Dr Graham's Marriage

by Meredith Webber

  As the others chatted he studied Gabi, trying to work out if she was feeling a similar amount of stress.

  Not noticeably. In fact, she was talking and listening and smiling with unnecessary animation—showing off for Josh no doubt—while all Alex could think of was that morning's kiss and her passionate response—cut short by the 'no' she'd kept repeating.

  A sudden cessation of conversation made him look around, to find all three of his companions smiling expectantly at him.

  Damn! Someone must have asked him a question. Had it been about Edinburgh?

  Or maybe his mother's progress?

  'I think he goes back into the specialty programme next year,' Gabi said, 'though whether they'll take him if he's still comatose I don't know.'

  The others laughed and Alex added teasing to the score he had to settle with his ex-wife. Though that morning hadn't been a tease—Gabi's reaction had been genuine, which made the 'no' even more confusing.

  Josh was talking about the restructuring of the children's ICU and isolation rooms.

  'Of course, we've had to upgrade the isolation rooms since meningococcal raised its ugly head.'

  'Have you had a bad season of it?' Alex asked, pleased to have something other than Gabi to focus on, and knowing the disease was always worse in winter.

  'Bad enough,' Josh told him. 'We vaccinate all children who come in contact with anyone who develops it, but we're looking into mass vaccinations of the two-to five-year-olds.'

  'But what about the other group in danger—the late teens and early twenties?' Kirsten asked.

  'At the moment we can't do them all. I think now hospital staff and GPs are more aware of the signs and symptoms we should be able to treat it more quickly and effectively, though once it takes hold there's little that can be done.'

  The conversation turned the talk to other 'new' diseases, which, although they'd always existed, were now becoming less rare.

  'Someone's buzzing,' Kirsten said, and all of them patted at clothes as if expecting to find a pager in a pocket.

  Josh withdrew his and looked at the little screen.

  'It's not me,' he said.

  'Mine's upstairs so it's not me either,' Alex remarked, then his chest tightened as he watched Gabi scrabble around in her handbag, finally pulling out the small black receiver.

  'Me!' she said. 'Now, if I can find my phone in here— why didn't you tell me to buy smaller handbags, Kirsten?— I'll find out who wants me.'

  Alex relaxed. If it was the hospital she'd have recognised the number. But anxiety lingered as she stood up and walked away from them to make her call, and grew to near panic when he saw her face pale.

  She walked back to the table.

  'I'm sorry, I have to go. A burst water main in one of those new developments up on the hills on the edge of town has caused a landslide. Several apartment blocks have come down. I've been called up for the rescue helicopter.'

  The smile that wobbled on her lips broke Alex's composure.

  'You can't go. You're not properly trained.' He was on his feet and moving towards the door. 'I'll go. I'll take your car.'

  Gabi caught his arm and stopped his progress.

  'Go up and check your pager. You've probably been called to the hospital or the site. You can't muck up the emergency response rosters.'

  She glanced back at Josh.

  'Keep your pager handy, too,' she said, then she slipped past Alex, who was still considering her words about emergency response. She was right. When disaster struck it was imperative everyone obeyed orders or there'd be further chaos. Maybe Gabi would remain in the chopper, treating patients as they were ferried to hospital.

  Gabi raced down to her car and drove swiftly to the rescue service base. The helicopter was on the pad outside its shed, the motor running but the rotors not yet moving.

  'Good girl!' She was so pleased to see it was Pete piloting the machine she didn't object to the 'girl'. 'That's Chad's motorbike coming in now. He'll be handling things up here for you. It's a simple operation. Apparently some people on the upper floors of some of the units have managed to get to the roof—with their mobiles. The whole structure's so unstable we don't want to put more pressure on it by putting more than one person down there—and a lightweight at that. You'll stay harnessed, and can check them out, then we can lift them off in order of the severity of their injuries.'

  He was strapping her into her harness as he explained, reminding her of the equipment attached to it, especially the two-way radio which would keep her in contact with the helicopter.

  Chad arrived and Pete climbed into his seat, leaving Chad to ensure Gabi was buckled into hers. Then the rotors roared and the small aircraft lifted, Chad indicating to Gabi to put on the headphones hooked over the back of her seat.

  Once airborne, they could easily pick out their destination on the other side of the city, as arc lights mounted on cranes already lit the scene. Coming closer, the buildings looked like a child's model that had been carelessly kicked so it lay tilted and in pieces on the ground.

  'I'll come in over the lights and you'll see where we're heading. We'll hook a second line and double harness onto you, Gabi, so we can be lifting people off while you're working. Ask for any equipment you need.'

  Pete was so matter-of-fact Gabi had no time to feel anything but the rush of adrenalin any emergency provoked, though when they were hovering over the buildings, and Chad attached her harness to the winch line, a tremor of fear rattled her bones and stiffened her sinews.

  Not now, she told it as Chad went over her instructions again. He was watching her with concern and she knew he'd have preferred to be going in her place, as Alex would have, but she was small and light and less likely to cause any further problem to the building's balance.

  Then the helicopter dropped until the people beneath it could almost touch it. Gabi slid forward and, as Pete had suggested she'd be doing, she jumped out of the machine, the harness taking her weight, Chad above her, judging to perfection when to stop the winch.

  A babble of voices crowded her ears, though the noise of the helicopter was making it difficult to hear.

  'My husband,' a woman said. 'He's bleeding badly. He got me up here, then collapsed. And I think Mrs Cochrane's had a heart attack.'

  Great! Gabi thought, but she'd seen enough, and she unhitched the second line and used the double harness to hook up a woman and young baby.

  'There are two people who need urgent help,' she told Pete through the two-way, while strapping in the woman and trying to calm the others. 'I'll need stretchers for both of them, so I'm unhooking my line harness and I'll send someone else up in it with a woman and baby in the other one. She's ready now, Chad.'

  'You're supposed to stay hitched up,' Pete told her.

  'As far as weight's concerned, I'm only taking the place of the people you're lifting off,' she reminded him. 'You'll need to take these first people to safety, so I'll stay here and stabilise the injured ones. Just drop the stretchers before you go.'

  Pete stopped arguing, and the first group of survivors was winched back into the helicopter, then the lines were lowered again, with the stretchers and the emergency equipment which was kept strapped to them.

  Mrs Cochrane was breathing and her pulse seemed strong enough, so Gabi found the man with the bleeding head. He was unconscious but there was nothing she could do about that here. She bound his head and with help from his wife and another man rolled him onto the stretcher. She could hear the helicopter returning and she decided she'd have it lift this patient first, then return for the second one.

  She knelt beside Mrs Cochrane, all movement hampered by the tilted floor beneath their feet. The woman was deeply unconscious, though her pupils showed a response to the light Gabi shone in her eyes. With help from the same people, Gabi rolled the woman onto the second stretcher. When the helicopter returned, she waited for the wire rope to be lowered and caught it, attaching it to the stretcher with the head-injured man, checking
all the cables were properly secured and not twisted.

  'You can lift him now,' she said to Chad, but she stayed where she was, steadying the stretcher until it was out of reach.

  'Now you,' she told the injured man's wife, and she strapped her into the second harness. 'Up you go.'

  .'That just leaves four of us,' the man who'd been helping said. 'Mrs Cochrane will go next, I'm guessing.'

  Gabi nodded. 'And one of you,' she told him, nodding towards another younger man who was over by the edge, looking down at the people working to get victims out of the rubble beneath them.

  'He can go,' her helper said. 'He's younger and got more to live for. Besides, it's a long time since I've been on a rooftop with a pretty girl.'

  The chopper returned and once again Gabi hooked a stretcher to the first cable, then, as it rose, she crossed the roof to tell the young man he was next. The light from the chopper hit his face and she recognised him. Robin Blair! Was that his name?

  She called to him, felt something give, then heard a roar and blackness enveloped her.

  Gabi looked up into Alex's eyes, so dark with pain they looked almost black, and smiled.

  'I felt the earth move,' she whispered hoarsely. 'Was it like that for you?'

  He watched consciousness fade from her eyes almost before they closed, and gripped her hand more tightly. He knew he should be talking to her, trying to pierce the coma enveloping her, but he was too tired, and too grateful she was alive, and too wrung out emotionally to do anything but sit there and will her to get better.

  'Any change?'

  He turned to see his mother, with Fred behind her, wheeling her in a wheelchair.

  Alex shook his head, then realised there had been a change.

  'She woke up and spoke, but apparently she did that in the ambulance as well.' She'd said 'Where's Alex?' according to reports, and that had kept his hope alive.

  'Let me sit with her for a while,' his mother said. 'You need some rest and I'm not going anywhere. Her parents will be here tomorrow, but until they arrive you'll have to bear the brunt of it, so rest now while you have the chance.'

  It made sense—when didn't his mother make sense?— but he didn't want to leave Gabi, even for a minute.

  'Come on, Alex,' Fred said quietly. 'I'll take you home and wait there so I can drive you back as soon as you've had a sleep. Your mother won't rest until you do. You know that.'

  Alex looked at the man he'd resented for so long, and nodded to acknowledge the truth of his words. Then he kissed Gabi, kissed his mother and left, not resenting at all the hand Fred rested on his shoulder.

  Gabi lay in her nether world for six days. Her parents alternated at her bedside, with Alex there most of the time as well, leaving only to eat and sleep, apologising to the hospital but knowing they could get an agency doctor to take his place in A and E. After all, he'd only been a fill-in himself.

  So he was with her when she finally, and fully, awoke.

  'I'm in hospital? Our hospital?'

  She took in her surroundings with the lost expression he'd seen on so many recovering patients, then alarm flickered in her eyes and she started up in the bed, looking around frantically, holding up her hands as if to inspect them.

  'Hell! Am I bleeding? Did I bleed? Did everyone know I'm suspect?'

  The words made no sense at all to Alex, who tried to calm her, but as her cries became increasingly hysterical, and it seemed to be his presence that was upsetting her more than anything, he left the room to find Catherine Cross, the doctor who was in charge of her case.

  'Keep Alex away,' he heard Gabi say as Catherine walked into the room.

  The words scored through his skin and he felt a coldness as if they'd cut his heart and blood was leaking out. She'd wanted him when she was semi-conscious, but now her senses had returned she'd rejected him again.

  'She doesn't know what she's saying,' Gabi's mother told him. She'd been in the room and, perhaps realising he'd heard Gabi's rejection, had come out to be with him.

  To comfort him?

  There was no comfort. He'd been at the triage area over a hundred metres from the building when the second collapse had occurred and, on hearing Gabi had been trapped, had joined the men digging by hand, desperate to reach survivors before air pockets ran out. Though his desperation had all been for the woman he loved.

  Loved dearly and for ever. And now it couldn't be too late for them to sort things out. Fate couldn't be so cruel. Not to Gabi, who deserved at least to know how he felt about her, and to hear him apologise for all the pain he'd caused her in the past.

  So he'd dug, and they'd found children, and other adults, but he hadn't been the one to find her. Someone else had, when the long night and another day had ended, and they had been finding fewer and fewer people alive.

  'Why was she so worried about blood?'

  Nancy Kerr's question jolted him and he turned to look at Gabi's mother who was suffering nearly as much as he was.

  'What did you say?'

  'I wondered why Gabi was so upset about blood and bleeding. It's not as if she's ever minded it. Out on the farm she was always the one to patch up wounded animals. She had a cat she stitched up with embroidery thread when she was only six.'

  Alex had heard the story before, but he nodded acknowledgement of the retelling of the tale while his mind whirled back to Gabi's first coherent words—if you didn't count asking for him and questioning the moving of the earth.

  'Did I bleed?' she'd said. Then what? He frowned as he tried to recall the fragment of memory.

  Something about being suspect.

  And something had happened to change her direction in life—Alana had suggested perhaps someone young had died. But what if it hadn't been that? What if it had been that common but dreaded occurrence, a needle-stick injury?

  She'd kissed him, then panicked when things might have gone further. She'd be covered for hep. B—all hospital personnel had regular shots—but did she fear HIV?

  He kissed his ex-mother-in-law, pushed her back towards Gabi's room and said, 'You stay with her. I'll be right back.'

  He headed for the lift and down to A and E. He wouldn't be able to access results of her blood tests—it was near impossible to access your own—but if she'd had a needle-stick injury in A and E there'd be an incident report. Could he access them?

  Though even if the donor was positive for HIV Gabi wouldn't know if she was—not yet! But the injury could have happened six months ago and she'd now tested positive.

  His heart faltered, then he realised that if that had been the case there'd have been a notation on her file—a warning for all staff to be double-gloved—and he'd read her file every day. Which meant it had to be a recent injury and as yet unconfirmed.

  He sighed as the lift spilled him out on the ground floor. He'd been forgetting her over-developed sense of responsibility. However slight the chances—and the figures were so slight they barely counted—Gabi wouldn't want to risk passing the infection on to anyone, let alone someone she loved.

  Or had loved?

  No, he refused to believe their love was dead. She wouldn't have kissed him the way she had the morning he'd gone down to talk to her. Wouldn't have looked at him, when she'd woken briefly the day before, with so much love in her eyes he'd felt his bones melt.

  Roz was at the desk.

  'How is she?'

  'Awake, but there's something bothering her. I think it goes back to her last week on night duty. Do you keep the incident reports going back that far or have they gone into central filing?'

  Roz crossed to the filing cabinet.

  'You're not supposed to have access to other people's incident reports,' she told him, but she'd pulled out a drawer and was riffling through it. 'But I could talk to myself as I read it. Last night on night duty. Needle-stick injury, donor refused to have blood tested. Name here, and an address in Sydney, so it's a bit difficult to check him out, but a refusal to be tested usually signifies the donor
either knows he's positive for something or suspects he might be but doesn't want to know.'

  'But wouldn't Gabi have had HIV prophylaxis just in case?' he demanded.

  Roz raised her eyebrows.

  'Come on, Alex, you know how many needle-stick injuries there are in A and E each year—hundreds, if not thousands. If the patient's a known case of either HIV or AIDS, then, yes, we treat immediately—but for every needle-stick injury? That's why we try to always get donor blood. And most times we do—sometimes we don't.'

  'But Gabi won't know until she's been tested at what— three and six months?'

  'I think that's right, but think about it. Even if you suspected you might have contracted it, how would you feel?'

  'Numb?' Alex suggested.

  Or determined to get the most out of life, to try new things, get a new image, live life to the full? What had Gabi said to him that day he'd arrived? Something about dancing all night?

  Well, Gabi Graham, he said to himself as he walked away from the desk, that's just what we'll do. That and more. Kirsten had mentioned dancing lessons—he could do that! He might whinge a bit, but he could do it.

  And together they'd face whatever fears and demons she was nursing inside her. Together they'd conquer them—or, if the million-to-one shot came off, at least they'd put up a good fight. Hell! Hundreds of people lived for years and years without HIV becoming full-blown AIDS. Boy, did that woman need a talking-to!

  He stormed back upstairs and was confronted by an empty room.

  'They've shifted her to Bayview Private,' the nurse on duty at the desk told him. 'Her parents felt if she stayed here, now she's conscious, there'd be a constant stream of hospital staff popping in to see her, and what she needs more than anything is rest. Dr Cross agreed.'

  I guess they had the right, Alex conceded grimly as he went back down in the lift, but the realisation stung. Gabi had been his—not a possession but a partner—for so long, it was hard to feel he could no longer make decisions on her behalf.