The Family Doctor

by Bobby Hutchinson

  “Phew, what a stench.” Kate wrinkled her nose at the smell that no amount of air freshener could disguise. “I thought you might have time for coffee, Les, but it looks like you’re swamped. Give me a call when it slows down and you can get away for a minute. I want to talk to you about a patient who was treated in Emerg last week.”

  “I’ll buzz you when it happens. Right now we’re up to our hips in alligators. Shriners with food poisoning and—” Leslie lowered her voice “—the chief in with what he insists is a fractured ankle. Slipped on a candy wrapper in the lobby, no less. Bet the cleaning staff are gonna get reamed out for that one.”

  “Tony O’Connor?” Kate’s eyebrows arched, and her green eyes widened. Leslie knew that Kate had had her problems with O’Connor.

  “The very one,” Leslie confirmed.

  Kate pursed her lips and gave a silent whistle as she glanced around at the loaded stretchers. “Lousy timing.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Did you get him to take his clothes off?” Kate asked in a whisper.

  “Damn.” Leslie snapped her fingers. “I knew I forgot something. What was I thinking?”

  “You weren’t thinking of me, that’s for sure. The laughter dancing in Kate’s eyes made Leslie smile. “How many times have I told you I’d like to know what’s really under those Italian suits?”

  “And how many times have I told you to just walk up to him and make a formal request?”

  Kate grinned and shook her head. “Tempting, but I’m chicken.”

  “Rubbish. You’re the bravest woman I know.” Leslie wasn’t joking about that. Where her job was concerned, Kate constantly and willingly put herself into the midst of conflicts that would have made Leslie run fast and far. “I’ve always thought you and Tony would make a striking couple.”

  Kate laughed. “I hope it wouldn’t get to the striking stage, but you never know.”

  They were giggling when a clerk came hurrying over. “Leslie, paramedics are arriving with an MVA, ETA seven minutes.”

  “It’s been such a quiet morning, it’ll be nice to see some action for a change.” Leslie rolled her eyes and waved a hand at Kate as she hurried off.

  CHAPTER TWO

  KATE LEFT EMERG AND HEADED back to her cubbyhole of an office on the second floor, thinking about Tony O’Connor and his injured ankle. She hated to admit it, even to herself, but she found it difficult to feel any real sympathy for the man, and her lack of compassion embarrassed her. She’d been a nurse before she became an administrator, and she never wanted to lose her empathy for anyone in pain, be it emotional or physical.

  As patient rep, her job involved the resolution of conflict—she was the bridge between the system and the individual. She dealt with anger every day, she even gave seminars on anger management, and still she couldn’t entirely resolve the ambivalent feelings she had toward O’Connor.

  One of his first campaigns when he came to St. Joe’s last February was to try to do away with her position. She understood that budget cuts by the government were at the root of his reasoning, but he’d been unsupportive in the extreme, suggesting that having an employee whose sole function was to resolve patient and staff problems was both frivolous and unnecessary. Her salary was a waste of money, he declared openly at one meeting where she was present.

  Fortunately, she had powerful support on the hospital board as a result of a dispute she’d resolved just before Christmas that had saved St. Joseph’s from what might have become a lengthy and expensive lawsuit.

  When he learned of it, O’Connor had grudgingly withdrawn his objections to her position. He no longer actively opposed her, but neither had she felt any positive support from him.

  At the time, she’d felt betrayed and deeply angry. She’d tried to let it go, but it was there, just under the surface, whenever she was around him, which was often. She saw him regularly at staff meetings, and they were on several committees together. It had been necessary many times to meet with him and discuss various concerns that had been brought to her attention involving patients and staff. Although he’d always been fair, he’d certainly never gone out of his way to be understanding, and she resented him for it.

  Why, then, was she so powerfully, physically aware of the damned man? Sometimes he had a way of looking at her from those unreadable brown eyes, as if there was no one but the two of them in the room. She was all too conscious of the graceful, athletic way he moved, and she’d noticed that his unruly dark hair curled a little above his collar, and his hands were big and muscular.

  It was such a waste. In Kate’s opinion, Tony O’Connor had been richly blessed with compelling good looks, and he’d gone and sabotaged the package with a personality that could only be described as unsympathetic. Offputting, she amended. Downright objectionable? Yup, at times he could be a proper pain in the butt.

  She certainly didn’t want O’Connor to suffer any real pain from his injury, she assured herself as she closed the door of her windowless office and sank into the comfortable chair behind her narrow desk. Clicking on her answering machine, she started listening to the dozen messages that had accrued that morning, making careful note of the ones that required immediate responses.

  Pain, no. She wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But a dose of what it felt like to be caught up as a patient in the machinery of a big hospital wouldn’t hurt Dr. Tony O’Connor one tiny bit.

  FOR THE FOURTH TIME in ten minutes, Tony glanced at his watch. He’d now been in Emerg for one hour, twelve minutes and forty seconds. He’d had to ask a nurse to call and make his apologies for the ten o’clock meeting he’d missed. His cell phone was in his pocket, but when he’d tried to use it, a nursing aide had snatched it from him.

  “Pacemakers, Doctor. The man in the very next cubicle has a pacemaker. You know you aren’t allowed to use a cell phone in Emerg.”

  He did know, of course, but he’d forgotten. His irritation had reached the borderline of outright fury by the time Alf Jensen burst through the door with the results of the X rays.

  “It’s about time,” Tony growled. “Fractured, right?” He’d resigned himself to the fact that he’d be hobbling around on a cast for the foreseeable future. His ankle was swollen to more than twice its normal size, and it was so painful he could barely stand the weight of the ice pack a nurse had slapped on it.

  Alf closed the door and perched on the side of the bed.

  Tony frowned at him, wondering why the hell Alf had such a grim look on his face. “Well? What’s the verdict? If it’s fractured, I know I’ll have to wait for the swelling to go down before we can cast the bloody thing. Let me have a look at the X ray.” He grabbed for it, but Alf quickly moved it out of his reach.

  “The ankle looks fine, Tony, no fracture.”

  “Well, that’s good news.” It didn’t make it any less painful, but at least a sprain would heal faster. “So let’s just bind it up with a tensor bandage, and I can hobble around on crutches.”

  “I’m afraid the X ray picked up something we hadn’t expected.” Alf got up and slipped the negative into the viewing frame. “See this shadow right here?”

  Tony frowned and studied the film. It showed an ankle and part of a leg. Alf was pointing to a spot on the fibula, just above the ankle joint.

  “There’s a lesion right here, Tony. I had Crompton take a look at it—that’s what took so long. He was up in Surgery and I had to wait until he could break for a minute. He agrees with me that it looks like a possible sarcoma.”

  Stunned, Tony gaped at the other doctor. “You’ve got to be joking. Sarcoma? That’s not possible.”

  “I wouldn’t joke about a thing like this, Tony, you know that.”

  It was a struggle for Tony to keep the utter horror he felt from showing on his face. The ramifications sent a bolt of fear straight into his gut. Sarcoma was a fast-acting cancer. He could lose his leg.

  No, he corrected as his stomach knotted and bile wormed its way up into his throat
. No could about it. If this were sarcoma, he would lose his leg. He swallowed hard and did his best to control his expression.

  “I’ve ordered a CAT scan. They’ll come and take you over there in a minute.” Alf looked uncomfortable and didn’t meet Tony’s gaze. “We could well be wrong. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed. And we have to be grateful for the X ray. If it is sarcoma, the sooner we treat it the better—although I don’t need to tell you that, Tony. You know as well as I do.”

  He did, but it wasn’t any comfort. After mouthing another half dozen platitudes, Alf finally left, and for the first time all morning, Tony was relieved to be alone in the tiny room.

  He could let go of the rigid control he’d maintained in front of Alf. His fists were knotted, and he realized it was because his hands were trembling. In fact, his whole body was shaking. His stomach felt sick. He could feel his heart hammering against his ribs, as if he’d just run a fast mile, and his breathing was jerky and rapid.

  Shock. For the first time in years, he felt on the verge of tears. Jumbled thoughts raced through his head, all of them centered on his small daughter. Losing a leg was one thing, but what if the cancer had spread?

  What would become of McKensy if he died? She was only nine, and he was the parent raising her. His ex, Jessica, had left them when McKensy was about to turn four. Jessica wanted to be a jazz singer, and when an offer came to travel with a blues band, she’d taken it.

  He and his ex-wife were friends now, but it had been a tough four years. Tony knew Jessica loved their daughter, and she came to visit whenever time and distance permitted, but the life she’d chosen to lead wasn’t one that could include a child.

  After his divorce, and after two bad experiences with housekeepers, Tony had asked his mother, Dorothy, to move in with him and McKensy. The timing was right. Dorothy had just sold the family home and bought a condo, which she promptly rented out. The extra income meant she was better off than she’d ever been, and of course Tony paid her well for caring for McKensy.

  He was grateful to his mother, but for very good reasons he absolutely didn’t want Dorothy raising his daughter single-handed. His mother was a kind and loving grandmother, but she was also a neurotic and bitter woman, still obsessed with the fact that Tony’s father had walked out on her years before.

  He had a brother and two sisters, but to which of them would he entrust his daughter? They all loved McKensy, but their lives were busy and full. Two of them had children of their own. His single sister was plowing her way through med school and had another grueling three years to go.

  For a moment, he gave in to the despair that overwhelmed him, and felt the strange sensation of tears welling up in his eyes. Horrified, he used his fist to swipe at the moisture that escaped down his cheeks.

  With no warning knock, the door opened. “Tony O’Connor?”

  He scrabbled for a tissue and turned his head away until his eyes were dry.

  A white-smocked young woman ignored his distress and gave him a wide smile. “Hi, I’m Lisa Bently. I’m here to take you down for a CAT scan.” She released the brakes on the bed and whizzed him out the door and down the hall, chattering as they sped along.

  “Wrecked your ankle, huh? I did that last year, out jogging. I fell off the edge of the sidewalk. Hurts like fury, doesn’t it? Here we are. Looks like you’ll have a bit of a wait—this place is crazy today.” She angled the bed against the wall, one of four others.

  “Look, Ms.—” Tony had to squint at her name tag. “Ms. Bently, would you just go in and tell the tech that I need this done stat?” He hated to pull rank, but there was no choice in this case. “Tell them the chief of staff is waiting and needs to be seen immediately.”

  “Oh, they know, Doctor. But see, it’s first come first served. You’ll have to wait your turn like everybody else. Here’s a couple magazines.”

  She plopped two outdated copies of Newsweek on his lap and was gone before he could say another word.

  “Hell of a thing, ain’t it?” The elderly man in the bed across the hall propped himself up on his elbow and twisted his head around to talk. “S’posed to be the best medical system in the world, here in Canada, and still you gotta lie around goin’ rotten waiting for some test or another. What’re you in for?”

  “My ankle.” Tony tried to be distant without being rude, but the old man was oblivious to subtlety. For the next thirty-five minutes, he regaled Tony with the entire history of his bowels and gall bladder operation. By the time an attendant finally came and wheeled him in, Tony felt numb. He went through the test without saying a single word, grateful for the silence, anxious for the results. When it was over, he asked to see the negatives, but the female attendant insisted that Jensen had to see them first.

  “Look, I’m a doctor,” Tony insisted. It was getting harder to summon up his usual authoritative tone. He felt exhausted, and his stomach was upset again. The sense of unreality that had begun with the X ray intensified. Still, he tried. “I’m the chief of staff at this hospital. Surely I have the right to see my own results.”

  “Sorry, Doctor.” The older woman shook her head. “You’re Dr. Jensen’s patient, and he didn’t leave any orders of that sort.”

  By the time he’d been wheeled back to Emerg, Tony was seething again, focusing on the ridiculousness of the rules rather than thinking about what the results of the scan would reveal. But underneath the justifiable anger, he could feel anxiety eating away at his gut like acid.

  Jensen came bustling in after another twenty-minute wait, a brown envelope clamped under his right arm, and Tony’s stomach cramped hard. The bile in his throat burned, and he had to swallow repeatedly before he could croak out, “Is it sarcoma?”

  “Tony,” Jensen began in a hearty tone, avoiding eye contact again, “I don’t know how to tell you this. There’s been one hell of a mix-up—I owe you an apology. When I looked in the computer for the results of your X ray a while ago, I had no idea another Antony O’Connor had been seen in Emerg this morning. He was complaining of a sore lower leg, and he had an X ray shortly before you did. Turns out it was his X ray we were looking at, not yours. He does indeed have sarcoma.” With a triumphant gesture, Jensen whipped out the negatives from the envelope. “Now, this is you, and as you can see, there’s no fracture, and definitely no sarcoma. We can safely assume all that’s wrong is a severe sprain.”

  The relief that flooded Tony was so intense he felt dizzy. It took several moments before utter fury edged out the thankfulness. How could such a gross mistake happen in his hospital? He opened his mouth to ask and the turmoil in his stomach intensified.

  Suddenly he knew he was going to vomit. He stretched across Jensen, groping for a kidney basin. Jensen shoved one at him only seconds before he threw up.

  With each expulsion, the burning in Tony’s chest intensified, and he began to have difficulty catching his breath. His intestines were on fire, and as his stomach convulsed in agony, he moaned and bent double.

  “Easy, Tony.” Jensen was checking his blood pressure. Two ER nurses materialized and took over the task of monitoring vital signs.

  “Acute GI symptoms,” Jensen concluded. “You have any history of intestinal problems, Tony?”

  Tony gasped and shook his head. “Tylenol,” he managed to croak. “Four Tylenol…empty stomach…need water…”

  Jensen gave him a small paper cup of water, and Tony swallowed it in one sip. “I just need some food,” he groaned, his eyes streaming from the pain in his chest and abdomen. “That Tylenol I took is killing me.”

  Being told he probably had sarcoma hadn’t helped, either, but Tony didn’t have the breath to say so.

  “Go down to the kitchen and ask for a bowl of clear broth,” Jensen barked at an aide, “and be quick about it.”

  The burning subsided enough so that Tony could straighten. A nurse stayed with him, and when the aide arrived with a large bowl of broth on a tray, she cranked the back of the bed higher so he could sit m
ore comfortably.

  Tony had never been as grateful for a simple bowl of beef broth. He spooned it up, and almost immediately the pain in his chest and abdomen began to ease.

  “Better?” The nurse smiled at him, and he was able to give her a facsimile of a smile in return.

  He finished the entire bowl in less than two minutes. The nurse set the tray on a cart. Sinking back on the bed, he heaved a sigh—and with the speed and intensity of a killer wave rolling in, a sensation of extreme heat rushed over him. It grew more and more intense, and as he felt his throat begin to swell, panic overwhelmed him.

  “Allergy,” he whispered with the last of his breath.

  He heard the nurse shouting and was dimly aware of bodies surrounding him and voices talking in urgent tones. In the few moments before he lost consciousness, he knew he was about to die, after all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “DID YOU HEAR THAT O’CONNOR’S now on a respirator in ICU?”

  Leslie was taking hungry bites of her tuna sandwich. It was past two in the afternoon, and she and Kate were sitting in the hospital cafeteria.

  “The whole story’s been flying back and forth on e-mail all day,” Kate said with a shake of her head that sent her auburn hair flying. “It’s hard to believe there could be such a series of problems, and with the chief of staff, of all people.”

  “It would be funny if it hadn’t almost been tragic,” Leslie agreed. “The final straw was that new French chef in the kitchen.”

  “Rene Lalonde,” Kate said. “I heard that he put eggshells in the beef broth. Now, why would he do that?”