by Amy Andrews
Still with his grandfather weighing heavily on his mind and a certain degree of urgency over returning home, he hoped there wouldn’t be too many bodies to put back together again. He smiled at the analogy. That’s what they were—all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Putting soldiers and civilians alike back together. Unfortunately for some, like poor Humpty, no amount of surgical intervention would make a difference.
Harriet felt nauseated. There was nothing new in that. The moment the siren wailed, a surge of adrenaline hit her bloodstream and her body responded in kind. Her heart beat loudly in her chest, its tempo picking up as each second ticked by. And her stomach prepared for fright or flight by immediately wanting to evacuate its contents. She swallowed against the rising urge. As Gill had said, there was no telling when they would next eat.
She’d never realised how much she dreaded the adrenaline response until now. It was a fairly basic human reaction to stressful situations and she knew that for the next how ever many hours it would be adrenaline that kept her on her toes, anticipating Gill’s needs, keeping one step ahead.
But afterwards was awful. Coming down from the high, the buzz, was the terrible part. She hated the shaky, strung-out feeling. How everything around her seemed far away and a fog blanketed her brain, making her thoughts slower and her tongue feel all thick and fat in her mouth. Coming down off the high was not at all pleasant and the only consolation was that at least she’d be en route to London when it hit. She found London was generally a good antidote to the withdrawal. To most things, actually.
The dull ache in her side was still there and she contemplated taking some pain killers. It wasn’t exactly painful but as it twinged again she knew she couldn’t afford to have it interfere with the hours of surgery ahead. A couple of tablets usually did the trick.
She rose as the teams were quietly talking about the possible injuries and walked into the kitchen area. A first-aid kit beneath the sink carried basic medication. It was a hard plastic contraption that consisted of a series of little drawers. Each drawer had its contents written on it. She located the tablets, pushed two out of the blister pack and popped them in her mouth, swallowing them down with some bottled water.
‘Are you OK?’
Gill’s deep voice was right near her ear and she could feel his heat directly behind her. It was so tempting to lean back into him. She clutched the sink to stop herself from swaying back.
‘Sure,’ she said, turning around, forcing him to take a step back. ‘Just a little niggle.’
‘A niggle? Where?’
‘It’s fine, Gill,’ she said, massaging her side absently. ‘I think I have another cyst building.’
‘Oh…OK.’ He stood there feeling worse than useless. She had been badly troubled by the cysts over the years and he had seen her in quite a bit of pain, but he didn’t know what she expected of him any more. Was he supposed to make a fuss or just nod and let her get on with it?
Any conversation they could get into now seemed fraught with problems. He’d been down this road before and knew it was scattered with landmines. Talking about her cysts led to talking about her ovary and then her Fallopian tube and then her fertility and then her desire for a baby. They had a few minutes before critically injured patients depended on them and he knew he couldn’t go into the operating theatre on the back of an argument.
He needed clarity. They could potentially be operating well into the night, if not all night. It was important to not be distracted by external forces. He couldn’t bring his relationship problems into the operating theatre. One wrong move could be potentially fatal or lengthen the operating time significantly.
And this was a true pressure cooker. Get them in, get them out, move them on. If he allowed himself to be distracted to the point where mistakes were made, the process slowed and things got backed up. And potentially people died.
Maybe that was why he had spent the last year so successfully in denial. He’d been able to spend so much time shutting down any thoughts of his crumbling marriage out of necessity. Maybe that was why the papers this morning had come as a surprise. Maybe they shouldn’t have, but they had.
‘Let me know if it gets worse,’ he said.
‘It’ll be fine, Gill.’ Harriet tried and failed to keep the irritation out of her voice. The adrenaline was making her edgy. He was going to be proprietorial now? She didn’t need him to take care of her. She’d been managing just fine without him.
Gill heard the terseness in his voice and felt a little annoyed himself. ‘I can’t afford to have one of my team not at a hundred per cent. If you’re going to scrub in, I need you to be on top of your game.’
Harriet glared at her husband. How dared he call her professionalism into question? ‘When have I ever not been on my game?’ she demanded.
Gill realised too late that he’d somehow managed to get himself into an argument anyway. If he could have bitten his tongue off, he would have. He truly didn’t need this now. Now was the time for mental preparation. To ride the wave of adrenaline to his advantage. Hone his instincts, sharpen his vision, tune up his mental abilities.
‘Look, I’m sorry…you’re right. I worry about you, Harry.’
‘Really?’ She raised delicately arched brows.
‘Yes. Despite everything, you are still my wife. Your problems are my problems.’
‘Well, don’t worry, Gill,’ she said sweetly, her face aching with the effort it took to keep a saccharine-sweet smile there. ‘Pretty soon they won’t be yours to worry about and you won’t have to worry about me being off my game.’ She pushed herself away from the sink, their arms brushing as she strode away.
Gill sighed. Great! Well done, there, old chap. The phone rang and he strode across the room and picked it up on the third ring.
He listened for a brief second. ‘Shrapnel to the abdomen,’ he said to Ben.
‘I’ll take it.’ Ben nodded and his team rose to do their duty.
‘I wonder if the patient was one of the bastards that shot Peter out of the sky?’ said Katya, again to no one in particular.
Harriet stopped her finger drumming on the table and looked at her friend. They all did. Katya had summed up in one sentence the conundrum of their job. They tried to forget that a lot of their patients were the bad guys. It wasn’t their job to pick and choose who they operated on and the backgrounds of the people who came through their doors didn’t matter—everyone got the same treatment, the same surgical options.
But Peter’s death and the unfairness of it all still weighed on their minds. Katya’s statement wouldn’t be far from their thoughts as they operated tonight.
The phone rang again and Gill snatched it up before it had a chance to ring again. ‘Yes?’
Gill looked tense and Harriet felt churlish for arguing with him. He should be looking primed, instead he looked on edge. No doubt she had thrown a real spanner in the works of the mental preparation she knew he went through every time the siren wailed. Still, knowing Gill, it wouldn’t take him long to get back into his groove.
‘Female with a pneumothorax, needing a Caesar,’ Gill announced. ‘She’s 35 weeks and the baby’s in foetal distress.’
The team didn’t move for a second, no doubt all a little stunned. Harriet couldn’t ever remember the team ever being asked to perform a C-section. She didn’t even want to think about the personal irony of it all.
‘Well, come on, guys,’ said Gill, a sharp edge to his voice. ‘We have to get this baby out.’
They moved then, spurred by the urgency in Gill’s voice. He watched them troop out. Harriet was last and he grabbed her arm. ‘I’m sorry, Harry.’
She nodded. The note of sincerity was obvious. ‘A baby, Gill? How ironic.’ And she turned on her heel.
Gill shut his eyes momentarily and leaned his head against the wall. He waited for the familiar rise of adrenaline to kick his system into hyperdrive but it didn’t come. He sighed in frustration. What the hell was wrong with him
today? Too much on his mind, damn it! Suddenly he’d rather be curled up on his lounge in Bondi with Harriet than about to pull a wet and bawling baby out of its nice soft home. Hell! He never felt like this.
He blamed the events of the day. It had certainly been eventful! The divorce and his grandfather and Nimuk and Peter and arguing with Harriet. And now…a baby!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1900 HOURS
IT WAS Harriet’s turn to scrub in. She almost passed. She almost said to Siobhan and Katya that she would circulate again but a stubborn brain cell somewhere refused to let Gill off the hook. He was going to have to look her in the eye as he passed the baby to her and she would meet his gaze with a silent challenge in hers.
It would say, You, too, could have this. You, too, could create human life and rejoice in it and make a real contribution to this world. Yes, you do that already, but this is so much more personal. This is about fulfilling your biological purpose, truly becoming what you were born to become. A father.
She left Katya and Siobhan setting up as she tied her mask in place and flicked the taps on. She ripped open a sterile pre-soaped sponge and began her thorough three-minute surgical scrub. She started at her fingertips, paying special attention to her nail beds, and worked her way down the fingers to the palms and backs of her hands.
Gill joined her and began his scrub at the sink beside her. She ignored him as much as she could ignore possibly one of the most gorgeous men on the planet, and continued working the sponge down, scrubbing at her wrists and further still until all the way down to her elbows was now sterile. She held her soapy arms upright in front of her as she put them back under the tap and let water and soap sluice off her arms, running from her fingertips and dripping off her elbows.
Harriet shut off the tap with a push of her elbow and stood still for a moment, waiting for the elbow dripping to settle. She flapped her arms a little to hasten the process.
As she departed, her arms still upright, Gill said, ‘Did the paracetamol help?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ It had, actually. The niggle was noticeable when she moved, but had practically all but disappeared otherwise. But she would have said yes even if it hadn’t been the case. She wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction of being right.
Harriet turned before she got to the swing doors that led into the theatre, pushing them open with her back and bottom and then swinging round so she was facing forward again as they swished shut behind her. Katya had set up a trolley for them, where they could dry their hands on sterile towels and then gown and glove. Harriet had her gown on and was just finishing gloving when Gill entered the theatre in the same way she had.
She moved away from the trolley as Gill approached and busied herself over by the operating table, opening packs and sorting her instruments, asking for Betadine to be poured into one of the metal bowls and doing a swab and instrument count with Siobhan. She checked the suction.
The silence in the theatre was broken as Joan and Helmut wheeled a hysterical woman inside. She was crying and moaning and Theire was talking calmly to her. Harriet felt goose-bumps break out beneath the long sleeves of the gown at the cries that needed no interpreting. It was patently obvious as the scared woman clutched at her abdomen that she was terrified over the welfare of her baby.
Harriet felt her own abdomen twinge again and it felt as if her only ovary was responding to the young mother’s plight. She couldn’t be much more than twenty, thought Harriet, and the ugly tube hanging out of one side of her chest to reinflate her lung was probably more than enough for her to deal with. How had this young woman got caught up in the fighting? Like they all had, Harriet guessed—wrong place, wrong time.
Theire explained as the vocal woman shuffled over onto the operating table that Joan was going to put her to sleep and when she woke up she would have a beautiful baby. Harriet kept her fingers crossed that it would be the case and they didn’t encounter any complications.
The woman’s cries petered out as Joan injected an anaesthetic agent into her IV.
‘Let’s go,’ said Gill.
Joan intubated the woman and had her hooked up to monitors and ready to go in five minutes. Harriet passed Gill the green drapes one at a time until the woman completely disappeared beneath the drapes and they had a large, sterile operative field.
Joan nodded at Gill, indicating that everything was good to begin.
‘Prep,’ he said.
Harriet passed him the bowl of Betadine and a swab on a stick. He dipped the swab into the dark brown liquid and liberally applied it to the woman’s abdomen. Gill opened his mouth to ask for the scalpel and found it in his hand before he could even get the word out.
‘Thank you, Harry,’ he murmured, and there was a brief moment when their gazes met above their masks and he saw a flash of the old Harriet. The one he’d been happily married to for five years before she’d changed the plot on him. The one who could anticipate his needs in an operating theatre better than anyone else he had worked with. He missed that Harriet.
Ella came on, singing Mack the Knife, and Gill almost smiled at the appropriateness as he made a horizontal incision low, just above the woman’s pubic bone. A horizontal incision would have made for easier access but just because this young woman probably wasn’t going to be wearing a bikini ever didn’t mean she didn’t deserve as much consideration to her body image as Western women who thought C-sections were a designer choice.
Blood welled up from the incision and he mopped it up with towels and used diathermy on the bleeding points. The smell of burnt flesh permeated his mask. He quickly achieved a bloodless field and could see the pink colour of the stretched uterus.
Next he made a similar shallow incision into the uterine wall and took the blunt dissection instrument Harriet gave him and slowly opened up the incision further, making it wider and deeper with each separation of the uterine fibres. He stopped when he saw the membranes glistening like a peeled grape.
‘Ready for the suction,’ he said out of habit, but as he glanced down he noticed Harriet was poised with the sucker in hand. He used the scalpel again to pierce through the two membranes. As the clear, sweet-smelling amniotic fluid spouted out of the hole, Harriet efficiently sucked it all away.
Harriet could feel her heartbeat starting to pick up. Any second now Gill was going to pull the baby, hopefully kicking and screaming, out of its comfortable home. He would place it in her arms, and maybe for one or two seconds she could pretend that it was their baby he was giving to her.
Gill used his gloved fingers to tear the membranes open. ‘Come on, little one. Time for the big bad world,’ he said, supporting the head as he gently eased the baby out through the incision. Gill felt the team’s collective breath hold as he laid the silent newborn down on the drapes and sucked her nose and mouth with a catheter Harriet had passed him. He was conscious of her clamping and cutting the cord as he cleared the baby’s airways.
The baby girl did not like it one little bit and a lusty wail and flailing fists were the response to the potent stimulus. Harriet felt tears prick her eyes at the joyous noise and felt rather than heard the collective sigh of relief.
‘What a beautiful noise,’ said Helmut, as Joan passed him the syntocin to inject into the woman’s IV to aid the expulsion of the placenta.
Until you have to wake up to it every night at 2 a.m., thought Gill as he picked up the wet, bawling infant and prepared to hand her over to Harriet. He noticed the reproah in her gaze as she held out her green-drape-covered arms. He felt as if she’d read his mind.
But then something happened. As he passed the infant down into Harriet’s waiting arms he had a flash of what it would be like to be passing their newborn to her, still wet from its birth.
The bundle he was holding suddenly felt very precious and he eased the baby girl ever so gently into his wife’s arms and watched as she stared at the child’s face with utter fascination. Harriet rocked the baby gently as she wrapped the little one
in the green cloth to keep her warm. The baby’s cries quietened and he watched more than a little fascinated himself as the woman and child blinked at each other.
Harriet looked up at Gill again with wonder in her eyes and he felt a twinge of something deep inside. He didn’t know what it was, but he did know she looked so beautiful with that look in her eyes, even through the layers of theatre clothes and her face obscured by a mask, and he wanted to be responsible for putting that look there again.
Holding the child, gazing into her husband’s eyes, Harriet had to stop herself from speaking out loud. Please. Please, Gill. This is what I want. A baby. Your baby. Don’t you see how wonderful and precious they are? Look at how she’s looking at me like I’m the most important thing in the entire world. Where else can you get that? Knowing you are someone’s everything, that somebody out there truly loves you unconditionally?
Katya cleared her throat behind Harriet and broke the intense gaze between the two. Harriet reluctantly handed the baby over to Katya, who also had her arms draped with a sterile towel so that Harriet wouldn’t contaminate herself. She wished there was a paediatrician standing by to give the baby the once-over, especially as the babe was a little on the premature side, but this was a war zone. They made do with what they had. Thankfully the baby hadn’t required any resuscitation.
Harriet watched as Joan assumed the paediatric role and, satisfied, turned back to concentrate on the continuing operation. Gill was performing a controlled cord traction, gently pulling on the thick, rope-like structure to ease the placenta out. It came away and Harriet presented him with a kidney dish. He placed the placenta in the metal container and Harriet turned and passed it to Katya.
‘Large swab,’ said Gill, as he eased the now deflated uterus out of the mother’s body.
Harriet passed him the thin but absorbent cloth with the radio-opaque strip down the centre. He spread it out over his open hand, inserted his hand into the uterus via the incision and did a sweep of the inside to ensure no products had been left behind.