Mercy Memorial was thirty-four minutes away by ambulance. Pony worked on Mia the whole ride.
He didn’t sugarcoat it. Second and third degree burns over thirty-eight percent of her body. Inhalation injury possible. The next seventy-two hours would tell us if she’d live.
I held her right hand. The left was bandaged.
She was unconscious by then. The morphine had taken her.
“Frank,” Pony said. “Why don’t you have insurance?”
I didn’t answer for a minute.
“Karen’s medical bills,” I finally said. “When she had cancer. Three years of treatment. I sold the shop. I sold the house. I sold everything. By the time she was gone, I owed four hundred grand. I had to declare bankruptcy. After that, no carrier would touch me.”
Pony nodded slow. “You should have called somebody, brother.”
“I didn’t want to be the guy who always needs help.”
“That’s not how it works in this club. You know that.”
I knew that.
Mia coded once in the ambulance. Pony brought her back in nine seconds.
The first surgery lasted six hours. The second one lasted four. There would be eleven more over the next eighteen months.
Mia lived.
She was in the hospital for sixty-three days. Skin grafts on her arms, her chest, the right side of her neck.
I never left the hospital once. The brothers brought me food. They brought me clothes. They sat with Mia when I needed to shower. Reverend Bill prayed over her every morning. Tank handled every form, every bill, every legal matter.
The bill, by the way, never came.
The morning after Mia was admitted, Pony walked into a meeting with Mercy’s board and told them they were eating the cost. He told them why. The board agreed in eleven minutes.
The Riverside General bill never came either, because we sued.
Tank’s lawsuit against Doctor Hammond and Riverside General was filed within a week. The Iron Saints’ charity arm, which Tank runs, paid for everything.
The discovery process turned up something we hadn’t expected.
Hammond had refused treatment to at least nine other patients in the previous four years. All uninsured. All from poor neighborhoods. Two had died. One was a sixteen-year-old kid named DeShawn whose appendix ruptured in a Riverside parking lot after Hammond sent him away.
Tank found those families. He brought their cases together with mine.
The trial took fourteen months. Hammond lost his medical license. Riverside General settled for an amount I’m not allowed to disclose, but it built a free pediatric burn clinic in our county that opened the year Mia turned ten.
We named it after Karen.
