A Forever Family for the Army Doc

by Meredith Webber

  Izzy gave a huff of laughter.

  ‘Not that so much as where it could lead,’ she told him as one of the enrolled nurses came looking for Izzy.

  ‘It’s Mrs Warren in bed nine,’ she said. ‘Says she’s feeling right poorly, whatever that might mean.’

  ‘I’ll see to her,’ Izzy said quietly, setting her tea down on the table and leaving the room. Mrs Warren should really be in a hospice, but the nearest one was in Braxton and she didn’t want to leave her friends and family.

  She was poorly, her skin sagging around her bones, her old eyes clouded with pain and confusion. Three months earlier she’d been an extremely fit and spritely ninety-three-year-old living by herself, capable of managing her house and garden, getting a little help with shopping and occasional visits from a social worker.

  An accident in the bathroom, a fall that had left her with a broken hip, bruised ribs and a bang on the head had changed all that. Lying in bed, she was a prime victim for pneumonia, and although she seemed to have fought that off, she was still far from well, her organs slowly closing down.

  Izzy slipped into the chair beside her and took her hand, talking quietly to her.

  ‘I see someone’s brought you flowers from your garden,’ she said, nodding towards the big bunch of colour on a shelf on the wall.

  ‘Jimmy,’ Mrs Warren whispered. ‘He’s a good lad. He comes every day and often brings a mate so we can have a laugh, but I don’t want to laugh any more, Izzy. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘I know, love,’ Izzy soothed. ‘I know.’

  Mrs Warren’s health directory had been explicit that she didn’t want measures taken to keep her alive, but her heart refused to give in, still beating strongly in the old woman’s skeletal body.

  Izzy sat with her until she drifted off to sleep, then she checked the other patients under her care. With everything quiet she returned to Mrs Warren, sitting with her through the night until, at four, her heart finally gave in, and the old woman passed away.

  Technically, one of the GPs was on call for the night shift, but why wake him just to certify death when Mac would be here at six? Possibly earlier, knowing Mac. Declaring Mrs Warren dead could wait, as could breaking the news to her family.

  Izzy had wanted to call them earlier, but Mrs Warren had insisted she didn’t want wailing relatives sitting around her bed.

  ‘I’m happy to go,’ she’d told Izzy, ‘so there’s no reason for tears.’

  She was phoning Mrs Warren’s eldest daughter when Mac arrived.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘Have you done a double shift?’

  Izzy held up a hand to silence him as someone answered the phone and she began her explanation.

  Mac shook his head and left the nurses’ station, but when he returned it wasn’t to chide her. Instead, he touched her lightly on the arm.

  ‘You sat with her all night?’

  Izzy nodded.

  ‘She didn’t want the family, just someone to be there.’

  ‘You should have had the coffee,’ Mac said, but the glint in his eyes and the smile tugging at his lips told her he approved.

  Probably would have done the same, Izzy realised, and the warmth his light touch had generated blossomed into appreciation.

  He was a good man.

  It was a refrain that stayed with her as her feet pounded on the coastal path. She’d had to run to clear her head and have any hope of sleep but the ‘good man’ thought stuck and she knew it tipped the scales in his favour in the matter of any relationship between them.

  * * *

  Mac got on with his working day with a certain sense of relief. Relief because he’d see much less of Izzy while she was on the swing shift from two till ten, but qualifying the relief was a touch of let-down.

  Damn it all, he liked seeing her at work! Enjoyed a glimpse of her red curls as she flashed past a door, enjoyed the feel of her by his side as they studied notes or discussed a patient.

  The worst of it was he’d see even less of her out of working hours. It was unlikely she’d want to try his Moroccan tagine at ten-thirty at night.

  He fought an urge to check the nursing rosters again—he’d checked twice already today and she was definitely on the swing shift. And today he wouldn’t see her come on duty. He had a district hospital meeting—some kind of meet and greet the new guy, he guessed—at Braxton Hospital at two this afternoon.

  Belle had booked him into a motel in Braxton for the night as apparently there was always an informal dinner held after these meetings.

  The paperwork following Mrs Warren’s death diverted him for a few minutes and a visit to the nursing home took up a little more time, but the day still loomed as a very long one without Izzy.

  Until a very attractive blonde bounced into his office.

  ‘I’m Frances, I’m your physiotherapist—well, not yours particularly but the hospital one. I do two days a week in Wetherby, one here at the hospital and tomorrow in a private practice. I’m based in Braxton, so some of the patients here I’ve already seen at the hospital there.’

  ‘Like the young man whose ankle was pinned and plated in Braxton last weekend? I heard he was coming back to us today.’

  ‘And you’ve got another man from the same accident—simple tib and fib break who’ll be seeing me here as an outpatient.’

  Mac nodded. He’d discharged the patient with the simple break after fitting a full cast and had talked to him about needing physio once the cast came off, but apparently Frances would have exercises he could do now.

  He walked with her as she visited the occupied rooms, introducing the Watsons and little Rhia, pleased that Frances spoke mostly to Rhia, telling her she’d be back to give her some toys that would help her stay strong in hospital.

  ‘You probably haven’t explored the physio cupboard,’ Frances said as they left the room.

  ‘I’ve seen a room that looked to be full of toys, and I did wonder just how many children might ever be here at any one time to warrant so many.’

  Leaving Frances to go about her work, Mac returned to his office, aware of how much he didn’t know about the hospital he was supposedly running. What other visiting therapists might they have? How did he contact one if he needed someone for a specific patient? An OT for a stroke patient, for instance?

  All the information he needed would be here in his office somewhere, but he’d avoided being in it, doing only the absolutely necessary paperwork—and then only when bullied into it by Belle.

  True, there had been emergencies to be dealt with in his first few days, and Rhia’s diagnosis had led to a flood of outpatients, but now things had quietened down, it was time to learn his job—his real job—especially as the other district doctors would expect him to know something at this afternoon’s meeting.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ he said to Belle when he’d summoned her to his office. ‘Tell me everything I need to know about how the place runs. I know who’s in charge of Housekeeping, and I have met the cooks, but apart from Frances what other visiting professionals do we have? Where do I find their information?’

  He smiled at her.

  ‘I fear I’ve been leaving everything to you.’

  ‘Not your fault,’ Belle assured him. ‘You’ve hardly had a moment to breathe since you arrived.’

  But she ran him through the normal weekly and monthly routines, through the visiting professionals, and volunteers who worked mainly in the nursing home, playing board games and doing craft projects with the residents.

  ‘It’s all in there somewhere,’ she said, waving her hand at the filing cabinets banked against one wall, ‘but generally you only need to ask me and I’ll either find it for you or find out what you want to know.’

  ‘In fact, you really run the place,’ Ma
c said, smiling at her. ‘I had a sergeant like that in the army.’

  They talked a little longer, Mac realising just how much was involved in running even a small hospital.

  Frances appeared at the door, greeted Belle like an old friend, then handed Mac a knobby ball.

  ‘Stress ball,’ she said. ‘You just squeeze it in your hand—one hand at a time—you’ll be surprised how much it will relieve that tension in your neck and shoulders.’

  What tension in my neck and shoulders? Mac wanted to ask, but with Belle there...

  And Frances was right, although how she’d noticed it he didn’t know.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the ball and squeezing it in his right hand then throwing it across the table to Belle, wanting to make light of it—to not have people thinking he couldn’t cope.

  ‘Want a go?’ he said, but Belle only tossed it back.

  ‘I’ve got one of my own,’ she said, ‘only mine’s hot pink. Frances keeps an eye on all of us.’

  Enough of an eye to see tension in his neck?

  Tension that was part of his PTSD, or new tension caused by his attraction to a certain redhead?

  He wondered if the visiting professionals included a psychologist...

  Mac kept squeezing, one hand and then the other, while Belle and Frances were now discussing a barn dance to be held that weekend at a property out of town.

  ‘It’s to raise money for the animal shelter,’ Frances explained. ‘Do come, I’ll email you the directions. They have a kind of auction and you can bid on the different animals and if you win the bid your money goes towards its keep for the year.’

  He agreed it sounded fun and was about to ask if he could take Izzy along when he realised that being linked with him was probably the last thing she wanted.

  Or needed...

  ‘It’s very casual,’ Frances was explaining, while he squeezed hard on his stress ball.

  Because he was thinking of Izzy?

  ‘It really is in a barn out on the animal refuge,’ Belle added.

  ‘As long as I don’t have to wear a hat with corks dangling off it,’ Mac told them, and the laughter broke up the meeting.

  So, off to Braxton! And it will probably do you good not to see Izzy for a whole day, he thought. That situation was getting way out of control...

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘WHY ARE YOU doing the swing shift?’ Nikki demanded the next morning while Izzy was packing her lunch for school. ‘You never do it because it’s a quiet one, and working at the weekend means you won’t be able to take me to the barn dance.’

  ‘Hallie and Pop will take you,’ Izzy said firmly, not answering the real question because she didn’t want to admit she’d changed shifts to avoid Mac.

  ‘There’s no need because I’m going with Shan and her older brothers and sister,’ Nikki informed her, but Izzy barely listened, her mind back to trying to work out why one kiss had affected her so badly.

  Badly enough to change shifts in an effort to avoid the man causing her mind and body so much trouble!

  Not that she could avoid him for ever. But she’d hoped the break would give her time to work out what was happening—to rationalise the feelings in her body and remind herself that her first priority was getting through the three-to six-month process of officially adopting her daughter.

  Not that it was working—the shift change. She missed seeing Nikki after school, although now she had mornings to catch up with her and hear the latest school news, and she could make sure Nikki was taking a nutritious lunch, but Mac’s absence from her life wasn’t helping her sort out her thoughts or her feelings.

  Even thinking about the kiss sent tremors down her spine, and she couldn’t think about the situation without thinking about the kiss so, in truth, she was in a muddle.

  A muddle made worse when she saw him as she came on duty that afternoon!

  ‘You avoiding me?’ he asked, just enough edge in his voice to tell her it wasn’t really a joke.

  ‘Trying to,’ Izzy answered honestly, if weakly, as her brain lit up like a fireworks display and her body was rattled by more reactions than it could handle.

  ‘Working, is it?’ he asked, so genially she wanted to hit him. How could he be so composed?

  Because he was a man?

  Because he was used to kissing women he barely knew?

  ‘How was the meeting?’ Izzy managed to ask, determined to get her mind focused on work. She’d leave her body till later and run it to exhaustion...

  ‘Very educational.’

  Izzy raised her eyebrows, sure he was being facetious.

  ‘No, I mean it,’ he assured her, with a smile she really, really didn’t need. ‘I had no idea of the complexities of coordinating health services in regional areas. Whoever set this all up was a genius. The army couldn’t have done it better.’

  ‘High praise indeed,’ Izzy said drily.

  ‘No, I mean it. The way they manage to coordinate the staffing of the emergency services, like the ambulance and helicopter, with staffing at the hospitals so there’s always a paramedic available to go out to accidents—that alone must take endless fiddling and adjustments.’

  ‘It’s a lot of paperwork,’ Izzy agreed, and won another unnecessary smile.

  ‘Which most doctors and, I imagine, nurses hate. Yet it all gets done.’

  ‘Because the office staff know the system and have their own procedures in place,’ Izzy told him. ‘It took quite a while, but at the moment it’s working. Most of the time!’

  ‘I’m still mightily impressed,’ Mac said.

  ‘Good, but I’ve got to get to work. Rhia’s drip will need changing and apparently the chap who had his ankle fixed in Braxton is complaining about cramps.’

  She turned away but not quickly enough to miss Mac’s last words, quietly spoken but sneaking into her ears and, damn it, into her heart.

  ‘I’ve missed you, Izzy!’

  The shift was quiet, a few visitors to the ED that Izzy could handle on her own—a footballer with a strained wrist, X-rayed to make sure it wasn’t broken, and just before she went off duty, an older man with chest pain but no history of heart problems or angina.

  Roger was on call, but by the time he arrived Izzy had ascertained that the ECG was normal, blood pressure and oxygen sat both good, but a blood test showed high troponin levels.

  ‘That’s ringing a bell for me,’ Roger said. ‘We’ll admit him anyway and do half-hourly obs but I’ll check back through his file.’

  Izzy started the process of admitting the man, chatting to him in between the questions she needed to ask.

  Yes, he’d been before, feeling the same way, and had stayed three days while the doctors did tests. He’d been to a cardiologist in Braxton who had done more tests, but found nothing.

  ‘And how are you feeling now?’ Izzy asked, as a wardsman arrived to move the patient to a hospital bed.

  ‘The pain’s gone but I just don’t feel well,’ the man explained. ‘Just not right.’

  Scary, was Izzy’s first thought. With no symptoms to treat apart from giving him the blood thinners, there was little they could do but wait and see.

  Roger returned as she was accompanying the trolley to a patient room.

  ‘I’ve found the records of past blood tests. Turns out his blood tests always show a higher level of troponin than is normal. He’s had every test under the sun, but the cardiologist found nothing.’

  ‘But we keep him here?’

  ‘My word we do,’ Roger said. ‘And keep him hooked up to the monitors so we can see if there’s the slightest change in his status. High troponin levels could be an indicator of an imminent heart attack, but there’ve been no studies done on abnormally high levels in an otherwise well person.’


  Izzy settled the man into what they considered their ‘cardiac ward’, a room with monitors already set up so it was only a matter of attaching the leads to their new patient’s legs, chest and arms, slipping a blood oxygen monitor onto one finger, and watching information come up on the monitor screen.

  ‘You should be gone,’ the night shift nurse told her. ‘I’ve called in an extra nurse so we can keep an eye on him, and Roger’s staying awhile, just to be sure.’

  Izzy glanced at her watch and realised it was after eleven. Tiredness swamped her suddenly. Adrenalin seeping out, she knew that, but it wasn’t helping her put one foot in front of the other as she collected a jacket and headed out the back door for the short walk home.

  ‘Izzy!’

  She muffled the shriek that the soft murmur of his voice had caused and turned to see Mac standing in the light shed from the hospital’s kitchen window.

  ‘I thought I’d walk you home.’

  The moment the words were out of his mouth Mac knew it was probably the lamest thing he’d ever said, but he’d been lurking around the back of the hospital for over an hour, wondering if this constituted stalking, feeling incredibly stupid but needing to see the woman who had him tied in knots.

  ‘May I walk you home?’

  She was standing on the path, apparently bemused by his sudden appearance, but then she smiled and he forgot his doubts about stalking, and all but forgot his name.

  ‘That would be nice,’ she said, ‘although it’s quite stupid for you to be doing this. You’ve got an early shift tomorrow and I imagine the district meeting went on to a dinner and a few drinks last night and you didn’t get to bed till all hours.’

  But she hadn’t said no, so he took her arm and drew her close, felt her warmth, while the effect her body had on his sent blood racing under his skin.

  They reached the shadows of the old nunnery and stopped of one accord, turning to each other as if there was nothing else to do, kissing gently at first, touches of lips on lips, remembering, revelling in their own restraint.

  But restraint couldn’t hold back the attraction, and the kiss deepened, until Mac heard a low groan from Izzy and she pressed closer, slid her arms around his back, pulling him into her, or her into him, the kiss saying things for which there were no words.