Hannah Miller was working the graveyard shift, like she does every Saturday, at Saint Charles Children’s Hospital. Not many nurses at the hospital liked working this shift, nurse Miller on the other hand found this to be one of the more enjoyable shifts, because by this time of night all of her patients should be asleep. With all the children being asleep, there weren’t many patient demands throughout the night, making her job a whole lot easier. However the night of February 13th was a total different story, it was about three hours into her shift when all the lights in the hospital shut off and the security alarms started screaming. It was within five to ten when the lights flashed back on and the alarms went silent; the nurses got up from their desk and looked back and forth down the hallways, but everything seemed normal and nothing out of place.
“The kids are probably all awake now, we should probably go check on them and get them back to sleep.” Nurse Miller suggested.
Miller made her rounds, checked on each and every one of her patients, calmed them down, got them what they needed, took vitals, and got them back to sleep. The last patient she had to check on was little Megan Smith, when she walked into the room Megan’s hospital bed was empty and her IV tubes were dangling from the plastic bed railing. Hannah looked around the room and thought maybe during the blackout she had to go to the bathroom and since she can’t pull her own IV pole and couldn’t get a nurse's attention she went without it. So she checked the bathroom only to find it vacant as well.
Miller ran back to the nurses station hoping she would find Megan there looking for a nurse, but she was nowhere to be found. She knew there was nothing else for her to do but send out a missing patient code, so that’s exactly what she did, and thus began the search for little Megan Smith. Every available nurse and doctor were on the hunt, and there were police officers swarming the building and the surrounding area in hopes of finding her. Hannah Miller was given the grueling task of calling the Smith’s and informing them that their five year old daughter had gone missing under her supervision.
Meanwhile Megan Smith was sitting in a van with two couples, trembling and bewildered, she was wondering who these people were, where she was, and why she was out of the hospital. Megan could only remember being woken up by the piercing sound of alarms, being jerked out of bed, and carried through the pitch black hallways of the hospital by a running man. At first she assumed it was just nurse Miller taking her to a different part of the hospital due to the blackout, until she felt a gust of icy winter wind smack across her face. “There’s no way nurse Miller would be taking me outside, it’s cold, snowy, and we never risked me being late for my medicine” Megan thought to herself. Even though Megan was only five years old she had caught on to her pill schedule and knew if she did have her medicine pumped through her IV every ten hours she would get very sick. Only, Megan didn’t know that if she did happen to miss a dose of her medication she would only be able to survive for another three hours, at most. She sat in the van thinking about her family and her nurses, about how much she loved all of them, and that surely by now they had noticed she was missing and someone would be there to rescue her shortly.
Hannah Miller was sitting in the little girls room and looking around for any kind of clue to where she may have gone, when she noticed something out from underneath the bed. She bent down and pulled the brown, plush object out from under the bed, it was Megan’s stuffed bear. Hannah knew she never left her room without her bear, she didn’t even go to the bathroom without carrying her bear with her. Megan had told Hannah the story that was behind her favorite stuffed animal one night when she was woken up by a thunderstorm. The bear was a gift given to Megan by her birth parents, it was the last thing they had given her before they put her up for adoption and disappeared from her life. According to her adoptive parents, her biological parents were a young couple who were involved with drugs and were apart of a street gang in the city, they weren’t capable nor willing to take care of a baby, let alone a baby who was sick. Hannah was happy she remembered how attached Megan is to her bear because when she told the police this information they came to conclusion that little Megan Smith had to have been kidnapped. The police chief believed that the power outage was apart of the kidnap and ensured a clean escape.
“Her kidnappers must have messed with the electricity cords, cutting the lights and sounding the alarms, so that they weren’t seen or heard during the process of taking her.” declared the police chief.
The clues were helpful to her rescue, however they didn’t give any information as to who had her, where they took her, or what they were going to do to her. At this time she was an hour late for her medication and was already getting sick. The two couples were starting to get irritated because she was puking all over their van and had been crying and complaining for the past half hour. They parked parked the van in a lot behind a run down bar and her four kidnappers jumped out, leaving Megan in the van alone. She could hear them outside fighting with one another about what to do with her
“We can’t just keep her in the van while she throws up” one of them said
“Well we can’t take her back to the hospital and get arrested for kidnapping” someone replied
“I don’t get why she’s puking so much, guys” one of the females said.
Megan realized they obviously didn’t know how sick she was or else they wouldn’t be questioning why she was throwing up so much. “These people know nothing about me, they don’t know anything about me being sick, they don’t have any of my medication, they don’t know my illness and I’m trapped with them until someone finds me” she thought to herself. About five minutes later the fighting stopped and all she could hear was the beat from the loud music blaring inside the dive bar. She was expecting the doors to swing open and they all pile back into the van, but nothing happened, she sat alone in the empty van for a hour and a half before a bar employee found the van. The employee called the police to report the abandoned van, but by the time the police arrived Megan only had about half an hour to get back to the hospital and take her medicine.
Megan was rushed into the hospital in critical condition, with only ten minutes to spare the doctors didn’t expect to recover, however nurse Miller would never lose hope in Megan. She did everything in her power to be sure that Megan pulled through, and that is exactly what she did, after a couple of closely monitored days in the ICU Megan returned to her happy self. it was only a few hours after finding Megan the police found the kidnappers inside the same bar they had left their van behind. Later that week Hannah Miller found out the kidnappers were actually her biological parents; they were still apart of the gang and they admitted to taking Megan. They also admitted that the gang leader had ordered them to get their daughter back or else he would kill them and their child. Hannah was confused to what the gang leader could possibly want with a five year old little girl, but found out that there was file in the hospital record system that has the couples names down as Megan’s biological parents. So with Megan being in the hospital long term due to her illness, the record was bound to come up and trace back to identify the couple, which could also identify the gang. However none of the kidnappers or anyone else in the gang knew the severity of Megan’s disease, nor did they know the responsibility and challenges that came along with taking her out of the hospital. Although she will never forget what she went through, Megan overcame the fear being kidnapped left her with.