He opened his eyes, his fingers stilling. Maggie had gone without sex for three years? He recommenced the stroking. ‘Hell, Maggie, no wonder the condom broke. It’s probably past its expiry date.’
Maggie laughed, relieved by his deliberate humour. But she wasn’t fooled by it. Underneath his light words she could detect his horror at her non-existent sex life. Just one of the many differences between the two of them.
‘You don’t sound too upset by this,’ Nash murmured after her laughter subsided. ‘Aren’t you worried about getting pregnant? Or is this a safe time in your cycle?’
Even as he said it he wished he could take it back. He was sounding like an ignorant teenager. There was never a safe time. God, he was a doctor, he’d spent six years at uni learning that!
Maggie shut her eyes, savouring the closeness of him, his warmth as she reached for the shield she hadn’t needed in a long time. ‘I’m infertile.’
Nash’s hand stilled again. It had sounded casual but he could feel her tensing against him, her slouch less pronounced. ‘Oh?’
‘Two years of trying with my husband. Six years of IVF. Multiple attempts. Pregnancies none. Divorce one.’
He could hear the nonchalance she was forcing into her voice and was ashamed at the flood of relief sweeping through him. He didn’t need to be a psychologist to know that Maggie had suffered. After a few moments he kissed her head and went back to trailing his fingers along her skin.
‘That must have been hard,’ he said carefully. He didn’t want to betray his happiness in the face of Maggie’s misfortune.
Maggie shut her eyes. It had been the most gut-wrenching decade of her life. No wonder she and Peter had crashed and burned. Years of her being a hormonal wreck, in debt to their eyeballs and having robotic sex devoid of any expression of love had led to an inevitable conclusion.
‘Yes.’ Made worse by Peter marrying again within the year and having three children in quick succession.
‘Did they identify the problem?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘No. Idiopathic infertility. After hundreds of tests and tens of thousands of dollars no one could tell me why.’
Sitting this close, knowing her like he now did, Nash could sense her deep, deep regret. He’d seen her with the kids at work. She would have been a good mother. ‘I’m sorry.’
She turned her head and looked up at him, raising her palm to cup his face. ‘It was a long time ago.’ Hadn’t he said that to her about his sister’s death? She dropped her hand but continued to look at him. ‘I take it from the overwhelming relief in your eyes that babies aren’t on your agenda just yet?’
Nash shot her a sheepish grin. He felt like he’d dodged a bullet. ‘Babies aren’t on my agenda full stop.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘Really.’
‘Oh.’ Maggie looked away.
He looked down at the top of her head. ‘Is that so hard to believe?’
Maggie shrugged. ‘You’re training to be a paediatrician. I guess I assumed you liked them.’
‘It’s because of my profession I choose not to be a father. And my sister’s death. I see the bad stuff that can happen to kids every day. I’ve witnessed it personally. Parents can do everything right and then, whammy! Out of the blue some horrible cancer or awful disease comes at you. I’ve seen how it tears families apart. How it tore at my own family for years. I lived through the death of my ten-year-old sister and I won’t willingly set myself up for that kind of potential ever again.’
Maggie nodded. Obviously Nash’s scars ran deep. Not that she could blame him. How often had she comforted herself with the fact that she would never know the agony of some of the mothers she’d been involved with over the years? Being infertile had been a cruel blow but Nash had a point. At least she would never know the even crueller blow of losing a child.
‘Yes, losing a child must be deeply devastating.’
Nash rubbed his cheek against her hair. ‘And I guess I have some old-fashioned beliefs. I don’t think people should have children outside committed relationships. And I don’t plan on committing to anything other than my career for many years to come.’
Maggie heard the grim certainty in his voice. It was easy to mistake Nash as a laid-back country boy but he was as driven and career focused as the most dedicated city doctor.
She shifted against him and wriggled a bit to get comfortable. ‘It’s good that you know what you want.’
Nash felt his erection swell back to life and chuckled. ‘Well, I know what I want right now.’ He dropped the arm draped around her shoulders and cupped her breasts in his palms.
Maggie sucked in a breath as a lust-tipped arrow shot straight to her core. ‘I think it’s the same as me,’ she said, arching her back as he grazed his thumbs across appreciative nipples.
‘Lucky for us I have two condoms in my wallet. Two new ones.’
Maggie looked up at him. ‘I thought we just established there’s no need.’
Nash dropped his head and kissed the tip of her nose as he kept up the massage of her breasts. The thought of being inside her with no barrier between them was tempting as hell. ‘Old habits die hard.’ He kissed her nose again. ‘Just because you couldn’t fall with your ex doesn’t mean you won’t with me.’
Maggie smiled at his youthful cockiness. ‘You think your swimmers can manage what medical science couldn’t?’
He grinned back at her. ‘I don’t want to risk it.’
Maggie sobered. Wow. He really, really, really didn’t want kids. But then his right hand wandered from her breast, down her stomach and totally distracted her. She bit her lip and arched her back again. ‘Are two going to be enough?’
Nash chuckled, his erection straining as he gazed down at her, her nipples taut, her stomach quivering beneath his touch. ‘I’ll get creative,’ he murmured.
And he was. Very, very creative. All night long.
Two weeks later both Nash and Maggie found themselves on a run of nights together, the first time their shifts had coincided since their one-off night of passion. Maggie expected things to be awkward. At least a little. But he smiled at her in all his jeans-clad glory, a secretive I’ve-seen-you-naked-but-it’s-okay smile when their gazes first met and she knew it was going to be all right.
Okay, yes, she’d spent two weeks reliving that night and all its wonder over and over in her head. She dreamt about it. About him. About his hands and what he’d done with them. His mouth and where he’d put it. And the pleasure he’d rained down on her in a frenzy of desire.
But they’d made a deal. One night only. And she had no intention of welshing on it. Even if sleeping in her bed with his smell embedded in her sheets and his touch, his taste embedded in her memories, was driving her crazy. What she had was a prime case of lust and she was fairly certain she wouldn’t die from denial.
And the night didn’t allow any time for either of them to psychoanalyse their night of hot sweaty sex. They hit the ground running and didn’t stop. Maggie was in charge of the shift and a retrieval arrived as soon as handover finished. Billy Sugdeon, a five-year-old immersion, pulled from a back-yard fishpond with a ten-minute downtime.
The little boy was barely visible beneath the metallic space blanket as the paramedics pushed the gurney into one of the side rooms. Maggie and Gwen, Billy’s assigned nurse, worked with Nash to get the blond-haired, blue-eyed darling unhooked from all the transport monitors, one ear on the handover. They transferred him to the bed and began hooking him up to their monitors.
‘Are the parents here?’ Maggie asked as the retrieval crew prepared to depart.
‘Mum is. She’s waiting in the parents’ lounge. We told her you’d need an hour or so to get the little tyke settled but you’d go and get her when you were done.’
‘Thanks.’ Maggie nodded as she adjusted the ventilator settings.
Nash inspected the intra-osseous needle site. It had had been screwed into the patient’s tibia when no other venou
s access could be found. The boy was pale and cold despite the space blanket, his heart rate a little too slow for his liking.
‘Let’s warm him up and get some lines in,’ he said, flicking on the overhead warmer switch. ‘We’ll take him to CT after that.’
‘You want some sedation running?’ Maggie asked as Gwen went to get some blankets from the warmer.
‘No. We’ll let the retrieval stuff wear off and see what he does.’
Maggie and Nash worked together like they’d been doing it for years. Like they were professional colleagues only and their night of rapture had never happened. She assisted with several intravenous line placements, an-endotracheal tube change and a chest X-ray.
Billy’s limbs started to twitch as soon as the X-ray plate was removed from behind him.
‘Midazalom,’ Nash ordered.
Maggie administered the preprepared solution into Billy’s central line and watched as the seizure stopped. It wasn’t an unexpected development. Maggie knew that any injury to the brain, be it traumatic or hypoxic, usually resulted in some sort of seizure activity. She just hoped it was as the result of initial brain swelling and not a sign of more permanent damage.
‘I’ll write him up for a loading dose of phenytoin,’ Nash said, accessing the computerised medication chart at the bedside console and ordering the anti-convulsant therapy.
Maggie checked the drug with Gwen. ‘Why don’t we get Mum in now? It’ll give her some time before the CT scan.’
Nash nodded. ‘I’ll get her.’
Maggie watched surreptitiously a few minutes later as Nash approached the bedside with Billy’s mother. He was talking in a low voice, his voice soothing to the obviously emotional woman. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her hands were visibly shaking.
As she got closer and saw her son looking small and helpless amidst all the medical equipment she pressed her hand to her mouth and fresh tears welled in her eyes. Maggie could see her hesitate, falter and then crumple.
‘Whoa, there,’ Nash said as the sobbing woman collapsed against him. He put his arm around her shoulders, holding her upright. ‘Chair, Maggie.’
Maggie, well used to the emotional shock parents felt on seeing their children in a critical care environment, was two steps ahead of him and had the mobile stool behind the mother in an instant, allowing Nash to lower her gently. He knelt beside Billy’s mother and shot a grateful smile at Maggie. ‘Thanks,’ he murmured.
Maggie nodded admiring his way with the over-wrought woman reminding herself of their one-night-only deal. ‘No problems.’
Gwen and Nash accompanied their patient to CT twenty minutes later and Maggie watched them go with a heavy heart. She shook her head and wondered how many blond-haired, blue-eyed immersions she’d looked after. She’d lost count over the years.
She looked through the glass window separating the two side rooms at the red-headed burns boy next door. Why were they always red-headed? She wondered if anyone had done a study on hair colour and its correlation to specific types of accidents?
She laughed out loud, the sound echoing in the empty room strewn with discarded packaging, used linen and multiple bits of medical plastic that had wound up on the floor. It seemed like such a trivial thought but anything that kept her mind off the horrifying prospect that Billy might be severely brain damaged was more than welcome. He and his mother had managed to touch her heart.
Maggie couldn’t believe three hours had gone by. When she looked at the clock she was amazed to find it nudging midnight. She managed a quick breather to catch up with the other patients—there were two of concern.
Toby, who had been extubated yesterday after a few weeks of ventilation, appeared to be struggling again. And Ruby Wallace, a nine-year-old with a closed head injury thirty-six hours post-MVA, had a grumbling temp.
Thankfully Linda and another experienced nurse were helping to run the shift tonight and had been keeping an eye on these patients as well as the rest of the unit while managing all the breaks.
Billy returned from CT half an hour later. He’d warmed up, his heart rate had improved and he was reasonably stable. The CT showed global swelling but no specific areas of concern. Hopefully he was going to be one of the lucky ones.
No sooner had they got Billy settled back in when Linda entered the side room. ‘Nash, Ray needs you. Toby’s just not coping.’
Linda stayed to help Gwen get Billy sorted and Maggie went with Nash. The situation at bed three didn’t look good at all and one look at Toby had Maggie pulling the resus trolley closer.
Toby, who usually beamed at anyone who came close to the bed, even with an endotracheal tube sticking out his nose, was looking exhausted, using all his accessory muscles in his chest again to help him breathe. He certainly had no energy left to smile. His oxygen sats were eighty-five on a hundred per cent rebreather mask and his arterial blood gas was abysmal.
‘Shall we trial him on mask c-pap?’ Maggie queried.
Nash nodded. ‘I think so.’ He popped his stethoscope in his ears and listened, not liking the decreased air sounds over his right chest. ‘Let’s get an X-ray too.’
Toby’s father, Brett, was staying overnight and seemed very relieved when Nash explained to him that Toby would need to go back on non-invasive ventilation. Maggie could tell that watching his son struggle to breathe was increasingly distressing for the father too.
Toby wasn’t having any of it, though, fighting the claustrophobic confines of the mask. The harder he fought, the more he taxed his respiratory system. He was also in a lather of sweat, which made maintaining a good seal on the mask very difficult.
The X-ray showed a marked deterioration from the morning’s picture but no pnemothorax, as Nash had suspected. It took several doses of sedation to finally settle the boy with another blood gas finally showing an improvement in his gaseous exchange.
With the imminent crisis averted at bed three Maggie was able to grab her first cup of coffee. Considering it was almost three a.m. she was hanging for one. She made one for Nash too and brought it out to the central nurses’ station, plonking it down beside him where he sat at the doctor’s computer, making an electronic entry into Toby’s chart.
Nash looked up. He hadn’t had a chance tonight to think about their tryst but the smoulder in her fudge-brownie gaze put him straight back in her bed. ‘Thanks,’ he murmured.
Maggie’s breath stuttered to a halt at the heat in his loaded gaze. Watching him in action tonight should have helped to put him firmly in the colleague category, but his calm capability, his decisive authority, his dedication to his job made him even more desirable.
She nodded and turned away. The night had been crazy and there was much to catch up on. She didn’t have time to moon over his blond good looks. She sat at the computer console furthest away from him, planning to review all the patients’ charts. She’d just clicked on the first one when Linda called her over to bed eight, where she was doing a meal relief.
‘I don’t like the look of her, Maggie.’
One look at Ruby Wallace and Maggie could understand Linda’s concern. She was tachycardic, hypotensive and febrile. The little girl had been in a high-speed car accident two days ago. She’d been restrained but her head had still smashed sideways into the window, resulting in a large subdural haemorrhage. She’d had emergency neurosurgery to evacuate the blood but was still in a coma requiring ventilatory support.
‘She’s been grumbling along most of the day with this fever but just in the last twenty minutes she’s spiked her temp and her heart rate. Her oxygen requirement has increased. Her lactate on her blood gas is rising and her blood pressure’s bottoming out. I think she may be septic.’
Maggie nodded. ‘Nash?’ she called as she grabbed the resus trolley again.
Nash wasn’t sure if it was because he was so attuned to her or whether it was the note of concern in Maggie’s voice but he stood immediately, joining her and Linda at bed eight. He listened to their concerns, more than a
little alarmed at the deterioration in Ruby’s condition and the rising lactate.
‘Yes. I think she may be septic too. Let’s get some blood cultures and give her a ten per kilo bolus of colloid for her blood pressure to start with.’
Maggie accessed the arterial line for the blood while Linda hooked up the extra fluid.
‘Her abdo’s quite distended,’ Nash mused, palpating the tense dome. They’d been treating Ruby for an illeus since admission due to her lack of bowel sounds and bruising from the seat belt. Abdominal ultrasounds had shown no acute trauma but they’d kept her nil by mouth while her gut recovered from the impact.
‘Yes,’ Linda agreed, ‘I reckon it’s blown up just in the last hour.’
Maggie added the blood to the culture bottles, a heavy foreboding settling in her bones. She reached up to the monitor to adjust the alarm settings as Ruby’s heart rate climbed to one hundred and eighty. The little girl started to gag and cough and then vomited. Bilious liquid spilled from her mouth and nose, streaming down her face and over the sheets.
Maggie quickly whipped out the yankeur sucker and turning Ruby’s head to the side to try to prevent aspiration, she suctioned the girl’s airway while Linda aspirated the nasogastric tube. Alarms trilled all around them as Ruby’s heart rate again breached the set limits.
‘I’ll call the surgical reg for a consult,’ Nash said, walking briskly to the nearest phone.
Maggie wiped Ruby’s face with a towel and used a couple more to sop up the excess stomach contents around her. Dr Hannah Oakland arrived fifteen minutes later as the second ten per kilo bolus was almost finished. Nash could see it was having no impact on the flagging blood pressure. ‘Let’s start some inotropes,’ he ordered.
Maggie and Kylie, Ruby’s nurse who had returned from her tea break, drew up some dopamine while Hannah and Nash consulted.
‘You want an ultrasound?’ Nash asked her
Her Baby Out of the Blue/A Doctor, A Nurse: A Christmas Baby Page 21