St Matthew's Passion: A Medical Romance

by Sam Archer

  The journey to the bottom seemed to take forever. During it, Fin experienced his entire life. His boyhood played itself out in leisurely fashion, mundane events interspersed with the big, significant ones like the time he fell out of the elm tree at the bottom of the garden and broke his arm (was that the beginning of his interest in trauma surgery? He’d never made the connection before). His adolescence passed almost as slowly, though more tumultuously: there were the first kisses, and more; the clashes with his parents. Then came young adulthood, and medical school, and the breakneck-paced early years as a junior doctor.

  He reached the Catherine years, and the terrible time of her death and its aftermath, reliving the experience as acutely and as painfully as if it were the first time. The ensuing years of loneliness and ever-deeper immersion in his career were marginally more bearable.

  And then came Melissa.

  As he dropped further down into the water, the river seeming implausibly deep, Fin reflected that the richest period of his life – the time he’d had knowing Melissa Havers – was also one of the shortest. She was with him in her totality; he could not only see and hear her, but smell and taste and touch her as well.

  Melissa, her blonde hair cascading around his face, her vivid blue eyes blazing into his.

  Melissa, her mouth soft and urgent against his, her musk flooding his nerve endings.

  Melissa, her arms around his neck in an unbreakable clasp, holding him close so that no matter where he was going, no matter what terrible unknowable eternity lay beyond the river bed, she would be with him always and he needn’t be alone.

  As he felt himself slipping away, Fin experienced a revelation. Of all the awful, corroding experiences a human being could have, worse than loss and longing and failure was… regret. What a time to understand this, just as he was about to die, when it was too late to do anything with this knowledge.

  If he’d had a second chance, Fin would have done what his heart had been telling him to do ever since he’d first acknowledged to himself his feelings for Melissa.

  He’d have told her that he loved her, that she meant more to him than anyone else he’d ever known – more even than Catherine – and that he wanted to be with her for the rest of his days.

  He’d have questioned the rationality of clinging with every fibre of his being to a vow he’d once made which now seemed not so much a method of atoning for his sins as a way to avoid being hurt again.

  To avoid truly living.

  Well, there was to be no second chance. He was dying, and he had time for regret, but nothing more.

  He could only hope that the regret didn’t accompany him as he passed into whatever was waiting for him on the other side.

  For the first time since he’d sunk into his reverie, Fin became aware of discomfort in his throat, and of the fact that he couldn’t breathe.

  That’s odd, he thought. You’d think you’d become less conscious of bodily sensations as you slipped towards death, not more.

  It was more than discomfort. It was a stifling, choking sensation, as if the water surrounding him had formed itself into a fist and was forcing itself down his windpipe.

  He experienced a rush of panic so intense he cried out, except he couldn’t, because his mouth was filled. His arms and legs flailed helplessly against the water, cutting through it more smoothly than he was expecting, as if it had taken on the consistency of air.

  He’d been about to slide gently into oblivion, but now, at the last, he found himself straining every sinew to stay alive, to hang on to even a precious few seconds of earthly existence. He’d seen it before, in patients of his who’d been so mortally wounded it seemed a miracle that they had lasted as long as they did. It was the animal life force in people, the primitive drive for self-preservation.

  Fin found the use of his hand, gripped the arm that was forcing its way down his throat. He noted with surprise that it didn’t feel at all as if it was made of water. If anything, it felt like plastic. He tore at it, ignoring the raw pain in his throat as it was dragged free, and flung it away.

  And suddenly there was no more darkness. Instead, light blazed down on him, so shockingly that he wondered crazily if he had in fact died after all and this was some kind of afterlife located in the vicinity of the sun. But there was little heat, just blinding, painful illumination.

  There was also noise, a lot of it: mechanical and electronic sounds, human voices and cries. Physical pain announced itself to him from various outposts around his body: his chest, his neck, above all his head, which pulsed with steady pounding throbs. His body was secured somehow, trapped under a layer of something that wasn’t water, but instead felt like cloth of some sort.

  And then Fin knew he had died, and the afterlife was more bizarre than any religion or spiritual movement had conjectured. For in this cacophony of sound and sensation and brightness, an angelic form hovered into view before his eyes.

  Melissa.

  Her eyes were wide with wonder, and terror, and joy. Her beautiful mouth curved in something that seemed not to dare quite to be a smile. Around her head the light blazed from behind her, crowning her with a halo.

  ‘Melissa,’ he whispered. No sound came. Of course it wouldn’t - he was dead, after all.

  ‘Melissa.’ This time it was a frog’s croak, all too earthbound.

  And now she did smile, her lips stretching back to reveal her perfect teeth. Fin stared at her mouth, then at her eyes, and wondered why, with such joy in her smile, the tears were bursting over her lower lids, spilling like rain and cascading down her cheeks.

  Her mouth tried to close to form speech, failed, then tried again, until, stammering, she managed one word.

  ‘Fin.’

  He felt his hand being grasped, squeezed tightly. He gripped back. There was a solidity there, a sense of something corporeal, not ethereal.

  Does that mean I’m not dead, then?

  With great effort, both because it was physically painful to do so and because he was reluctant to tear his eyes away from her face, Fin turned his head towards one particular familiar sound. It was the steady drone of a cardiac monitor.

  Yes, there it was, to his left. A heart monitor showing a flatline.

  The movies and the television shows all represented a cardiac arrest with a flatline reading on the monitor. It made for thrilling, dramatic viewing, but as every doctor knew it was completely inaccurate. All a flatline reading meant was that the leads attached to the patient had come off and needed reattaching.

  Fin did a rapid inventory.

  One or more leads on his chest had come off.

  The pain in his neck was from the prick of a needle used to insert a cannula for a central venous line.

  The pain in his head was from where the toppling boat had struck him.

  The choking in his throat had been caused by the endotracheal tube which had been inserted in order that he could be artificially ventilated. The fact that he’d become aware of it and pulled it out meant that he had recovered the ability to breathe on his own.

  Which meant that he was no longer in the river. He was in hospital, he’d been resuscitated, and he’d woken up.

  Which meant he was alive.

  He was alive.

  He stared at Melissa, her lovely face creased now, wet with tears, and he brought his free hand, the one she wasn’t gripping, shakily up, grasping clumsily at the side of her head. He imagined he could feel every strand of hair beneath his palm, every contour of her skull.

  Her face loomed closer, lowering itself towards his.

  ‘Fin,’ she whispered again. ‘You haven’t left me.’

  He ran his tongue over his lips, dry as dust, and tried to speak. The words wouldn’t show themselves. He brought his head up but found he couldn’t; pain forced it back. Realising what he was trying to do, Melissa lowered her head so that her ear was brushing his lips.

  Fin whispered, ‘I won’t leave you. Ever.’

  Before she could lift her
head he pressed it down, needing to say more, however laborious it was to do so.

  ‘All that... before. The uncertainty. The... tension. That’s over. No more.’

  And, when he’d been silent for a few seconds and she again tried to pull away and look at him, he held her head and whispered: ‘Melissa. I... love you.’

  Fin became aware of people beginning to crowd around the bed, and heard their gentle murmurs to Melissa that she needed to give them some space; but she showed no inclination of separating from him, and he pressed her ever close against him. The people around them, the environment of the ward, all faded away, and it was just the two of them, clasped together properly for the first time.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Melissa! Doctor Havers!’

  Melissa turned instinctively and blinked as the camera, an elaborate high-end model with a lens that looked about a foot long, whirred and clicked in her face. She tried a smile – it wouldn’t do to look surly – but her face ached by now.

  The photographer, an amiable-looking young man dressed in jeans and a tatty sweater, grinned and tipped her a salute, then hurried off down the hospital corridor before the security guards could be alerted.

  Melissa sighed, continued on her way to the wards. How many more of these ambushes were there going to be? Would she ever be able to come to work in the morning and leave at night without having to run the gauntlet of reporters, paparazzi and amateur celebrity spotters? And when could she start heading directly home again instead of taking a convoluted route in order to make sure she wasn’t being followed? She felt like a secret agent in some old film, watching out for tags in a menacing and unfamiliar city.

  She’d been confined to the hospital for the first two days after the episode on the river, feeling no inclination to head home, working her way through the supplies of surplus clothes she kept in a locker for emergencies. Her meals were taken in the canteen or one of the offices, and she spent the rest of her waking day at Fin’s bedside, even while he slept. When tiredness threatened to smother her where she sat, Melissa caught a few hours’ sleep in one or other of the on-call rooms.

  After the ICU staff had prised her away from Fin that first time, after jokingly threatening to call security if she didn’t allow them access, Melissa had hovered in the background until one of the nurses had pointedly drawn the curtain all the way around his bed. Melissa got the message and wandered unsteadily through the corridors towards the entrance of St Matthew’s, barely registering people’s greetings as she passed them. The bright cold air of the early morning hit her as she stepped on to the pavement, and for a moment her disorientation was total.

  She sat on the great stone steps that led up to the front façade of the hospital, buried her face in her hands, and wept more uninhibitedly than ever before in her life.

  Never before had she been assailed by such a powerful blend of intense and competing emotion. There was awe and incredulity, great relief at the release of the pent-up terror she’d felt, indescribable joy and profound sorrow at the burden Fin had been carrying for these past years.

  Even if Fin didn’t want her, even if he clung to his conviction that he couldn’t allow anyone new into his life, anyone who might take his mind off his work, Melissa was grateful beyond belief that he was alive. That was what mattered most. But, as well as demonstrating that he’d returned to full consciousness, he’d told her, not once but over and over again, so that there could be no mistake, that he loved her. The words she’d scarcely dared hope to hear from his lips, even back in the days when they’d been drawing ever closer to one another.

  People had stared at her as they’d passed her on the steps, seeing her in her casual non-surgical clothes and no doubt assuming she was a distraught relative who’d lost a loved one to some illness or other within the hospital. One or two people stooped to her, their faces concerned, but she’d smiled through her tears, thanked them for their kindness, assured them she was all right.

  Fin wasn’t necessarily immediately out of danger. He was awake, and apparently compos mentis, but extensive tests would be needed to determine whether or not he’d sustained any lasting neurological damage that might affect his body or, perhaps more worryingly, his mind. The next couple of days would be the crucial period. So Melissa spent as much time as she could at his side in between his visits to various wards and departments where he underwent electroencephalograms, further MRI scans and a host of other investigations, and spent the rest of her time elsewhere in the hospital, eating or sleeping or simply going for walks to stretch her legs, staying close by in case Fin needed her.

  It was in the afternoon after Fin woke up that Melissa was strolling down one of the long St Matthew corridors, keeping the circulation going in her still-exhausted limbs, when she heard footsteps approaching rapidly behind her. She turned. Emma was hurrying after her, clutching a newspaper.

  ‘Melissa! Have you seen this?’

  Emma had herself volunteered for a double shift at work after the casualties of the Thames river incident, including Fin and Melissa, had been brought in, and she’d already shared Melissa’s joy at Fin’s awakening earlier that morning. Melissa took the paper from her. It was one of the national tabloids. The front page headline yelled, in huge letters: HOT SHOT DOC SAVES TOT. Beneath it was a slightly blurred photo, clearly taken by an amateur photographer using some sort of camera phone, which showed a bedraggled figure in the water, handing up a tiny shape to the outstretched arms of a policeman on a stationary speedboat. It was her, Melissa. She couldn’t even remember passing the child to the man.

  Below the picture a subheading read: 29-YEAR-OLD SURGEON HAILED AS HERO. And: Full story on page 2.

  ‘Fame at last.’ Emma laughed in delight.

  Melissa turned to the article. It was a small inset to the main story which was an overview of the accident, and mentioned her by name as well as the fact that she worked at St Matthew’s.

  ‘At least there’s no clear photo of me,’ she sighed.

  ‘Oh, just you wait,’ said Emma archly.

  And she was right. One of the personnel officers from the Human Resources department tracked Melissa down half an hour later and told her a press statement was being prepared.

  ‘The media are interested in you, particularly, Ms Havers,’ said the woman. ‘There’ll be photographers crowding the hospital, reporters at your heels. We need to get you prepared for some questions.’

  Melissa rolled her eyes. The last thing she wanted right now, the very last thing, with her emotions still in turmoil and fatigue trying to drag her under, was to get caught up in a media circus. But she listened to what the HR woman had to say.

  She did one brief press interview that evening, astonished and not a little intimidated by the bristling forest of cameras and microphones that faced her across the conference room in the hospital’s offices. Melissa recited a pre-memorised account of what had happened, how she’d dived in and rescued the toddler - she didn’t mention that she couldn’t swim - and afterwards she fielded ten minutes’ worth of questions. Her pictures appeared in the late editions of the papers, and people told her the interview had been broadcast on the evening news on all the stations, though she didn’t watch any of the broadcasts.

  That night, as she walked to and from her vigil at Fin’s bedside, she was cheered and slow-clapped wherever she went in the hospital, by staff of all professions and levels of standing. Even patients and their relatives did double takes as she passed by, whispering behind her back and pointing. Melissa responded graciously to begin with, but then, when the constant attention became wearying, tried to ignore it as best she could.

  When she did finally venture home, at the insistence of not only Emma and Deborah and Professor Penney but Fin himself, she spotted the throng of reporters on the front steps just before she went through the doors. Retreating back into the hospital, Melissa headed for a little-known exit through the kitchens and made her escape that way.

  During the day
s of Fin’s recovery, as test after test came back normal and the relief began to intensify in Melissa, the two of them conversed very little. Melissa didn’t want to weaken Fin by overtaxing him, didn’t want to get in the way of his healing. But he made it clear he didn’t want her to go away either. So she sat by his bed, in ICU and later when he was transferred down to one of the regular wards, often holding hands with him, sometimes kissing in a fairly chaste way. There was so much to be said between them, but it could wait now that it was becoming clearer that he was going to be all right.

  Now, as Melissa stepped on to the ward ready to face a day’s work, she felt a pang of sadness. Prof Penney had told her not to start her duties again: she had less than a week left, and she’d been through a serious trauma. She needed rest. But Melissa couldn’t leave just like that. She had to go out with a bang, giving her all to the job right up until the end.

  The sadness she felt was for the ward, the department, the hospital itself. Because she couldn’t stay, even now that she and Fin had made clear their feelings for one another. Perhaps particularly so now. Deborah had been right: a love affair between two of the most important people in the department would inevitably get in the way of the smooth running of the service. Melissa had made her choice: she wanted Fin, and it looked as if they were going to be together. But in return, she had to give up her job at St Matthew’s.

  As Melissa busied herself about the ward, the atmosphere different now, cheerful even despite the enormous suffering many of the patients had recently undergone (Deborah later said one of the patients had told her that being treated by doctor who was a genuine hero had assisted his recovery, and Melissa snorted, though secretly she was pleased), she thought: I’m going to miss this place. Perhaps more than I can even imagine.

  ***

  By the fifth day after the episode on the river, Fin was up and about, taking regular walks, a little shakily at first but with growing confidence. Melissa visited him upstairs whenever she could snatch a few minutes away from her work. One such opportunity arose after the orthopaedic and neurosurgeons took over one of her cases for whom their skills were better suited than hers. With no patient to take to theatre, Melissa wandered along to Fin’s ward.