The Surgeon's Second Chance

by Meredith Webber

  The tonsils and pharynx were an angry red, with whitish blotches on the tonsils.

  ‘We call it in English a strep throat,’ Stephanie explained. ‘A streptococcal infection. I can give you an injection of penicillin to start fighting it, then follow up with tablets to take. Have you had penicillin before?’

  The young woman nodded.

  ‘Did you have any allergic reaction?’

  A definitive shake of her head.

  ‘Have you any other allergies you know of?’

  Again the head shake.

  Stephanie rang for Joanne, the nurse on night duty, and, when she came, told her what she needed. As Joanne departed, Stephanie turned her attention back to her patient, concerned that the young woman, who was now shaking with feverish chills, would have to go back out into the inclement weather.

  And possibly continue a gruelling ‘holiday’ schedule.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.

  ‘Just down the road at the Whale Beach Resort,’ the guide replied.

  It was just down the road—perhaps only five hundred metres—but in the rain…

  ‘I think you should get a taxi back there,’ she told the man, speaking Japanese so the patient would also understand. ‘And—’ She checked the completed patient form ‘…Reiki should spend at least tomorrow in bed.’

  ‘But tomorrow we go to see the dolphins!’ It was Reiki who protested, and Stephanie knew it was useless to argue. The young woman had probably been feeling sick for days, but was soldiering on because she’d paid good money for her holiday and wanted to make the most of it.

  However, the doctor in Stephanie had to make the effort.

  ‘You should stay in bed,’ she repeated. ‘If you don’t, you could become even sicker.’

  Reiki’s obsidian-dark eyes filled with tears, as if the thought of feeling worse was truly horrifying.

  Maybe she’d listen to the advice.

  Joanne returned and, after asking the guide to leave the room, Stephanie gave the intra-muscular injection of benzathine penicillin G into Reiki’s buttock.

  ‘Stay in bed,’ she warned again, as she showed the young woman out.

  ‘Bet she doesn’t,’ Rebecca said, when the three had departed.

  But more patients had drifted in so, although Stephanie agreed, she didn’t have time to chat.

  Jet lag struck at midnight, but for a couple of hours Harry refused to give in to it.

  ‘Damn it all, I took my melatonin, I was flying west to east. This isn’t supposed to happen!’

  He was striding back and forth in front of the wide windows of the apartment so kindly loaned to him by Bob Quayle. Outside, the rain still lashed down, blurring the streetlights and hiding from view the ocean he knew was only a block from where he stood.

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t happen when you’re flying east-west, not west-east!’ he muttered as he made his way to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door, bending over to eye the edibles Pete Jennings, Bob’s business manager, had organised for him.

  No, it wasn’t food he needed, but sleep.

  He strode back to the living room and slumped into an armchair, wondering if it might be more conducive to sleep than the bed.

  But nothing worked, except his brain, which was alive and alert and looking for some action.

  Action!

  Ha! Maybe that was the answer.

  In return for the largesse of the apartment, he’d told Bob he’d take a look at the twenty-four-hour clinic somewhere downstairs in this very building. Twenty-four hours meant open all the time. It should be open and operating right now.

  He leapt out of the chair, strode through to the bedroom, pulled on trousers and a long-sleeved shirt that could have done with an iron, but at two in the morning he didn’t care, and headed down to ground level to find the ailing medical centre.

  Steph was battling with Tom Butler, a regular patient with a bipolar condition. She’d seen Tom a few times when he was in his depressive phase of the illness—feeling suicidal and needing someone to assure him he was wanted on the earth—but tonight he was the opposite, flying high, not on drugs but on the curious chemical imbalance in his system that caused his mood swings.

  ‘So I thought I’d come and show you how well I am,’ he said, grabbing Steph and swinging her off the ground, then dancing around the waiting room with her in his arms.

  ‘Put me down!’ she shrieked, while Rebecca pressed the hidden alarm bell to summon a security man—just in case.

  Steph heard the asthmatic wheeze the doors made as they opened, and tried to see if help—in the form of the security man—had arrived, but it wasn’t until Tom completed his arc that she saw the newcomer. Tall and angular, his midnight-dark hair tousled and untidy, his so-familiar face a study in disbelief.

  ‘Harry?’

  Harry heard his name, and stared in total bewilderment at the woman dangling in the arms of a dancing maniac. The beautiful dark red hair was cut so close to her head she might have been shorn, while her face was too thin—all flat planes and angles and huge, huge eyes—but it was still Steph.

  ‘Steph?’

  He heard his voice say her name—heard the incredulous shock in it.

  ‘Put me down!’ she was saying to the man who held her. ‘Now, Tom!’

  The man not only ignored her but whirled her around once again, while, behind Harry, the doors slid open again and a very large security guard entered.

  ‘Put me down, Tom,’ Steph repeated, more sternly this time.

  The dancing man—Tom—did just that, dropping his burden so Steph crashed to the floor. Instinct sent Harry towards her, rushing to her aid, his hand outstretched to help her to her feet.

  She looked up at him, and flinched—the movement so apparent he drew back, muscles stiffening with shock, his heart wincing, his mind numb with regret.

  Then she scrambled to her feet, thrust her hands on her hips and glared at him.

  ‘If you’re not here as a patient then get out right now, Harry Pritchard,’ she said, but her voice was shaking and her smoky grey eyes were bright with unshed tears.

  Harry felt the wince become a clenching kind of pain. He opened his mouth to explain, but she’d moved away, motioning to the man who’d dropped her, sending him ahead of her into what was probably a consulting room.

  ‘Are you a patient?’

  For the first time he noticed another woman, this one behind a desk in the far corner of the waiting room, her arms folded as she awaited an answer from him.

  ‘No, I’m to be working here,’ he said, turning towards the security man to include him in the conversation. ‘My name’s Harry Pritchard. The new owner has asked me to take a look at the way things are run. His business manager was supposed to let you know.’

  The woman behind the desk—Rebecca Harris if the name plaque was correct—studied him for a moment.

  ‘We heard a bloke was coming,’ she said, shrugging as if his arrival was a matter of supreme indifference to her. ‘But we hardly expected you to start work in the early hours of the morning.’

  ‘That was obvious!’ Harry snapped, as a vivid picture of Steph in the man’s arms flashed across his mind. ‘Do those kind of shenanigans go on all the time? Do you all mix business with pleasure?’

  Rebecca—if she was Rebecca, introductions had been bypassed—looked at him as if he was mad.

  ‘Mix business with pleasure?’ she repeated. She shook her head. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m talking about that man dancing around the waiting room with that woman in his arms,’ Harry said, growing angrier—mainly with Steph—by the moment.

  ‘But she didn’t want to be in his arms,’ Rebecca told him, still frowning dubiously at him. ‘That’s Tom. He’s a patient. Bipolar, and apparently in a manic phase. Dr Prince came out to call him—he was the next patient—and he grabbed her. I called Security—that’s what Ned’s doing here.’

  She nodded towar
ds the large man who was still standing like a misplaced monolith just inside the front door.

  ‘Oh!’ Harry said, then struggled to find something else to add. ‘I’m actually jet-lagged. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.’

  They weren’t the best couple of sentences to have found—pertaining as they did to a much earlier bit of the conversation. But as the woman showed no signs of rescuing him from this conversational morass, he plunged valiantly on.

  ‘That’s why I’m here at this hour.’

  ‘You can go, Ned,’ she said, looking past him to the security man, who touched his uniform cap and departed. ‘As for you…’ She turned back to Harry. ‘I don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, but I’d advise you to do it during the daytime in future. From the sound of things, you know Dr Prince, and if she’s not happy having you here when she’s on duty, then neither am I.’

  Harry watched her draw herself up to her full five feet six and puff out her chest as birds did when they wanted to make themselves look bigger, and fiercer—and he had to smile.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, hoping his voice sounded properly apologetic, ‘Dr Prince has no say over when I’m here and when I’m not. But I will try not to antagonise her.’

  Lie! Of course he’d antagonise her. He didn’t even have to try. There was so much unfinished business between them it was inevitable.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SOMEHOW, Stephanie managed to calm Tom down enough for him to answer questions about his medication.

  ‘But I don’t need it when I’m well,’ he told her. She forced herself to concentrate on the patient, explaining slowly and carefully that it was just as important when he was feeling well as when he was depressed.

  ‘It keeps the chemicals in your body balanced,’ she told him—for possibly the twentieth time since he’d first become her patient.

  ‘But I’m better now,’ he argued, though in the end he agreed to take the tablets—but only because she’d asked him to.

  The phone buzzed, and she turned to Tom.

  ‘Rebecca only interrupts if it’s something urgent,’ she said to him, hoping he’d take the hint.

  But, being Tom, he didn’t.

  ‘I’m as urgent as anyone,’ he said, his jaw setting belligerently.

  ‘Of course you are—and more important because you’re a regular—but this could be a child in serious trouble, Tom. I have to go.’

  She stood up and walked towards the door, praying he’d follow because there was no way she could leave him in a consulting room on his own.

  He did follow, but as he reached the door he grabbed her again.

  ‘Ah, my favourite doctor,’ he cried, lifting her from behind this time so she was able to kick back with her heel, hitting him in the knee.

  Bang. Down she went again, while Tom clutched his knee and scowled.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that!’ he grumbled at her, but as he turned, as if to touch her again, Harry appeared, seizing Tom by the elbow and steering him towards the reception desk.

  ‘There’s a woman in the second consulting room, coughing badly and slightly cyanotic around the lips.’

  Joanne had appeared and now helped Steph to her feet, then drew her towards the second door.

  ‘I’ve put an oxygen mask on her.’

  She thrust a new patient form into Stephanie’s hand, then opened the door and followed Steph into the room.

  The woman was sitting on the examination couch, clutching the oxygen mask in one hand while she coughed and wheezed and gasped for breath. Steph could smell the mix of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes from the door, but to give the woman her due, she might not have been smoking. A person’s hair and clothing could absorb the smell just being in some of the nightclubs where smoking was still allowed.

  ‘Put the mask back over your nose and mouth and breathe deeply,’ she said when the spasm of coughing stopped. ‘And don’t try to answer—just nod or shake your head.’

  The woman nodded to indicated she understood.

  ‘I’m going to listen to your chest. Have you had this kind of attack before?’

  Another nod.

  ‘Has it been diagnosed?’

  Again the agreement.

  ‘Bronchitis?’

  Nod.

  ‘Chronic?’

  Nod.

  ‘Do you use a puffer of any kind?’

  The woman shook her head.

  ‘Take any preventative drugs regularly?’

  Another head shake.

  Stephanie finished her examination and straightened up, looking directly into the eyes of the woman who was now breathing more easily.

  ‘Do you smoke?’

  The woman nodded, and her eyes shifted, suggesting she’d been told—probably more than once—she should give it up for the sake of her health.

  ‘And it’s worth it even though you have to put up with attacks like this?’ Steph asked.

  The woman shook her head.

  ‘I’ll give you antibiotics now to help you through this attack, but the problem is,’ Steph continued, ‘if you keep on having these crises it will eventually affect your heart. I can’t see any sign of it yet, but there’s a condition called cor pulmonale where, because of the extra work it’s called on to do, the section of the heart that deals with blood flow to your lungs becomes enlarged. This is serious stuff, so it’s up to you to decide if you want to risk it.’

  She waited a moment for this to sink in.

  ‘Your own GP has probably told you all the things you need to do to get rid of the bronchitis, but I’ll repeat them. First is give up smoking—there are really good medications available to help with that these days. Then you need to increase your exercise—walking is the best, starting slowly then building up until you’re comfortable walking briskly for at least twenty minutes every day.’

  She went on to ask the woman about allergies, and prescribed ampicillin and a bronchodilator, which would help prevent bad attacks if used when wheezing first started.

  ‘But it’s mainly a matter of avoiding irritants until your lungs are in better shape,’ she added. ‘As well as cigarette smoke, things like hair spray, aerosol insect sprays, even occupational chemicals can all affect damaged lungs.’

  The woman—Beth Graham, Steph had finally deciphered the writing on the patient form—now removed the mask.

  ‘That’s all very easy for you to say,’ Beth snapped, ‘but it’s impossible to do. I’m a barmaid. I work in cigarette smoke all the time—and I’ve tried all the patches and tablets ever invented in an effort to stop smoking. Then I think, Why bother when I have to breathe in other people’s smoke in my job? As for chemical irritants, you should smell the stuff we use to clean out the beer pipes and the area behind the bar when we close up for the night. I love doctors who say do this and do that, and never think about whether it’s possible or not.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Steph said. ‘We do tend to preach.’

  She studied Beth’s tired face, then checked the form again. At thirty-five, Beth was only five years older than Steph herself.

  ‘There’s no other job? Or maybe a day shift so you’re not out in the night air—and don’t have to do the cleaning?’

  Beth shook her head.

  ‘I’ve three kids—the oldest is fifteen, so I can leave her in charge at night, but the baby’s only six and I want to be home for her when she goes to school and comes home. Earlier shifts just don’t work.’

  Steph raised her hands out from her sides.

  ‘Tell me about it!’ she said. ‘I’m not exactly crazy about working nights myself, but I’ve a four-year-old and I feel the same way about being home for her.’

  They talked a little longer, Steph trying to think of alternative occupations for a woman who preferred to work at night.

  ‘I’ve tried a few others,’ Beth said. ‘Drove a limo for a while, but nothing pays as well as night-shift bar work and with Desiree, my eldest, now wanting all the things teen
agers want, I need the money.’

  ‘But it shouldn’t be at the expense of your health,’ Stephanie said. ‘Have you considered retraining? Doing a course that might get you into something you can do at home?’

  Beth nodded, then shrugged.

  ‘And who keeps us while I do the course? That’s what it always comes back to, doesn’t it?’

  She picked up the scripts and Steph walked with her to the door, then, as Beth departed, Steph continued on to the reception desk.

  ‘We could form a club of women who work nights so they can be home for their kids during the day. That was another one.’

  ‘Well, I’m only doing it for another year at the most,’ Rebecca said. ‘Once Dyson’s in high school, I reckon it’s going to be more important for me to be home nights than days. It’ll mean a pay cut, but you just wait—I’m going to get a receptionist job in a real doctors’ surgery, where you get to know the patients and have regulars bringing in bottles of jam and crocheted facecloths.’

  Stephanie laughed.

  ‘We have our regulars,’ she reminded Rebecca. ‘Look at Tom!’

  ‘And a couple of drunken derelicts, and a group of homeless kids,’ Rebecca snorted. ‘Some regulars!’

  Harry, sitting in the administrator’s office flicking through files in a drawer on the left hand side of the desk, heard them talking. The administrator’s office must have been an afterthought, built by putting a thin partition across part of the reception area, so the sound carried easily.

  The conversation was revealing enough in its way, but in other ways he was more confused than ever.

  Seeing Steph again was the primary source of confusion, but beyond that so many things didn’t even begin to add up, he wasn’t sure where to start sorting them out.

  Did Bob Quayle know Steph was working at the clinic—and, if so, why hadn’t he mentioned it?

  And why was Steph talking as if she had to work, and juggle work and child-care? Even if Martin had left no money when he’d died, surely the Quayles could afford to provide financial support for their only grandchild?