“He is settled in,” Florence said, pointing toward the closed wooden door of Room Two Twenty. “The transport team brought him up ten minutes ago.”
She walked away toward the nurse’s station, leaving me alone in the corridor with the chart in my hands.
I stood there for a full minute, my fingers tracing the raised plastic letters of his name on the folder.
The room was dim, the privacy curtains drawn halfway across the window to block the gray light of the Ohio morning.
The man in the bed lay with his head elevated, a thin plastic oxygen cannula resting beneath his nose. His hair was entirely white now, cropped close at the sides, and his face was lined with the deep, sharp creases of a man who had spent his life outdoors.
I walked to the side of the bed, the rubber soles of my shoes silent against the linoleum floor.
“Mr. Vance,” I said, my voice carrying the formal, precise cadence I had used with thousands of patients before him. “I am Nurse Nancy. I am here to take your vital signs.”
