You ever hear something break and just know—instantly—that whatever shattered wasn't going to be fixed today?
That was the sound at 8:12 AM.
A sharp metallic crunch.
A pause.
And then… a siren that didn't belong to any emergency.
We all looked toward the ambulance bay.
The next sound was Camila's voice echoing down the hall from Room 418:
"Someone backed into the plot again."
What actually happened?
According to Kip—who now considered himself a "First Responder to Administrative Protocol Breaches"—a paramedic misjudged the clearance height of the garage bay door while transporting a post-op patient. The rig's rooftop equipment clipped the edge. Hard.
The result?
The door bent inwards like a crumpled soda can.
It didn't open.
It didn't close.
It just… hung there. Half-open. Half-judging.
A monument to poor spatial awareness.
Everett arrived seconds later. No words. Just stared.
Then he slowly pulled out a pen, walked up to the twisted garage panel, and wrote in neat block letters:
"Wounded. Do Not Resuscitate."
Meanwhile, inside:
ICU deliveries got rerouted through the front lobby.
Emergency patients had to be walked in manually through the staff entrance like VIPs with no entourage.
Someone tried to schedule a "garage exorcism."
And Radiology started betting on whether the door would finally fall off before or after OSHA paid a visit.
Marcus, trying to sound professional, paged over the loudspeaker:
"Code Tin Man. Repeat: Code Tin Man has been confirmed at Bay Two."
Which meant nothing.
But it made Trevor grab a Sharpie and tape a paper heart to the nearest AED machine. He labeled it "For Emergency Courage Only."
I ended up helping guide a patient through the chaos. She looked up at the hanging, mangled door and said, "It's like the building's trying to give up."
I didn't argue.
Jude walked by, squinted at the damage, and muttered:
"Some doors were never meant to close."
I still don't know if he was being poetic or prophetic.
Camila, of course, updated her board again:
"Hospital Garage Door: Now Enrolled in Physical Therapy. Prognosis: Bent but Not Broken."
Next to it, a stick-figure ambulance with big eyes and a speech bubble that read:
"Oopsie."
By noon, word had spread.
Facilities was "assessing the situation," which meant someone with a clipboard stood near the garage and frowned deeply every 15 minutes. Kip tried to redirect all delivery protocols using a hand-drawn flowchart. Nobody followed it.
A volunteer redirected two oxygen tanks to the cafeteria.
Someone's Amazon package got delivered to the morgue.
The chaplain was paged to OR for a "blessing on the door's rebirth."
(He did it. He brought incense. No one stopped him.)
And as for the paramedic?
He was fine. A little shaken. Rumor has it he went back to the ambulance, shut the door, and just sat there for ten minutes, breathing deeply and reevaluating his life choices.
Someone left him a sticker on the door handle:
"Green Dot – Still Trying."
At the end of the shift, Everett came through the breakroom looking tired, eyes distant.
He sat down with Jude, Trevor, and me, holding his coffee like it might vanish if he blinked.
Nobody spoke for a bit.
Then he finally said, "I once watched a guy close a trauma bay door on his own arm. Didn't realize it was his. Just kept yelling at it to open."
We all nodded.
Trevor asked, "What happened?"
Everett sipped his coffee. "He got promoted."