A Nurse in Crisis

by Lilian Darcy

  Alone with his patient, he began with a briskness that he didn’t feel, ‘Now, Mr Martin, how can I help you today?’

  In the treatment room, Aimee gave Grace a far briefer summary on Sarah’s condition than she’d given Marshall.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of her, and of you,’ the red-headed doctor said, with the gleam of tears in her eyes. ‘Marcus will do the very best he can, of course. I don’t think Sarah will be sorry she chose him. He always was a caring doctor, but he’s said that losing our baby made him understand just how hard it can be for people when things go wrong.’

  ‘I’ve told Sarah about that. I—I hope you don’t mind,’ Aimee said, suddenly afraid that she might have been unintentionally breaking a confidence when she’d only been trying to give Sarah some extra reassurance about Dr Gaines’s sensitivity.

  ‘Not at all,’ Grace answered. ‘We’re both…a lot more at ease talking about James’s death these days.’ His name flowed comfortably from her lips, her tone filled with warmth. ‘It’s good, in a way, to feel that his little life meant something to other people, even if it’s only that Marcus and I both understand our patients’ feelings far better now.’

  ‘Tell me about the patient you want me to see,’ Aimee said quickly.

  ‘She’s Egyptian,’ Grace answered. She seemed to understand Aimee’s need to get back to business. ‘Her English is so-so. She’s young and keen to work on it, and she’s determined not to use an interpreter, but her history is complicated, I gather from her husband, and I really want to take the time to get it right. If you can go through it very slowly and carefully and write it all down. Anything that’s contradictory or unclear, flag it for me so I can double-check. I’d hate to miss something, as I’m going to be seeing her regularly for a while, with referrals to specialists as well.’

  And so the afternoon passed. Aimee spent nearly an hour on Omnia Bostros’s history, having to excuse herself twice during that time to help Rebecca with other patients. In the end, Grace was very pleased with the detail and clarity she’d obtained, covering a series of childhood illnesses, two operations following an accident and some treatment for infertility in Egypt which Grace apparently felt hadn’t necessarily been indicated at that stage.

  Late in the day, Aimee recognised Marshall’s patient Hilde Deutschkron in the waiting room, accompanied by her daughter. Mrs Deutschkron didn’t look well, and her daughter didn’t look happy.

  Neither did Marshall after he’d seen them, and Aimee couldn’t help asking, ‘Has she made a decision about the chemotherapy yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, then sighed. ‘She’s not going to have it.’

  ‘You were hoping she would?’

  He headed in the direction of the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee and she went with him as he seemed to expect it. In fact, she saw, he was making two cups. She didn’t protest!

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered her. ‘I’m not sure why I’m feeling the way I am. I’d have thought this was a decision I’d support. Acceptance, instead of a difficult fight that won’t give her much more time. But I suppose I felt that she wasn’t entirely happy with her decision.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Aimee asked.

  He thought for a moment, then answered, ‘She said it so defiantly, as if she was asking…almost begging…for a good reason to feel differently, only I wasn’t able to give her one. She’s always taken such pride in her will for survival, her capacity to fight. This doesn’t feel like a decision made from the heart, but one from the head, and I’m always sceptical of the human brain when it dictates something in opposition to a heart that’s been a very successful, intuitive organ in the past.’

  Aimee was silent at this, winded by the way his words reflected her own feelings about him. She’d made a decision with her brain that was right, but it didn’t stop the protesting of her heart all the same.

  ‘You expressed that very well,’ she told him at last.

  ‘Did I?’

  Marshall smiled briefly as he poured boiling water over the dark brown granules of instant coffee. They hissed a little, and the water steamed invitingly, then he splashed milk in on top. Some of it spilled, but he didn’t react, just picked up his cup and left the kitchen, so that their conversation hung in the air, dissatisfying and unfinished.

  Just like their relationship.

  Aimee wiped up the spill for him, took one mouthful of the coffee then tipped the rest down the sink, her stomach rebelling.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘MRS DEUTSCHKRON, I was a little worried to see your name on my appointment list again so soon,’ Marshall said to his elderly patient on Friday morning.

  It was less than twenty-four hours since her last visit, and Deirdre had had to squeeze her in between two longstanding appointments. She didn’t have her daughter with her, and she’d come by taxi.

  He was already feeling less than brilliant this morning. He’d asked Aimee about her visit to Sarah last night, and had received only a brief, sanitised reply, as if she regretted the way she’d let him into her personal life yesterday.

  Sarah was much more comfortable, Aimee had said. Her uterine contractions had settled. There was no cervical dilatation. Marcus was cautiously optimistic, and Jason and Sarah were both in good spirits.

  ‘So I might actually be able to earn my keep in this practice today, you’ll be pleased to hear!’ she’d finished, as if he’d only asked because he was keeping tabs on her performance.

  Her wilful misreading of his motives saddened him, and would have made Rebecca furious, he knew, if she’d overheard. Thankfully, she hadn’t.

  And now Mrs Deutschkron…

  ‘There’s no need to worry,’ she said firmly, with an emphatic German flair to her accent. ‘I am here to countermand the rubbish I gave you yesterday. I will have the treatment, please! Can it commence soon? Please, tell me how it is to be managed!’

  ‘You’ve changed your mind,’ he clarified. One of the most crashingly superfluous statements he’d made in a while.

  ‘I have,’ she confirmed. ‘And I am very sorry to have wasted your time.’

  There was an unmistakable zest to her which had been entirely absent yesterday, and he leapt to the conclusion which should have been obvious—would have been, if he’d been thinking clearly at the moment—from the second she walked in.

  ‘You’ve had some good news.’

  ‘I have had some marvellous news,’ she assured him. ‘My daughter is getting married. About time! She is thirty-eight! And I am going to be at that wedding—and it is going to be a proper wedding, I have told them, which will take weeks and weeks to organise. No using my health as an excuse to rush off to the register office in a knee-length dress, thank you!’

  She wasn’t smiling as she said all this. It was clearly far too momentous and important for the frivolous indulgence of a grin. But her whole manner was electrifying in its determination and happiness.

  The entire complexion of Marsh’s morning changed, and he urged her to tell him the whole story as there was clearly a story to tell.

  Mrs Deutschkron got comfortable in her chair. ‘Well,’ she began, then immediately interrupted herself, ‘Why it is that a parent cannot be told these things, I don’t know! But it appears that Marianne has been going out—what do they do these days? They don’t go out! They stay in! with this gentleman for a year. She has not mentioned it to me, she says, because she “did not know where it was heading”.’

  Mrs Deutschkron shook her head, as if in her generation there had never been any possibility of ambiguity on the issue.

  ‘But she was upset with me yesterday,’ she went on, ‘for deciding against the treatment, and she tells Jonathan about it—his name is Jonathan—and he says to her, “Would it change her mind if we got married?” What sort of a proposal is this? I would have turned it down! Thankfully, my daughter didn’t. She brings him round to meet me last night—about time—and the whole thing is arranged. I ask you!’
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  She threw out her hands helplessly, and Marshall had the best laugh he’d had in weeks.

  ‘Wonderful!’ he said.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ his patient agreed. ‘And if there’s any hope that this treatment might keep me going until there is a grandchild on the way…’

  ‘It might, Hilde,’ he told her. ‘It might, at that!’

  More good news came later in the day. Joan Allyson phoned to report that she’d got the result of her biopsy. ‘It was something called a fibroadenoma, apparently, and not a tumour,’ she said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘That’s great, Joan!’ he told her. ‘I’m so glad!’

  Joan had her first immunisation shots the following Monday, completed them as scheduled and had her wedding. Meanwhile, Mrs Deutschkron began her chemotherapy, which had been set at six cycles at one-month intervals, over the course of six months.

  Important things were happening in the lives of the practice staff, as well as the patients. Rebecca had begun to feel her baby move, and was approaching the halfway point in her pregnancy. Grace had announced that she was pregnant as well, and was obviously thrilled about it. She had Marcus’s full support this time, instead of the cloud of his deep ambivalence which had hung over her last thwarted pregnancy.

  And Aimee’s house sale had gone through successfully.

  ‘I’m in Summer Hill now,’ she told everyone quietly at a practice meeting in early October. ‘My new address and phone number are on the staff contact sheet.’

  Marshall waited until he was alone at the reception desk and looked it up, wondering about the move. Aimee had hardly said anything on the subject—not to him, or to anyone else in the practice that he knew of. He almost got the impression that the move hadn’t been something she’d really wanted, which didn’t make sense. Whose wishes and needs did she have to consider but her own?

  On the staff contact sheet, he read, ‘Aimee Hilliard, Unit 7/63, Croydon Street, Summer Hill.’ Then he actually looked it up in his street directory at home that night. Croydon Street was a main road, not far from the train. Was she looking ahead to a time when she couldn’t drive any more? That could be thirty years away! Surely she couldn’t have turned her back on their relationship out of a conviction that she was too old for a second chance at love?

  As always, when he thought about Aimee, it all came back to this. After nearly two months, he still had no idea why she’d rejected him. Was it an innate problem with the male ego, he wondered, that he had to keep looking for reasons? Surely it wasn’t! He didn’t think that he was an overly egotistical man.

  There’s a natural harmony between us, he thought frequently. I can feel it.

  He had plenty of opportunities to do so, working beneath the same roof with Aimee for approximately forty hours each week, exchanging small talk with her a dozen times a day, working in close partnership at times, too.

  Just to pick one random scene out of their working lives as an example—removing two large moles from Maria Costanzo’s left armpit and beneath her breast last week. Mrs Costanzo had made a nervous patient, and Marshall had half expected her to chicken out of the procedure at the last minute.

  It hadn’t been life-saving surgery. The moles had given every indication of being benign, but both of them had been positioned right at sixty-two-year-old Mrs Costanzo’s bra line and they’d been large enough to become chafed and irritated by the constant contact. For any woman, it was a vulnerable area.

  Aimee had assisted him, and as usual she’d done an enormous amount to reassure Mrs Costanzo and coax her into going through with the procedure.

  ‘I think the moles are no worries after all. I live with it. It’s not necessary to have the removal,’ he’d heard his patient say in a frightened tone as he’d come to the door of the treatment room.

  ‘Now, Mrs Costanzo, won’t you be angry at yourself when you get home if you don’t get it done?’ Aimee chided her gently. ‘You’ve already spent all that time being nervous. I bet you stayed awake half the night, didn’t you?’

  ‘Eh!’ Mrs Costanzo said dismissively, then admitted, ‘More than half!’

  ‘So you’ve done the hard part!’

  ‘The surgery, that’s the hard part.’

  ‘Believe me, it isn’t! Being nervous before the surgery is harder!’

  Aimee saw Marshall in the doorway and raised her eyebrows. Was he ready? He shook his head and made a gesture with his hand that said, Go on with what you’re saying to her. She still looks as if she’s about to bolt. Mrs Costanzo hadn’t seen him yet, as she was lying on the table, facing away from the door.

  ‘Now, why don’t I just leave you alone for a moment to take off your upper clothing and then cover your torso with this sheet? Dr Irwin will be along in a minute. He’ll tell you what he’s going to do, and that’s the point to change your mind if you really want to.’

  Mrs Costanzo didn’t change her mind, of course. Most nervous patients didn’t, once they’d taken the step of getting undressed. During the procedure itself, Aimee remained in the room, chatting easily to the elderly woman and passing Marshall everything he needed with an efficiency that allowed him to make a seamless job of the surgery. Mrs Costanzo flinched at the painkilling injection, but Aimee encouraged her to turn her head in the opposite direction and close her eyes while Marshall made each incision.

  The suturing was the worst part, but by then even the patient realised that there was no turning back. ‘Oh, I can feel it!’ she said in a panicky voice.

  ‘The pain?’ Aimee asked.

  ‘No, the tweaking.’

  ‘You’re squeamish, I know. Tell me about that grandson of yours!’

  ‘Oh, he’s so naughty! He’s going to wear me out! I have him two days a week now. But he’s so cute!’

  ‘All finished, Mrs Costanzo,’ Marshall was able to tell her a few minutes later. ‘Aimee will put on the dressings for you, and give you some instructions about how to look after the area and what to watch out for.’

  As he left the room, he just had time to hear Aimee teasing, ‘Now, tell me, which was worse? Having it done, or thinking about having it done?’

  ‘The thinking. You were right,’ Mrs Costanzo said.

  Back in his own office, Marshall knew that he’d have been happy about getting such a good nurse for his practice even without any question of a personal attraction on his part. As things stood, he risked losing this valuable member of staff because he couldn’t resolve what he felt.

  Despite the harmony between them, she sometimes looked hunted in his presence, and she would often go out of her way to minimise the time they needed to spend together. It seemed wrong that she’d turned deliberately away from him at a time when she’d needed his support on the issue of her daughter’s troubled pregnancy.

  Even so, this was the subject on which they connected best. The pregnancy was hanging by a thread. Labour hadn’t been triggered by that first drain, but now everyone in the practice knew that a second one was looming.

  ‘She’s having another ultrasound this morning,’ Aimee reported to Deirdre at the front desk on the first Thursday in October, just before the day’s first patients arrived.

  Aimee had spent a sleepless night. After less than a week in her new home, she hadn’t yet got used to the traffic noise on Croydon Street, but felt claustrophobic and cramped in the small second-floor flat if she slept with the windows closed. After thinking about her daughter and the baby half the night, she’d risen early, breakfasted quickly and fled the flat.

  Opening up the practice and enjoying its welcoming decor and uncluttered rooms, she’d made a mental note to herself to be ruthless about the furniture and boxes still piled in each room. Would Sarah like any of her superfluous things? Or William?

  Or perhaps, if I keep on looking, I can find something better, she thought. Further out, in a cheaper suburb. Two bedrooms, instead of one. Sydney prices were insane, and her credit-card statements still looked horrendous.

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sp; On a positive note, Sarah and Jason had been able to renegotiate their mortgage, which had, blessedly, dissolved away one of the sources of tension from Sarah’s face. She would be able to afford to stay home with the baby for as long as she wanted to now, and this was becoming more and more important to her and to Jason as the likelihood of a problem with the baby increased.

  ‘Dr Gaines is planning to drain off the fluid again,’ Aimee continued to Deirdre. ‘She’s like a balloon. Tight as a drum and horribly uncomfortable.’

  ‘How far along is she now?’ Deirdre asked.

  Aimee could see Marshall hovering in the background, looking at a file. She knew he was listening, and felt angry, though she recognised that this was illogical. It helped that he knew about this. She wanted him to know. And it was her fault that he didn’t feel comfortable about asking her openly for news, and that she didn’t have the right to seek all the comfort she wanted from him.

  ‘Thirty-seven weeks,’ she answered Deirdre, aware of Marshall abandoning his pretence of consulting the file as he approached to listen frankly.

  Much better! There was quite enough painful pretence between them already!

  ‘Which is fine if the baby’s normal,’ she said, ‘but if it does have an incomplete oesophagus…if she needs surgery…’

  ‘Would you like the day off?’ Marshall offered, and Aimee turned on him.

  ‘No!’ she exclaimed abruptly. ‘Thank you!’ she went on in a jerky tone as she tried in vain to control herself. ‘You’ve offered that before. But it wouldn’t help. Haven’t I already said that? There’s nothing I can do. Sarah doesn’t need me to hang around the hospital. Please, don’t keep suggesting it, Marshall!’

  ‘All right, I won’t,’ he said with quiet dignity. ‘But the offer stands, Aimee. We’ll manage. Any time you need to go to her.’

  Aimee nodded, and managed another stiff, ‘Thank you.’

  She was hot all over, and knew she’d behaved terribly, and in front of Deirdre, too! She could only be thankful that Rebecca wasn’t around, because the two of them got more awkward with each other as every day went by, although both sincerely tried not to be.