Mother's Mercy Medical Center - NO CC

Dr. Harper looked up at the incoming MedEvac chopper and savored the few seconds of solitude afforded her by the deafening roar of the rotor blades. Too soon though, the helicopter touched down on the rooftop landing pad, and before the turbines had even had a chance to start winding down, she was rushing across the tarmac to the side door where two paramedics were unloading the stretcher.

"What do we have?" she asked.

"34 year old female, MVA, fractured pelvis, severe lacerations to the lower right leg! Responding to questions when we arrived on-scene, but by the time the chopper showed up, she was non-responsive! Showing signs of shock, severe blood loss!" shouted the paramedic over the roar of the MedEvac.

Harper glanced down at the woman on the stretcher. The paramedic's diagnosis looked spot-on to her, and for something like this, there was no question that the woman was going to need emergency surgery to keep the blood loss from killing her. She and the two paramedics wheeled the stretcher into the MedEvac dispatch center and into the waiting elevator. As they descended into the hospital, Harper silently cursed for the thousandth time the architect who had designed the hospital's Emergency Services department… that idiot had been more concerned with the aesthetics of a rooftop helipad above the specialists' offices than the speed needed to get patients from the chopper to the emergency OR.

The elevator doors opened and Harper steered the stretcher through the connecting hallway and into the main interior entrance of the ER. The PA on call was already scrubbed in and in the department's trauma room, and they quickly had the patient transferred to the OR bed in the center of the room. The staff started cutting away the shredded remains of the patient's clothing, and suddenly Harper saw something that instantly changed her entire approach to treating her.

"This woman is pregnant. Get me an ultrasound and call the NICU, have them prep for an emergency delivery. Get Dr. Lane down here now."



The attending staff sprang into action, and in short order, they had an IV hooked up and the NICU had confirmed Dr. Lane was on his way down from the second floor. Dr. Harper focused her attention on keeping the mother alive, irrigating the deep lacerations on her leg and preparing sutures from the nearby supply cabinets to close the wound after it had been sterilized. Dr. Lane arrived and quickly took charge, evaluating the mother and (thank heaven) confirming that the infant was still alive as well. However, because of the nature of the injury, he did not feel that the child could safely be carried to term, and with the mother being 33 weeks pregnant, he judged the best course of action for both mother and child was an emergency delivery. Knowing that Dr. Lane was better prepared to lead such a procedure, Dr. Harper stepped back to assist.

As it turned out though, she never got the chance to assist in any significant way, as Dr. Lane decided that the facilities upstairs in the neonatal ward were better suited for this particular patient. Dr. Harper began to follow as the patient was moved past the curtained wards to the patient elevator on the other side of the ER, but the triage nurse flagged her down and redirected her to another incoming MVA patient. Harper rushed out the main ER entrance into the outdoor ambulance bay, where two EMTs were unloading a gurney. The patient's injuries presented as less extensive than those of the mother she had just been handling, but they were still enough to warrant moving back into the OR. In particular, he had suffered severe facial lacerations from the shattered glass of his truck's windshield, his jaw looked to be broken, and his face was slick with blood. He was conscious though, and responsive to stimuli, though he was less concerned with his own condition than Harper would have expected, instead just asking over and over "How is she? How is she?" in a kind of slurred daze. Harper eventually was able to administer enough morphine to take the edge off the worst of his pain, and she asked who he was talking about.

"The woban I hid- id she alive? How id she? I didn see her, an den all ob a sudden she wad righ dere in fron of be, an oh by god, id she alive? Please say she's alrigh... please..." the man gasped out. Dr. Harper looked up at the paramedics, who filled her in on the details of the accident, and she realized that this man had been involved in the same MVA as the woman who had just disappeared up the elevator to the neonatal ward.

"We'll take good care of her, I promise," said Harper, "but right now, we need to make sure you're alright too- hold still, I need to check out some of those cuts on your face and I need you to stop talking so I can take a closer look at your skull." Dr. Harper could already tell that the man's jaw would need fairly extensive reconstruction, and some of the deeper cuts were sure to leave extensive scarring without corrective surgery. She marked his chart to refer him to the hospital's reconstructive and cosmetic surgery specialists when he was discharged from the ER.



Later that day, Harper took advantage of her break to visit the NICU on the floor above, concerned for the health of the newborn she knew had been successfully delivered early that morning. The mother had still not recovered from the anesthesia she had been placed under, but she had been transferred to the inpatient surgery wing on the floor above, as it was beyond the capabilities of the ER or the Maternity ward to handle a pelvic reconstruction on the level she would need. Looking in through the NICU windows at a room that was somewhat more cheerful than most hospital suites, Harper saw Dr. Lane peering into one of the incubators at the tiny infant. Lane glanced up and saw her, and walked over to the door.

"He'll be fine, this little guy is pretty tough! Give him a few weeks, and he'll be in as good of shape as if he'd come into this world when his mama'd been planning on meeting him!"

"Oh good," said Harper. "I actually had the guy from the other truck downstairs earlier- his face was smashed all to hell, but all he could think about was how the woman in the other car was doing. I didn't tell him she was pregnant, since I didn't want to hit him with that right off the bat, but once he wakes up from having his jaw re-set, he'll be so relieved."

"It's not all sunshine and roses I'm afraid," said Lane. "Mother and child should both be fine in the long run, but she'll be in physical therapy for months- her pelvis is almost completely shattered on the left side. It'll be a long time before she can even walk with a cane… I don't envy you that conversation!"

"Lucky me…" said Dr. Harper. "I'm going up to the cafeteria- do you want anything?"

"I'd love a cup of coffee, if you're buying!" joked Lane.



Dr. Harper didn't always have the time to keep track of patients after they left the ER; she was, after all, a trauma specialist, but for the cases that really stuck in her mind, she tried to keep track of people as they moved through their treatment. Several weeks later, the man she'd evaluated in the ER had successfully undergone facial reconstruction surgery in the hospital's cosmetic surgery office, and to all outward appearances, was back to his old self. He still blamed himself for the accident though, and even after he knew that both mother and child were going to pull through, it was all he could seem to think about. After a few consultations, Harper had referred him to one of the trauma therapists in the specialist's wing of the hospital, and he was visiting the wood-paneled offices of a psychiatrist over there twice a week. While she knew it was a slow process, Harper was glad to hear that he was gradually making progress.

Dr. Lane's predictions for their emergency delivery infant proved accurate, as his development surprised even the NICU veterans. His mother didn't improve quite as quickly- she was crushed when she heard that they'd had to do an emergency delivery, blaming herself for missing her baby's birth. She was also still in and out of surgery- a shattered pelvis is no easy fix, after all, and she was quickly getting sick of those pea-green walls and having to take a shower from a wheelchair got old fast. Still, she was down in the NICU to see her baby every chance she had, and while she might be sad to have been unconscious for her baby's first breaths, Harper was sure that this was a mom who would make every effort to be there for the other big moments in her new child's life. The baby would still be in the NICU for a while too, which might be for the best, thought Harper, since his mother still had a long course of physical therapy coming, and the both of them being in the hospital at least kept them close to one another.

Yes, it would have been better for them if she'd never had to see any of these people, she thought, but it was stories like this, getting to see people on the road to recovery after a tragedy, or ensuring that a new life started with its best foot forward, that had inspired her to take up medicine in the first place, and she never once had had cause to regret it.



I'm sure you're all shocked to see me unveil yet another enormous lot, right? Anybody? No? OK.

I've wanted to try creating a hospital for quite a while now, and since an Obstetrics/Neo-Natal wing seemed like a good fit for the current challenge, it was enough to give me the last push I needed to go in and create one. You have all the wards and departments described in the story above, an Emergency Room on the first floor, Obstetrics and Neo-Natal on the second, In-Patient Surgery on the third, and the obligatory bland hospital cafeteria on the fourth, as well as things like on-call staff offices, a chapel, and a pharmacy. In the specialists' offices, the second floor houses a psychiatrist's office, the third, a physical therapist, and the fourth, a cosmetic surgery office, with the MedEvac helipad located on the roof (and in entirely the wrong place from a medical standpoint, as Dr. Harper pointed out above!). There are also extensive parking areas around the building, including a multi-story parking garage in the back corner (we'll all just agree to ignore the fact that there's no physical way for cars on the upper levels to get there, right? )

This is a huge lot, no denying it- 5x6, and $1.4M+ worth of stuff, so you can probably expect it to play slower than most lots you're used to. As uploaded, it's zoned residential, since that allows more flexibility in gameplay; however I can easily imagine using this lot as a community location as well- it actually has a few community lot objects here and there already, you'll notice.

No CC anywhere (though this is a lot that I could imagine many of you will want to renovate and add in some of the wonderful hospital-themed CC that exists out there), and I did playtest a clone of the lot to find problems, which should all be fixed now. If I missed any, let me know, and I'll get right on it as soon as I can.

Here's to your good health!

Lot Size: 5x6
Lot Price (furnished): $1,413,675

Additional Credits:
While I could never seem to find the original source, the inspiration for the exterior of this lot comes from the image attached at the end of the in-game screenshots, so inspiration credit to whoever designed that.