by Joanna Neil
She went from there to help the nurses with their queries and programmed the display on the computerised infuser so that they could interpret the readings it was giving them. Then she went to find out what was wrong with Helen’s ten-year-old patient.
‘I can’t find anything on the X-ray that points to the child’s problem,’ Helen said, ‘and all the tests I’ve done have come up negative, except for a mild joint effusion that showed up on the ultrasound scan. He doesn’t appear to be ill in himself, but he’s recovering from an upper respiratory tract infection and now he has a low-grade fever. His hip is giving him a lot of trouble, though, and he has a definite limp.’
Abby examined the boy. ‘Have you been doing a lot of sports activity lately, Ben?’ she asked him, but he shook his head.
‘No. I didn’t feel like it. I was supposed to be doing a cross-country run this week, but my hip hurt too much so I had to stay at school and do work instead.’
‘Oh, dear.’ Abby made a face. ‘Do you like cross-country running?’
‘Yeah. It’s better than doing maths.’
Abby smiled. ‘We’d better see if we can do something about that hip, then,’ she said.
She went to study the test results with Helen. ‘If you’ve ruled out all the main causes of hip pain, then it’s probably a transient synovitis,’ she told Helen. ‘Usually we would aspirate some of the fluid from the effusion and send it to the lab, but unless it’s anything major, I would leave it. It’s probably caused by a viral infection, and as he’s well enough in himself, I don’t think we need to worry too much about it. I expect it will settle down of its own accord in a couple of weeks, as long as he takes care to rest the joint.’
‘I’ll give him anti-inflammatories, then, and arrange for an outpatient appointment, shall I?’ Helen gave her a querying look.
‘Yes. Make sure the parents let us know about any flare-up of the condition and give them a letter for their GP.’
‘I will.’
Matt arrived back in A and E just as she was going to find Sam. ‘I thought you had gone home a long while ago,’ she said, looking at him in surprise.
‘I did,’ he said, ‘but I had to come back for some paperwork that Admin was putting together for me. Do you think you could spare me a few minutes? I want to run something by you, and alongside that the admin department said you have a file of statistics that might be useful to me.’
‘I’m up to my ears at the moment,’ she said. She tried to keep the weariness out of her voice. ‘It’s been non-stop in here since you left, and Sam has been waiting to talk to me for the last half-hour. You can walk with me, if you like, and I’ll answer any questions as we go.’
‘Thanks.’ He looked as though he didn’t have a problem with that but, then, why would he? He wasn’t struggling to deal with a dozen situations at any one time, and he certainly seemed to have time on his hands now that his TV series had come to an end.
She went to move off in the direction of the treatment room, but he stalled her. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off taking a break for a few minutes? You look as though you could do with a cup of coffee. It might help to revitalise you. Besides, you seem tense, as though your shoulders and neck are all knotted up. I do a pretty good massage, you know.’
She gave him a wry look. ‘I’ve heard that one before.’
He gave her a mischievous look. ‘Maybe, but I’m a proper doctor, you know, the real thing. Haven’t you ever seen the intro to my TV programme? I don’t just wear a stethoscope to wow the audience.’ His blue eyes danced with flickering lights and his mouth made a teasing smile.
‘You’re out of this world,’ she said, giving him an amused grin in spite of herself. ‘I’ll forgo the massage, thanks, but actually coffee sounds pretty good. I dare say Sam will hold on for a few more minutes longer. He said it wasn’t urgent.’
They went to the doctors’ lounge, and Matt made her sit in a comfortable armchair while he went and made the coffee.
‘Real filter coffee,’ he said, coming back to her with a steaming mug, sounding impressed. ‘Smells good…’ He took a sip. ‘Tastes good, too. It isn’t like the stuff you get in most hospitals where I’ve worked.’
‘That’s because I bring it in,’ she told him. ‘If there’s one thing I like, it’s a good cup of coffee.’
She sipped the aromatic brew and then closed her eyes briefly, savouring the moment of relaxation.
‘You look as though you could sleep right there,’ Matt said.
She opened her eyes. ‘You’re right, I could. We are so busy, completely overworked and understaffed. It sometimes feels as though I’m on a roller-coaster, going round and round endlessly.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Can you? I would have thought it’s a long time since you had to cope with the day-to-day stresses of the emergency department. Going around and about with a TV crew doesn’t seem half as demanding to me.’
‘It isn’t that long ago since I worked in A and E. As to the TV work, it isn’t demanding, I grant you, but it can be heart-rending. Some of the people we see are in a bad way. I can identify with them, just as I can with you and the stresses you feel. You do your job in an efficient, professional way, but I know you aren’t immune from the emotional dilemmas it throws up. You couldn’t help but feel empathy towards the young woman who was attacked by her husband, for instance.’
‘Melanie was vulnerable, and her child along with her.’
‘Yes, but so are you. I just haven’t quite managed so far to work out in what way.’
‘I’m not. I’m very grounded and capable. You’re imagining things.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You are, too.’ She looked at him, waiting for him to come back at her, but he stayed silent, his mouth making a crooked shape, and she said on a faint chuckle, ‘It’s your turn.’
‘I know. I also know that you’re trying to put me off track.’ His gaze meshed with hers. ‘You’re not going to tell me what caused you to identify with Melanie, are you?’
She sighed. ‘It isn’t a secret.’ She drank the rest of her coffee and then put down her cup. ‘It was a bad experience and one that I would much rather forget, to be honest. The truth is, I was attacked at work one day by a man who turned out to be a schizophrenic. He had some strange idea that I was his estranged wife, and he picked up an instrument from one of the treatment trolleys and stabbed me in the abdomen.’
His eyes widened. ‘I’m so sorry. That must have been terrible for you.’
She winced. ‘At least I was in the hospital and help was close at hand.’
‘There is that, I suppose.’ He came over to her and knelt down beside her chair so that he was on a level with her, looking into her eyes. ‘It must have been difficult for you to come back to work.’ He laid a hand gently on her arm and warmth flowed through her almost as though he was healing her with his touch.
She nodded. His understanding of how she had felt back then startled her. ‘It was scary at first, but I knew that I had to face up to my demons. It was either that or go under.’
‘I have the feeling that you would never let anyone, demons or otherwise, get the better of you.’ His gaze was intense, compassionate, and she realised that she needed to pull herself together.
‘You’re right, and I should really go and tackle some of them now,’ she said. ‘I have to get back to work.’
‘May I go with you? I’m fascinated by the way you handle the problems that come your way. You’re always so bright and on top of things.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’ She nodded in acknowledgement of his question, and he stood up, letting go of her arm, so that she felt a chill of loss, almost as though he had cut a connection. She got to her feet and led the way out of the room.
He went with her in search of Sam and his patient. Sam was treating a seven-year-old child who had suffered an electrical injury.
Abby introduced herself to the boy and his mother. ‘
What happened here?’ she asked, giving the boy a coaxing smile, but he didn’t answer. He was pale and subdued, watching as the nurse dressed burns to his hands and Abby guessed that he wouldn’t be easily distracted while that was going on.
‘Callum was playing with a fort that his dad made for him,’ Sam told her. ‘It had lights supplied by a cable that was plugged into the electrical socket, and he decided that the plug didn’t need to be attached any more.’
‘Ouch.’ Abby winced. ‘That obviously had painful consequences. How did he manage to remove it? And why would he want to do that?’
‘It was in the way,’ the boy said, looking up from having his hands dressed. ‘It wouldn’t tuck back into the roof space and I wanted the roof to be flat, so I got some scissors and cut it off.’ He paused momentarily. ‘It went bang.’
‘It did?’ Abby’s eyes widened.
‘It certainly did,’ his mother put in. ‘We all heard it. And then he must have fallen back and banged his head on the bunk bed. When we rushed into the bedroom to see what was going on, we found him unconscious on the floor. We didn’t know whether he was knocked out from the fall or from the electric shock.’
Abby looked at the boy. ‘So you didn’t think to switch the electricity off at the plug before you took the scissors to the cable?’
The boy shook his head and made a grimace. ‘I forgot.’
‘Well, that would certainly do it,’ Abby said. She turned to Matt. ‘It has to be a boy who would do something like that, doesn’t it?’ she said in a soft tone. ‘They always seem to be getting ideas into their heads about how to fix things…or unfix them, as the case may be.’
‘It’s because we like to find answers to problems,’ he said, with a smile for her alone. His blue gaze flickered as it swept over her features. ‘Give a boy a puzzle and he’ll work on it until he’s managed to figure it out.’
‘Hmm.’ She wasn’t sure she was happy with the way he looked at her when he said that. Did he think she was a puzzle, an enigma that he needed to solve?
She turned to Sam. ‘You wanted to ask me about something?’ She kept her voice low, and studied the boy’s chart while Sam drew her attention to the heart trace.
‘There was an upset with his heart rhythm when he was brought in. I’m not sure whether it was because of the electrical shock or from some other cause. There appears to be a slight murmur, too. Should I be doing other tests?’
She nodded. ‘It’s probably nothing significant…most likely it’s the aftermath of a recent illness…but I would follow it up, without being too invasive, and arrange an outpatient appointment in a few weeks’ time, just to be on the safe side. Keep him on the monitor here for twenty-four hours to make sure that the heart rhythm is back to normal.’
‘OK, I’ll do that, thanks.’
She spoke to the boy and his mother for a while longer and then left the treatment room.
She glanced at Matt. ‘I expect you’ve come across this kind of situation before, when you’ve been out and about with the TV crew. Children often poke things into electrical sockets and end up in A and E, don’t they? Is this the kind of event you would have put on camera?’
Matt studied her. ‘Are you asking me in case I was thinking of bringing a crew in here at some point?’
She laughed. ‘That’s about as likely to happen as you putting in an application for the part-time job here.’
He mused on that. ‘Actually, that isn’t as farfetched as it might sound. I’d be prepared to think quite seriously about coming to work here on a part-time basis now that my TV series has come to an end. We might even consider making a deal on that score…I’ll work here in exchange for you agreeing to a few programmes being filmed. After all, you said yourself that you were overworked and understaffed. I’m up to date with emergency work, and I’ve specialised in paediatrics…And you still don’t have anyone to fill the vacancy, do you?’
That was an underhanded move, wasn’t it? He knew full well how desperate they were to find a competent doctor to fill the slot, and what were the odds that Helen had filled him in on their progress to date? The woman was way too eager to have him around.
‘Even so, I don’t know that a deal is on the cards,’ she said. ‘It goes against the grain to have cameras intruding on the unit, and I’m sure the hospital management wouldn’t agree to it.’
‘Actually, Admin are all for the idea. It would bring money to the hospital and help the public to see how important your work is here. I could throw in a few pointers about preventative medicine, too. You’d want to be able to help people, wouldn’t you?’
She looked at him with narrowed eyes. ‘So you’ve already gone through this with the bosses?’ She might have known he would do that. She sucked in her breath. ‘How many programmes did they agree to?’
‘Twelve,’ he said.
She gritted her teeth in annoyance, and then shook her head. ‘That’s way too many. I wouldn’t be able to cope with the chaos.’
‘Make it six,’ he suggested. ‘And I would work five mornings a week, so that I can keep the afternoons free for my feature writing and the scripts for the radio broadcasts? How does that sound?’
‘It sounds,’ she said crisply, ‘as though you’ve been cooking this up with management behind my back for some time, and now you’ve cleverly backed me into a corner.’ She glowered at him. ‘Anyway, I thought your radio programme goes out in the morning?’
‘It does, but we record them before breakfast-time, so they don’t actually go out live.’ He sent her an encouraging look. ‘I don’t see that as a problem. I would still be able to get here early enough for the morning shift.’
The thought that he was willing to work in A and E weighed heavily in the balance. They needed another doctor in the unit and she knew that he was more than competent, from what she had seen and heard. His qualifications were there for all to see on his website, and they were very impressive.
What real choice did she have? ‘You had better leave your CV with Personnel. They’ll sort everything out as to hours and salary.’
‘That’s brilliant.’ His mouth curved and he leaned towards her and before she had any idea what he was about, he had planted a kiss firmly on her lips. ‘I knew you’d come around to my way of thinking.’
She was too stunned to say a word. Her heart was racing and her lips were still tingling from the tumultuous effect of that brief kiss when he stopped and glanced at his watch. ‘I’m glad we sorted that out,’ he said, ‘but I have to go now, or I shall be late.’
She stared at him. He wasn’t at all fazed by that moment of intimacy. As far as he was concerned, it might never have happened, it had been a momentary impulse. Whereas, for her part, she was finding it distinctly hard to recover her equilibrium. He had kissed her. He had actually kissed her and her lips were on fire.
Somehow she managed to find her voice. ‘Late for what?’ she asked. ‘Another recording?’
He shook his head and said distractedly, ‘No. I said I would pick up the children from their friends’ house and take them swimming, and I’m going to have to rush to get there in time.’ He glanced at her, already on the move. ‘You won’t regret this, you know. Things will be a lot easier for you around here with an extra doctor on the team.’
Her mind was buzzing with questions. Children? What children? Was he married? She tried to form the words to ask him, but he was already walking briskly away from her, heading for the exit. Abby stared at his disappearing back. Why did it bother her so much that he might be a married man with a family of his own?
She felt every bit as though she had been involved in a collision with some kind of earthmoving equipment. He had scooped her up and carried her along with him and had somehow persuaded her to do something that went against everything she believed in. How had he managed to do that?
He seemed to think that she wouldn’t regret taking him on, but that was a false supposition for a start. She was already convinced that she had
taken leave of her senses.
How could he send her pulses sky rocketing one minute and then bring her down to earth with such an almighty bump just a few seconds later? And more to the point, why had she broken her own rule and let him get under her skin?
Men were not to be trusted at all…not ever.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘DO I look all right with my hair like this? I could put it up, I suppose…’ Helen was flustered, checking her hair in the mirror in the doctors’ lounge and then gazing down at her footwear with indecision. ‘And what about my shoes? Should I wear my other ones? What do you think? I always keep a spare pair in my locker, just in case.’
‘I think that you look perfect, as always,’ Abby told her with a hint of impatience. ‘I’m beginning to think everyone around here has gone mad. I even caught Sam checking out his tie this morning and comparing it with one in another colour. No one is behaving as they normally do, and the camera crew haven’t even finished setting up their equipment yet.’
‘I know, but they’re working on it. They were holding a meeting first thing to decide which areas they were going to cover, and now they’re going through the list of patients who have come in already this morning to see who they’re going to include in the show.’
Abby swallowed the remains of her coffee and scowled over the rim of the cup. ‘I shall be glad when they’ve done what they have to do and packed up their gear to leave. I still can’t believe that I agreed to any of this.’
‘But it’s so exciting, Abby.’ Helen’s expression was animated, her eyes glowing. ‘I was talking to the cameraman a little while ago, and he says the programme will be aired in just a few days’ time. Just imagine…our own A and E unit featured on television.’
‘And all the staff looking nervous, or overwhelmed and forgetting about the patients they’re supposed to be treating. The only one who will have any notion of what he’s about is the man who started the whole thing, and he’ll have me to answer to if anything goes wrong.’ Her mouth made a grim line. Hadn’t Matt used her to further his own career, just as her ex had done? Now she would have to deal with the fallout from that.