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Lost and Found

Cassidy Lane had been a registered nurse for six years, working in the emergency at St. Agnes Memorial Hospital for the majority of that time and despite being only twenty seven years old she was the second most senior nurse in the department. In those years, she had personally seen a lot of different things, odd things, a lot of unusual ailments and circumstances where people had reported to ER. She thought herself inured and incapable of being surprised by anything that might possibly come through the double set of sliding glass doors leading into the department. She was about to find out she was wrong.

A paramedic report came in they had a single vehicle MVA involving a rollover, two persons injured, both unresponsive and with no major trauma or bleeding. They prepped two beds and waited for the ambulance.

Once the two patients were delivered, Cassidy took charge of the adolescent female. After initial triage, confirming no life threatening conditions, standard procedure was to insert a Foley catheter into the bladder on an unresponsive patient, which she prepared despite the fact the girl had peed herself in the accident. Cutting away the soiled clothes, she paused, confounded, having discovered something she could not explain inside the injured girl’s underwear and wedged into the cleft of her privates. At first, she thought maybe it was some type of little doll or maybe even a toy, but on closer inspection and examination, she was startled to discover it was actually a fully formed miniature man, not much more than a boy really. Removing the tiny youth from the fleshly folds, she laid his tiny unconscious body in the palm of her right hand. He appeared to be breathing, chest rising and falling regularly and there was no obvious cyanosis. She turned her head to the side and brought him close to her ear, close enough she could feel his slight exhalation on her own skin. There was no stridor in his respiration. Bringing her hand back down, she tried to find a radial pulse at his wrist, but his arm was just too tiny for her to get any discernible reading. He was certainly alive.

Looking on him, she was astonished by his little teeny fingers, each ending in an incredibly small fingernail. Even his facial features, eyebrows, nose, everything was so incredibly proportional. He was as light as a feather, weighing practically nothing in her hand.

What should she do? The situation made absolutely zero sense. First, how could somebody be so small and perfectly formed? The absurdity of it all made her laugh.

Walking over near the wash basin, she took a small sealed bottle of saline used for irrigating wounds in preparation for sutures and breaking the tip off, rinsed his body thoroughly. He groaned a little but did not rouse. She grinned, looking at the prize in her hand. He was a handsome little devil despite the abrasions and obvious bruising on his skin, much of which appeared to predate the accident.

So strange, she mused, shaking her head and drying him off, she was so curious, almost spellbound by the unbelievable nature of her find.

The curtain separating the girl from the rest of the ER abruptly parted and Doctor Richardson came walking in, surface in hand, startling her. Pivoting quickly on her feet, she turned to face the middle aged physician while she surreptitiously slid the hand holding the young man into the voluminous pocket of her blue scrub pants and deposited him there. If the doctor took note, he gave no indication.

After a brief exchange and a cursory examination of the unconscious girl, the doctor advised her both the girl and father were persons of considerable import and that they were relocating the girl to a private room upstairs and transferring the father to another in ICU for ongoing observation. Cassie nodded to demonstrate understanding of the doctor instruction, sandy brown hair streaked with blonde highlights bound back bobbing as she assured the doctor she would make all the necessary logistical arrangements.

Just to confirm that she wasn’t going mad, she thought about showing Doctor Richardson the tiny man, holding his wee body out for the physician to see, but she was too fascinated by the find, too captivated by the mystery of him and decided to keep his existence to herself. Was it wrong? She felt excited and nervous at the same time.

After the doctor had left, she tarried a moment in the area, removing the young man carefully from her pocket and holding him gently in her open right hand. Such a fragile little thing, so tiny and amazingly delicate. Taking a couple squares of sterile 4X4 drainage gauze off the shelving unit along the wall, she folded him inside it, before returning him to her pocket.

Checking the clock on the wall, she let out a long breath and smiled, her shift having been finished twenty minutes prior. Exiting the area, she stopped at the Nurse’s Station and made the required calls to arrange transport of the two patients and assigned the task of moving both to another nurse before walking back to her locker. Collecting her jacket and purse, she shut her locker door. There were so many questions in her mind. Who was this enigmatic young man? Was he always this small? If not, how did he get this way? How did he get in the girl’s underwear and why? Why was he so beat up?

Exiting the hospital, she walked purposefully across the asphalt toward the staff parking where her 2006 red Honda Civic was parked. Climbing cautiously into the vehicle, shifting her bottom so not to put too much tension on her pants, she sat. Reaching across her body, she took the seat belt and fastened it before inserting the key into the ignition and starting the car.

As she drove home, she couldn’t wait, her level of excitement growing with each passing moment, the smile crossing her very pretty face broadening.

 

Chapter End Notes:

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