I'm an ER Nurse - Full Moons and Friday Nights always Spell Trouble

This all happened back when I worked as an Emergency Department nurse at the hospital in my hometown. We saw a lot of sad cases there, a lot of horrible things. But this incident stuck with me for different reasons.

I saw what’s on the other side that night. And it scared the living shit out of me.

It was a Friday and a full moon on top of that - just ask any nurse what that means and they’ll tell you it’s not a myth but a real fact of the job. People get weird on full moons, and Friday nights usually mean a lot of drunks and OD’s. A lot of car accidents too.

Sure enough, just as we were getting ready to go for break, a head-on collision rolled in. Two passengers, one driver. Another EMS was on the way with the driver from the other car - the sole occupant of that vehicle - reeking of alcohol.

Straight from the back of the ambulance, they came to us. It was a mother and a father as well as their young daughter, only ten years old. I won’t get into specifics but they were all in bad shape - intubation, blood products, fluids, Epinephrine, CPR - we eventually got them all somewhat stabilized.

We had a small window of time where we could take our shortened breaks, since we were short-staffed and overcrowded. All the nurses were starving and exhausted, so we buddied up and went off to rest for a little while. I was getting the impression that the family would survive, but they still needed to be monitored very closely.

I told my coworker Sarah to wake me up if anything happened or if they needed my help. After working an extended shift the day before I was exhausted and needed to take a short nap. It wasn’t against any policies and was a regular practice, so don’t accuse me of slacking off because of what happened next. None of us could have predicted it.

After wheeling a stretcher into a storage room, I turned off the lights and quickly fell asleep, a blanket from the warming cabinet wrapped snugly around me.

My dreams were terrible. I kept feeling like someone was standing over me, watching me while I slept. Talking quietly in a young girl’s voice.

She was calling out, “Mommy? Mommy, where are you?”

“MOMMY! MOMMY! WHERE ARE YOU, MOMMY!?”

The piercing scream woke me from my slumber and I sat bolt upright on the stretcher in the darkened room. There was someone in there with me. She was standing between me and the lightswitch.

Part of me knew right away. But still I had to see for myself.

My heart thumping in my jugular and in my chest, beating heavy against my ribs, I reached for my phone. I had set it down on a shelf and couldn’t find it. Patting the area, my fingers brushed against it and I grabbed hold of it, almost dropping it in the process.

The person was quiet now, and I could almost have convinced myself it was just a nightmare, if not for the sounds of their shuffling feet, their rapid, frustrated breathing.

With a shaking finger, I unlocked the phone and turned on the flashlight app, illuminating the space in front of me.

The little girl was standing there staring at me. She had her hands at her sides and I noticed her bottom lip was quivering with despair. Her pale face was looking at me as if pleading for help.

That was what my mind registered for a split second, but then it was gone - vanished like the smoke from a blown-out candle flame.

I couldn’t sleep after that - there was just no possible way. My entire body was trembling and I ran out of that room and straight back to the Nurses Station, thinking maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe we could still save her.

All I needed to do was look at the faces of my coworkers to know what had happened. The little girl had passed away. Their eyes were all full of tears and Sarah walked over to me and gave me a hug.

“I’m sorry, she went so fast,” was all she said - and I knew exactly who she was talking about.

“I just saw her,” I told them. “She was in the storage room. She asked me where her mommy was.”

Sarah and my other coworkers dropped their jaws at that. They could see by the look on my face I was serious, and on top of that I had already known she was dead before they told me.

An hour or so later, despite all that had happened, Sarah had to go take a short rest. Some nights we don’t even get that opportunity, winding up going home exhausted and malnourished, dehydrated and hypoglycemic, our feet sore and our heads aching after a day of working without stopping. These days that happens more often than I’d like to admit.

I was tasked with looking after her patient while she went to go eat something. One of her patients was the drunk driver who had killed the little girl and severely injured her parents. He was sleeping soundly, still drunkenly oblivious to what he had done.

After Sarah left, I began doing some documentation on the computer. It was a little after 3AM by that point and that’s about the time when bad things seem to happen. Especially on Friday nights with full moons when you’re working in the hospital.

Surely enough, I began to hear a sound coming from inside the patient’s room. It sounded like a voice talking. A little girl, I realized as I got closer.

My feet were stepping forward of their own accord at that point, I seemed to have no control as they carried me into the room and I stood there in the doorway, looking at the man in bed.

The little girl stood near the window, pointing at him. She cast no reflection in the glass behind her. On the other side of the bed, closest to me, there was a large shadow, its edges ill-defined but vaguely humanoid, seeming to move and gust in the air currents and then hovering over the man’s face.

“That’s him,” said the little girl, pointing at the man in bed. “He’s the one who took my mommy from me.”

The shadow-cloud suddenly descended, covering the man’s face like a pitch-black swarm of bees, like a sentient fog made of darkness. Where his eyes had been a second before, now I could only see a shadowy blur.

The man's legs began to jerk. His feet began to kick. His arms flew up and down and I called for help, just as the fog around his face disappeared, and with it the little girl. They both turned into nothing, ascending through the ceiling tiles, vanishing from my sight.

We lost two patients that night. One of them we were heartbroken over. The other one disturbed us (me in particular) for other reasons.

I couldn’t help but think of the people I have wronged over the years. The patients we couldn’t save. The little girl, especially.

Part of me can’t help but picture her standing over me, pointing at me while I lay asleep in bed, a shadowy entity hovering above me, deliberating. I imagine her pointing at me and saying, “Him. That’s the one who let me die.”

TCC