Даниэла Стил - Turning Point

“She was upset, but she understands it’s the nature of what you do. She just doesn’t understand why you have to work on holidays,” he said quietly.

“Because people get hurt even on Christmas,” Stephanie said simply. “They called in everyone last night. We even delivered two babies in the ER. We couldn’t get the women to labor and delivery in time.” But the worst of it had been the burns, and she knew that several of those patients wouldn’t survive. The firefighters had been incredibly brave.

Stephanie looked peaceful as she drifted off to sleep. The entire trauma unit and emergency room team had done a good job, and she was proud of them, and to have been a part of it.

Tom Wylie felt the same way at Alta Bates, and Bill Browning was still in the thick of it. He hadn’t had time to call Pip and Alex at midnight as he’d meant to. They were still doing triage at General, and had gotten some homeless patients too. They had been asleep in doorways too close to the fire and been injured by falling debris. At Stanford, Wendy had her hands full as well. Jeff had come in at midnight to lend a hand, but all the cardiac patients had gone to SF General and UCSF to save time, and he left fairly quickly after talking to Wendy for a few minutes.

Tom Wylie got home at three P.M. His six-year-old patient who had had surgery the night before, after the car accident, was awake and doing well. And fresh teams had come in to deal with the victims of the fire, so he had finally gone back to his apartment. It was a depressing place, and looked better at night, lit with candles, than in broad daylight, which showed the threadbare furniture and the peeling paint. He had never spent much on rent and didn’t really care about where he lived as long as the place had a comfortable king-size bed. He grabbed the remote and turned on the TV mostly out of habit. He liked hearing a voice in the apartment, and he expected to see more coverage of the fire. The DEM had done an amazing job on the scene and overseeing dispatch to the various hospitals, and were being highly praised by all. But instead of Market Street, Tom saw images of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées in Paris. It was midnight on December 26 there, and a band that ran across the television screen read “Terrorism in Paris,” as an American reporter described a scene of carnage on the Champs-Élysées. Four major luxury stores and two movie complexes that showed mostly American films in the original version had been taken over, with moviegoers and shoppers held hostage and gunned down, including children. A suicide bomber had blown up one of the stores, and another had entered the elevator at the Eiffel Tower, intending to blow it up, but had been killed before he could detonate the belt he wore and turn himself into a human bomb.

In all, one hundred and two people had been killed, and another fifty-three injured. It was the worst attack of its kind since the November attacks four years before. It was another massive assault on people going about their business, shopping the day after Christmas, taking advantage of sales, going to movies and having dinner on the famous Champs-Élysées. The motives were political, but however they justified it, innocents had been slaughtered, even young children. The attacks had occurred at six P.M., before the stores closed in Paris, and tears rolled down Tom’s cheeks as he watched the scenes of destruction and mass murder, and the numbers of people injured as sirens screamed in the night. The ravages of the hotel fire seemed small compared to what Paris had just been through, again.

Incredible acts of heroism were described. There were videos from the cellphones of people who had been there, and sobbing interviews with the survivors. It was heartbreaking to see the effects of tragedy again, and impossible to understand. Listening to the stories, seeing the damage and loss of life, and hearing how many had died from gunfire or the detonated bombs, the only conclusion a sane person could come to was that the world had gone mad.

Chapter Three

The cleanup after the hotel fire on Market Street was massive, and firefighters combed through the rubble for days, looking for clues to how the fire started. Foul play was eventually ruled out. Faulty wiring had caused it, and the fifteen-foot Christmas trees on every floor of the hotel had fed the blaze. Within a day or two, those with minor injuries left the hospitals where they’d been admitted. Others had to stay longer, and those with severe burns had a long road ahead of them. Three more of the firefighters and two elderly hotel guests died within days of the fire, and the death toll reached a total of fifty-one, with eighty-seven more people injured to varying degrees.

It took several days for the hospitals involved to calm down, and once the people with minor injuries had been released, they were left mostly with the burn victims to be treated. By New Year’s Eve, each of the hospitals had almost returned to normal. Bill Browning and Tom Wylie were working again at SF General and Alta Bates. Wendy Jones was on call at Stanford, and Stephanie Lawrence had the night off from UCSF, much to her husband’s relief and her own. Both boys had come down with the flu the day before, and Stephanie didn’t want to leave them with a sitter, so she and Andy stayed home on New Year’s Eve. At least she wouldn’t have to go to work that night. They opened a bottle of champagne after the boys were asleep, and watched old movies in bed. Stephanie had been working hard all week, and fell asleep at ten o’clock, while Andy saw the New Year in alone.

The savage attack in Paris took longer to clean up, and the country had been scarred again by tragic losses. Candles and flowers were left in vast profusion up and down the Champs-Élysées, and particularly in front of the stores and movie houses that had been affected. More than a hundred people had been killed. There was a special memorial mass at Notre Dame, and a vigil the night before. The images of the mourners on TV were heartbreaking, as people held up signs with the names of the victims whom they knew. It was nearly impossible to conceive of acts of a political nature carried out against innocent people going about their business on a Thursday night. It was an echo of what had happened before, but this time was infinitely worse with more people killed, and not just young people this time, but children too. The youngest victim of the attack was two years old. In some cases, entire families had been slaughtered.

It made no sense to Tom as he watched the coverage. In his mind, politics never justified the murder of people who had nothing to do with the issues. He had been watching CNN all week, and cried every time he saw an interview with someone who had survived the attack and described how the people around him had been assassinated. To Tom, it seemed like a tragedy not just for Parisians, but for humanity and the entire world. It went against everything he believed and had dedicated his life to. He had spent twenty years putting wounded bodies back together, while others wanted to destroy them. He wished there were some way to help, but France was a long way away, and there was nothing he could do. It had depressed him profoundly, and he watched the latest stories emerging from the tragedy every day.

All the perpetrators had died with their victims. The whole thing seemed like a terrible waste, and he was overwhelmed by sadness every time he thought about it. The story had certainly eclipsed the hotel fire in San Francisco, which had genuinely been a regrettable accident. There was nothing accidental about the Paris attacks. They had been carefully planned, executed with precision, and entirely intentional. It made him think of the last time he’d been in Paris, while he was in medical school. He’d gone there for a summer break with two friends and fell in love with the city, and every girl he met.