that had formed at the sight of the blood. There was a neat hole, smaller than the diameter of a dime, in my T-shirt. Blood was spreading slowly around this hole. I glanced up to see that my truck was still pointed down the Interstate and then looked down again, pulling the neck of my shirt away from my body. There was another hole in my chest, also very slight in diameter, just to the right of my sternum, at about the level of the sixth rib. I'd seen many similar holes in my internship time at one of Seattle's trauma centers. It was a gunshot wound. Somebody had shot me.

"Fuck me," I muttered, feeling the burning intensify. I looked frantically around the truck, searching for the gunman, but saw nothing but hills and dirt and pine trees and snow. Who the hell had shot me? Why had they done it? What had I ever done to deserve this?

My survival instinct kicked in, bringing up two points at once. First of all, whomever had done this was probably still around somewhere. I needed to get the hell out of here, quickly. Second, I'd been shot in the chest, right of the sternum. People died from this sort of wound all the time. The right lung was under there. The heart wasn't directly under there but it was close and bullets rarely traveled in a straight line once they entered the body. There were also large, major arteries and veins under there, vessels that were just entering or leaving the heart itself. The aorta, the superior vena cava. If one of those had been nicked or penetrated, I could bleed to death internally in a matter of minutes.

I stomped on the accelerator, making my engine lug down for a moment in protest, but finally it resumed its normal operation and the truck began to pick up speed. I leaned to the right, looking around the cracks in the window at the Interstate unfolding before me. I took a few deep breaths to check my body, receiving both good news and bad from it. I was moving air okay but it hurt on the right side when I inhaled. Punctured lung? I thought. Perhaps. All of the symptoms were there. That could lead to a tension pneumothorax, the collapsing of the lung around the heart, which effectively strangled the body's pump. I felt no dizziness yet and that was good. Maybe I wasn't bleeding out, maybe the bullet didn't damage my heart.

I needed to get to a hospital like yesterday. Cursing myself for not buying a cell phone (I'll never have any highway emergencies, I'd thought), I continued down the Interstate, the feeling of threat from the gunman disappearing but the fear of the damage already inflicted increasing. What was I going to do? This was an isolated area. There were no call boxes beside the road, there were no businesses with payphones. How do I get help?

I came up beside a sports car driven by a young man in his early twenties. He had the rugged, arrogant good looks of a Ken doll. An attractive brunette was sitting in the passenger seat. Skis were mounted to a rack on top. A couple heading up to the ski resorts for an afternoon of expensive fun. My eyes locked onto the woman, not because she was attractive, but because she was talking on a cellular phone. They could help me!

I pulled up beside them, honking my horn frantically to get their attention. Both of them turned their heads to see what was going on, gave me an aristocratic look of disgust, and then went back to what they were doing. I honked some more. They didn't bother looking but the Cressida began to pick up speed as he pulled away from the madman that was bothering them.

Desperate, knowing that my pick-up was no match for their car, and unable to think of any other way to get them to stop, I jerked my steering wheel to the left. My tires squealed in protest and my truck slammed into the side of their car with a bang. They looked at me, shocked and angry expressions on their faces as I applied the brakes and brought my truck to a screaming, smoking halt on the freeway. He brought his car to a similar halt, coming to a stop in front of me.

His door flew open and he stormed out, moving angrily toward me, his fists clenched up. I hoped he would at least pause to listen to me before he started beating my ass. I rolled down my window.

"You fuckin' maniac!" he screamed, walking directly to my window. "What the fuck do you think you're doing? Do you know what I paid..." He stopped as he got a good look at me, his eyes widening in alarm.

"Somebody shot me," I told him, my eyes boring into his. "Please call 911 on your cell phone."

He seemed frozen in place, staring at me, not knowing what to do.

"Please?" I pleaded. "I need help immediately or I might die. Call for help."

"Janie!" he suddenly screamed, turning back towards his car. "Give me your fuckin' phone!"

The next thirty minutes passed in a blur. Cops, firefighters, and paramedics showed up. Questions were shouted at me. I was dragged out of the car and placed on a backboard. An oxygen mask was shoved onto my face. My clothes were cut off of my body, leaving me naked and shivering in the forty-five degree air. One of the paramedics agreed with my assessment that my right lung was collapsing rapidly and she poked a large caliber needle into my upper rib cage, releasing the pressure and making my breathing easier. A couple of IV's were stabbed into my arms. Finally I was loaded onto a Washington State Police helicopter. I enquired as to our destination and was told we were going to UWMC in Seattle, the same facility I currently worked at. Great. My colleagues would be taking care of me (and probably would make cracks about my dick afterward, assuming I survived this). I left this paragraph as it was. Again, please don't change my phrasing - it's my writing style.

It had taken me nearly an hour to drive from Seattle to that point. The helicopter returned me in less than fifteen minutes. I was wheeled inside the emergency room and directly to the resuscitation room, or recess-room, as it was known. I knew every doctor, nurse, x-ray tech and resident in there. They put me through the standard trauma exam, poking and prodding my body, stabbing needles into my femoral artery to draw blood gasses, drawing venous blood from my arm veins to check labs, even the dreaded rectal exam, or "prostate handshake" was done by the senior resident. Her slimy gloved finger slid up my ass to the second knuckle, making me wince.

"Sphincter tone is good," she called out to the scribe once her finger was clear. She looked at it. "No obvious blood."

That was certainly nice to know, I thought. My worst nightmare had come true. I was on the wrong end of procedures I'd performed a thousand times on others. It was certainly an education in itself. They shot x-rays of my chest and, alarmed at my low blood pressure, replaced one of the saline IV bags with whole blood.

"We're gonna get you upstairs, John," the senior resident told me.

Upstairs, I knew, meant the operating room. They were going to open my chest, see what was wrong in there, and hopefully fix it, leaving me to fight another day. Less than five minutes later I was on my way. They wheeled me inside and while the surgical team began prepping my chest with betadine solution, an anesthesiologist injected something in my IV. I began to get very sleepy. I wondered if I would ever wake up again. People died in surgery all the time, their wounds too grave to repair. I marveled that only about forty minutes ago I was driving down the Interstate listening to one of my favorite CDs without a care in the world. Now I was being forced to contemplate death. So thinking, my consciousness slipped away and I knew no more.

Obviously, I pulled through or I wouldn't be able to write down this tale. The bullet turned out to be a .22 caliber long. It had been fired, as near as the cops could figure, from one of the hills overlooking the Interstate - a completely random act. The bullet had sliced neatly through my right lung and had exited out my back, lodging in the car seat behind me where the cops were able to dig it out and use it for later evidence against the gunman. He would strike six more times over the next two weeks, killing two and injuring three. He made nationwide headlines and virtually shut down eastbound traffic on I-90. Finally, a stakeout of the hills resulted in his capture. He was a twenty-two year old methamphetamine addict with a long history of mental problems. Though he confessed to the crimes he gave no particular explanation for why he'd decided to start taking pot shots at passing vehicles.

I was forced to spend two weeks in the hospital, in the trauma intensive care unit, in order to recover from my injuries. Thanks to professional courtesy, I was given the nicest private room they had and the nurses and staff doted on me shamelessly. One in particular doted better than all of them.

Her name was Kelly. She was about forty years old, married with two children, and a career ICU nurse. Her hair was flaming red, in a hue that could only be natural. Her body appeared to be in pretty good shape and her face, while slightly plain, was pretty enough and didn't show her age. She worked the night shift and was my nurse from 11PM to 7 AM, Monday through Friday. I'd seen her around the hospital a few times before but had never formally met her until I found myself a patient in the place.

My first contact with her was when she came in to give me pain medicine my first night there. I appraised her as she entered. She was wearing skirt type scrubs and white nylons. Her body was alluring, as was her smile, but I was more interested in the syringe she carried in her hands. My chest was hurting bad, not from the bullet wound but from the ribs they had cracked when they'd opened my chest for surgery. I'd never imagined it could hurt like this. Each breath felt like someone was chopping into my breastbone with an axe.

"How are you doing, Doctor Winston?" she asked, pulling down my blankets a little to get at my arm and the IV port.

"I feel like somebody just cut my chest open," I told her, a weak attempt at a joke. "And please, call me John."

"John then," she said, pulling the cap off her syringe and ejecting the air. "I'm Kelly. I'll be your night shift nurse for most of your stay here. I have a little Demerol to help with the pain."

"How about a lot of Demerol?" I replied.

She smiled, a little more than the professional smile she probably gave to other patients. She injected the contents of her syringe into my IV, pushing it slowly to avoid having the sudden onslaught of medicine make me throw up. Vomiting would most definitely be counter-productive to my healing. A few minutes later I was stoned out of my mind. The pain, though far from gone, became a distant throb, unimportant. I smiled my appreciation

She reached her hand out and stroked my hair in a motherly way. Her hand was the only part of her body that showed her age. It was roughened by time, with veins showing on the back. Still it felt nice against my forehead, the fingers running through my short hair. I wondered if she did this for all of her patients or if I was special.