My Mother Called Me a Thief While My Brother Was DyingChapter 1
The mall's PA system was blaring a jewelry store theft alarm, and I was clutching my phone, sprinting for the exit.
"Mom, there's an emergency at the hospital. I have to go NOW!"
My mother grabbed my arm and her voice shot up an octave:
"Sweetheart, you're in such a rush. Don't tell me YOU'RE the one who stole that gold?"
The words barely left her mouth before security closed in around us.
My brain whited out.
Back in the ER, a teenage boy's trachea had been severed by a sheet of glass that fell from a high floor. His oxygen saturation had plummeted to sixty percent. Severe subcutaneous emphysema covered his entire body.
Without surgery in the next fifteen minutes, he would suffocate to death.
And right now, my mother was staring at me with that look, the one that said she was disappointed but not surprised, sighing like I'd let her down again:
"We may be poor, but that's no excuse to do something this shameful."
To find gold that never existed, I was strip-searched, force-fed laxatives, and locked in a back room.
I dropped to my knees and begged them to let me go save my patient first.
It wasn't until I tried to escape through a window and my mother caught me, slamming me down so hard my arm snapped, ensuring I would never hold a scalpel again.
Only then did she get the phone call. The boy hanging between life and death, the one waiting to be saved, was her son.
——
"Mom, what are you TALKING about?"
I was frantic, prying at her fingers with both hands.
"I'm a doctor! There's a patient in the ER right now, and they will die without me!"
She didn't let go. Her grip only tightened.
She turned toward a security guard patrolling nearby and raised her voice for maximum carry:
"Sir, I am NOT making this up!"
"My daughter has been acting suspicious since the moment we walked in. She kept glancing toward the jewelry store..."
She clapped a hand over her mouth and sucked in a sharp breath, as though she'd just cracked some grand conspiracy.
"Oh my God. You don't think she actually..."
Before she even finished, mall security swarmed in.
The security captain was a heavyset man in his forties with a hard face and a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. His eyes had already changed.
"Ma'am, you need to cooperate with an inspection."
Blood roared in my ears.