The Surgeon's Second Chance

by Meredith Webber

  ‘No way! Their parents simply bashed in their two front teeth and fed them through a straw.’

  ‘All their lives?’ Steph asked, horrified by the idea.

  ‘If necessary,’ Harry told her. ‘Which is where we come in. The French doctor had tried to organise to get some of these patients to Paris, but the logistics were too great, so before I came home I contacted a local service club who were interested in the project, then bargained with Bob for an occasional charity case in his hospital.’

  ‘You bargained for a free bed in Bob’s brand-new hospital?’ Steph repeated, aware her disbelief was showing.

  ‘Yeah, well…’ Harry said, shrugging his shoulders as if it was nothing.

  ‘No wonder he expected you to run his messages.’ Steph barely breathed the words as understanding dawned. ‘But you’ll need more than a bed—you’ll need theatre time, and presumably a post-op stay in Intensive Care for all these special patients, and who knows what other services.’

  She gazed at him in awe.

  ‘You talked him into all of this?’

  Harry’s smile lit up his eyes, then faded as he said, ‘Well, I kept harping on the good publicity he and the hospital would get, and I thought he’d finally agreed because of that. But maybe, from the start, he saw I could be useful in other ways.’

  ‘Like being the one to break the news about the name of the hospital—and asking me if Fanny could cut the ribbon?’ Steph sighed, then nodded. ‘Seems fairly petty—almost negligible—compared to helping a young man live a normal life.’

  Shame at how she’d treated Harry swamped her, and she was wondering how to apologise when she realised he was no longer listening, his whole attention absorbed by notes he was writing on the board.

  ‘You know, Steph,’ he said, as if there’d never been a moment’s antagonism between them, ‘it was one thing talking about doing all of this, but now, out of the blue, it’s all happening.’

  ‘Except the hospital won’t be open next Tuesday,’ Steph protested.

  ‘No, but we couldn’t operate immediately anyway. We need X-rays and blood tests—need to take some of his blood to store for emergencies. And start him on antibiotics—there’s likely to be many sources of infection already breeding happily in his mouth, given the restricted access to it he’s had over the years.’

  ‘So where will he stay? Can you organise all of this to be done without him being in hospital?’

  ‘We have to,’ Harry told her. ‘Hence the whiteboard. I want everything charted on it so we can look at it all the time and know exactly where we are. He’ll stay with one of the service club families both before and after the op, but we have to think about post-op problems and complications as well. He’ll need physio to get his jaw working, and speech therapy to teach him how to talk and eat again.’

  Harry watched Steph as she considered the magnitude of the task in front of them, and had to hide a smile as she straightened her shoulders. He knew she was accepting the challenge—and doubted whether there’d be any further arguments about her working with him in theatre.

  ‘When will you operate?’ she asked.

  ‘Hopefully, the Tuesday after he arrives—that will be a couple of days after the official opening. It’s going to be tight for us, but as far as other things go, it’s working well as the hospital won’t be up to full operating strength and we’ll have more access to its facilities.’

  ‘And Bob’s gone along with all of this?’

  The question made Harry feel slightly queasy.

  Or maybe that was lack of sleep…

  ‘He agreed the hospital would take two patients a year—and offered theatre time and all services free of charge.’

  ‘But?’ Steph said, no doubt hearing the uncertainty in his voice.

  ‘I haven’t actually told him about this patient yet. That he’s coming so soon. I’ve spoken to the administrator—did that earlier this morning before I called the other surgeons who’d offered to donate their time—but whether Bob knows yet I’ve no idea. I suspect he doesn’t, or he’d have been in to tell me it’s too soon or make some other objection.’

  Harry suddenly looked doubtful—and very, very tired. Steph longed to step towards him and put her arms around his shoulders—draw his head to rest against her body. But she knew where touching Harry led, so even an exhausted Harry represented danger.

  ‘You admit Bob’s in it for the publicity,’ she said, hoping she could comfort him with words. ‘And coming so soon after the publicity of the opening, it can only be good for the hospital.’

  She hesitated, trying to gauge Harry’s reaction—which wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence.

  ‘Can’t it?’

  Harry shrugged.

  ‘Who knows?’ he said, and Steph felt a tiny tremor of unease reverberate through her body.

  Harry had offered her a job and guaranteed no strings attached, but Bob wasn’t Harry—and anything he gave free would most probably have not strings but hefty hawsers attached to it.

  ‘Perhaps when you speak to him you can tell him it’s OK for Fanny to cut his stupid ribbon at the opening ceremony,’ Steph conceded. ‘But I won’t have to be there, will I?’

  ‘Wouldn’t Fanny like you to see her in action?’

  Steph nodded reluctantly.

  ‘But it will be from right up the back—not as part of any official party. I know you’ve been invited to the dinner back at their place later—if they want Fanny at that, you could keep an eye on her for me.’

  Harry recognised that she’d been pushed as far as she’d go.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he promised, then he took her hand. ‘And thanks. Having something to sweeten Bob will certainly help when I spring this other surprise on him.’

  He drew her towards him and kissed her gently on the lips, but it was a distracted kiss and she must have recognised it as such for she drew away, picking up a white-board pen and waving it in front of the board.

  ‘So what do we write here?’

  ‘Prophylactic antibiotics, X-rays, blood tests, blood retrieval. Let’s just jot down things as we think of them, then put them in order and draw up a time line later. Jot down on the right-hand side speech therapist and physio—you might be able to find out who’ll be working at the hospital and if they’d be willing to give some time to the patient. And find a dentist—he’ll need dental treatment for sure. Then Steve Lowry, Jason Blunt—they’re the two surgeons who’ll assist—and Fred Carter, who’ll bring his own assistant anaesthetist. Their phone numbers are on my desk. They’ll need to be kept informed about what’s happening.’

  ‘How long will the operation take?’

  ‘Max ten hours, I’d say.’

  ‘Ten hours?’

  He smiled at the astonishment in her voice.

  ‘The idea of the operation is to give the patient a workable jaw so we need to drill out the fused bone from the sockets in the skull then fasten something to the rami—those two bits of bone that come off the mandible or jawbone to attach it to the skull—which will fit back into those sockets.’

  Steph considered this bald précis of an operation that could take ten hours and saw the first problem.

  ‘But you’ll need cartilage to cushion whatever you insert into those sockets to attach the bones and provide movement. Hasn’t the jaw fused because the cartilage in the joint either became diseased or broke down in some other way?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Harry told her. ‘In some cases it’s an infection but, according to Frank, in the patient we’re expecting—his name’s Ty, by the way—he was injured when he was a toddler. He was in a car accident. The car rolled and he was trapped with lateral pressure squeezing his jaw, which obligingly broke. Unfortunately, although the jaw was wired and immobilised, the X-rays taken at the time didn’t reveal a dislocation of both sides of his jaw and by the time his jaw healed and the wiring was released, it was too late to fix the dislocation.’

  ‘Too late?’ Steph asked, reme
mbering operations she’d seen where jaws had been broken and reset.

  ‘Too late where he lived,’ Harry replied. ‘As far as I can make out, he was treated by a visiting doctor at a clinic on one of the bigger islands some weeks after the accident, so you can imagine the difficulty in reducing the damage at that stage! It may have been too late even then, but who knows? Anyway, the family took him back home with instructions on how and when to cut the wire. I suppose when he couldn’t open his mouth after they’d removed the wire they assumed that was how he would be for ever. They’re a very tolerant people, accepting of the troubles fate throws their way.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Steph said, wondering if Harry had made the point to remind her of her own intolerance. ‘So what exactly do you do?’

  Harry grinned at her.

  ‘Can you picture the rib cage?’

  She nodded assent. ‘Sure! One, two, three, four, five and six ribs are attached on each side to the sternum, then seven, eight, nine and ten all join up and are attached by the same…’

  ‘Light dawns? Attached by the same cartilage!’ he finished for her. ‘While eleven and twelve float free. In fact, the first six pairs are also attached to the sternum by cartilage which gives the rib cage the provision to expand when the lungs fill.’

  A familiar excitement began to tingle along Steph’s spine, only this time it had nothing to do with Harry Pritchard. It was the excitement of a new discovery—or new to her—in the medical field, the intense delight she had always felt when realising that now more people could have their pain eased or their illness treated more efficiently.

  To be part of such a miracle—right there when the surgery was performed—seemed unbelievably exciting.

  ‘You take costal cartilage to cushion the mandibular joints?’ she asked.

  ‘We do more than that,’ he told her. ‘We actually take a small piece of rib—about five centimetres—with some costal cartilage attached. The cartilage is shaped and fitted into the jaw socket with the bone, then the piece of bone is fixed with titanium screws into the patient’s mandible.’

  ‘And will it work?’ Steph asked, while in her mind she was picturing the different tasks required of the surgeons and the magnitude of what would appear to be a simple operation.

  Harry, however, must have been confident, for he chuckled at the doubt in her tone.

  ‘I haven’t seen such an operation done, but the surgeon in Paris, who had assisted at one, assured me it will.’

  ‘But the lad’s facial muscles haven’t worked for years,’ Steph reminded him. ‘Won’t they have atrophied?’

  ‘They’ll have had a certain amount of involvement in the sucking movements but will certainly have diminished in size and strength. The good thing is that he’s young—fourteen—so there’s no reason the facial muscles can’t be brought back into first-class working order. That’s where you’ll come in—supervising the post-op stages and making sure he sticks with his therapy schedule.’

  The tingle of excitement she’d felt earlier was now suffusing her body.

  ‘It’s better than sex,’ she said, beaming happily at Harry, then blushing as she realised what she’d said. It was the kind of thing she’d have said years back, when they’d been such close friends, and not thought twice about—but now…

  ‘Actually—’ embarrassment had her stumbling on ‘—it’s been so long since I had sex I probably can’t judge, but it is exciting, isn’t it, Harry?’

  He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head, though whether in disbelief at her burbling comments or at something else, she couldn’t guess. With embarrassment deepening to mortification, she rushed to change the subject.

  ‘I can understand a lengthy operation when you have to take bone from another site, but ten hours?’

  Harry’s scrutiny lasted a few seconds longer, then, as if acknowledging her change-the-subject tactic, he nodded.

  ‘It’s difficult because of the proximity of major blood vessels and nerves so close to where we’ll be operating—to say nothing of maintaining a viable airway and transplanting four pieces of bone. The trickiest part will be removing the fused section of the jaw without compromising these, and then maintaining viable nerve paths, so post-operatively, messages will get through to the renewed area.’

  He paused, then added, ‘Jason’s a neurologist. He’ll handle that part. Steve will retrieve the bone and cartilage, and I’ll reshape it. You’ll handle mopping and clamping and whatever else needs doing. The other two will come down from Brisbane the night before, and we’ll go over it in detail then. I’ve already emailed them suggestions as to how I think it will work, and they’ll get back to me with suggestions.’

  Thinking of the actual operation banished the remnants of Steph’s embarrassment. Harry might have kissed her earlier, but it had been a thank-you kiss, nothing more. Right now his mind was concentrated on the job ahead, and she’d better get hers onto it as well.

  ‘I’ll talk to the theatre secretary about theatre staff. Maybe two shifts of nurses.’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘Unless any of them want to volunteer to do the whole job. Though this is only the first of many patients I hope eventually to see, shifts would mean more theatre staff get an opportunity to see what we’re doing.’

  ‘I’ll talk to the secretary,’ Steph promised, realising she’d need her own whiteboard—or perhaps a small notebook she could carry with her—to make sure all her tasks were done on time.

  Then Harry looked up at her and smiled, and she realised the tingly feeling she’d experienced earlier—talking about the op—was nothing on what his smile could produce. But she could hardly take back her comment.

  Or let him know how he affected her.

  So she frowned, hoping it would look as if she was considering the operation—not Harry’s smile.

  ‘You’re OK with all of this?’ he asked, perhaps more misled than she’d intended by the frown. ‘Happy to be part of it? It won’t be a paid assisting job, you realise. All the specialists are donating their time.’

  It was as if he’d thrown a bucket of cold water over her.

  ‘Oh, Harry,’ she whispered, her voice breaking as she said his name. ‘Have I really changed so much you could ask that? Grown so bitter you see me as someone who’s only out for money?’

  She stood up and walked out the door, not stopping until she was out of the rooms and into the security of the staff washrooms, where she locked herself into a cubicle and cried.

  One step forward and twenty-five steps back, Harry thought as he sat and studied the whiteboard. How had he come to say something so stupid and hurtful to Steph? Especially when she’d been so excited.

  Actually, it had been because she’d been so excited, he realised. When she’d come out with her ‘It’s better than sex’ statement his mind had fought the implications of the analogy for a split second, then had weakened and started thinking how pleasurable it would be to prove her wrong.

  True, he’d managed to carry on his explanation of the operation—and hopefully had sounded more involved than he’d felt—but his body had been reminding him of the passion of her kisses and the sweet softness of her full breasts pressed against his chest.

  He’d been stupid to think they could work together. She was so damn distracting he should have applauded her suggestion of a move to Brisbane—though maybe migration to Mars would have been better…

  He groaned, then studied the mostly blank board in front of him. Today was Thursday and Ty arrived on Tuesday. Well, at least for the next few weeks he’d be too busy to be having libidinous thoughts about Stephanie Prince.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE arrival of the young man from the small Pacific island brought a buzz of excitement to the suite of rooms and seemingly to the hospital itself, as more and more staff moved in prior to the official opening.

  ‘We’re like guinea pigs for all the different departments,’ Steph said to Harry early on Friday evening—the day before
the official opening—when she’d returned to the rooms after her pregnant women’s session to tie up some loose ends. ‘Ty’s are the first X-rays the X-ray department has taken, and his blood is the first taken in the new pathology lab.’

  She was slotting the X-rays into viewing boxes in Harry’s treatment room as she spoke, and he was standing close beside her, peering at the illuminated images.

  ‘Blood tests today are clear of any infection, and the lab couldn’t find anything that might suggest delaying the op,’ she continued, bringing him up to date on the latest tests.

  She stepped back, because being so close to Harry, even when he seemed utterly unaware of her presence, made her feel edgy—even unpredictable. It was as if she couldn’t trust her body to believe this was neither the time nor the place to fling itself into his arms.

  ‘And they certainly tried. They took about six vials of blood from the poor lad.’

  Harry unclipped the X-rays and slotted them back into their envelope, turning towards her as he did so.

  ‘You’ve seen more of him than anyone, apart from his host family. How do you think he’s coping?’

  ‘I’m guessing he must be apprehensive, but he hides it well. He’s behaving like a typical teenager, eager to see everything at once—now! I’ve talked to him about the op itself, and the aftermath, but he brushes it all aside, saying he’s too busy to think about it now. Well, that’s what he’s jotting down on notes to me, but you don’t pick up intonations from notes, do you?’

  She was looking puzzled, and a little anxious, as if, in spite of all she’d done in preparing Ty, it might still not be enough. Harry reached out and touched her shoulder, intending the gesture as nothing more than reassurance. But the tension that had been escalating through his body as they’d stood so close to study the X-rays sneaked into the gesture, so it became a caress that lingered too long.

  Silvery grey eyes looked into his, asking questions, but telling him things as well.

  ‘Our timing is atrocious,’ he muttered, as he used only the minimum of pressure to draw her slowly towards him. ‘Has been since I first came back.’