The Red Band Society: Introduction
I know I said I’d be updating Refuge soon but I’ve had this little thing in my mind for a while and it just felt necessary to give it a little sample before posting the full first chapter, I hope you enjoy and let know what you think!
I really wasn’t sure if it was a goodbye. Hell I didn’t see most of them leave the hospital, it was a hellish last few months of my employment at Royal Hope Hospital. I transferred to Wilson Grey seven months ago, I guess the work load was too much at RH, or that feeling that always loomed over my head. They were a piece of my life I can’t ever forget, those seven girls. I was freshly out of nursing school, in a world too big for myself as I found myself on the pediatric ward of RH, meeting the first of the girls...
Katherine Howard, well she insisted I call her Kat, she hated being called Katherine, a sweet girl with malignant tumor on the base or her spinal cord, she’d had one removed when she was five and now she was back at sixteen, but the tumor had rejoined her. My first task of the job was to draw her blood and we stroked up a conversation, the poor girl had lost her hair to radiation therapy and now wore a hot pink wig proudly, it suited her quite well. She asked if I’d ever met a girl with pink hair and I surely hadn’t before that day, she was sweet.
Then we had another join the ward, sharing a room with Katherine. Anne Boleyn, she was sixteen and like Kat, was stricken with cancer, but it was attacking her bone marrow in her left foot which resulted in her needing lots of physical therapy and the possibility of amputation to prevent the cancer of spreading to the rest of her body, but that’s a story for another day. I could’ve sworn from day one, Anne disliked me but she shared a room with Kat, who slowly became like my little sister.
Anna Cleves had been the hospital long before I started but was on a weekend home the Friday I’d started so I hadn’t gotten to know her right away. She was starting to go blind as glaucoma affected her eyes, and she going through treatments to help her preserve the eyesight she still had. She’s a sweet girl with a fighting spirit, she was determined to keep going.
Then came Anna’s roommate, a seventeen year old with an enlarged heart named Catherine Parr who Kat nicknamed Cathy five minutes after meeting her. Cathy’s heart wasn’t pumping blood correctly to the rest of her body and she was about midway through the transplant list, she’d come in four days a week to have her heart motioned and run tests to make sure nothing was going wrong. Carny was also a sweet girl, always baking for all the nurses on the floor, she’s even made me an entire batch of her famous sugar cookies when I left.
Bessie was the next to join, she was in a car accident and came in with a head trauma and was placed in a medically induced coma to help her recover as her brain swell went down. She’s been in the coma for over four months now, they keep her in her own room as she’s still sensitive to notice but doesn’t mind when someone reads her a chapter or two from a novel.
Maria was the last to come in before I left, exactly one week. She’s a transfer from another hospital, Maria had been in a house fire, a huge 2nd degree burn lined her right arm and like Bessie, she had her own room to recover.
And you may be wondering at me, I haven’t really done a formal introduction, my name is Jane Seymour. RN and I rather not share my age but I’m old enough to be an RN. But this is my story of meeting some of the greatest people of my life with my co workers, Doctor Aragon, Doctor Vaux and my fellow nurse, Maggie Lee. Maggie is still my best friend as she’s still at Royal Hope and I probably wouldn’t be able to do this introduction with her. And I’ll tell you the truth of what’s it’s like working with teenagers. Teenagers who like to argue I may add.
