by Amy Andrews
‘Think you’ll need an X-ray just to check you don’t have any fractures.’
Roberta nodded. ‘Can I get dressed?’
‘Sure,’ Carrie said, pulling the mobile screen in place and handing her the clean clothes. ‘Just put your other clothes on the bed and I’ll bag them.’
‘All I want is a shower,’ Roberta said from behind the screen. ‘I can smell him everywhere.’
‘I know, but it’s best if we collect the evidence from your body for the police first.’
‘I’m done,’ Roberta said a minute later.
Carrie pulled back the screen and helped Roberta back onto the table. She was gathering her discarded clothes together when there was another knock on the door.
Carrie opened it. There was an older woman standing with Charlie. She looked to be in her forties, her tough exterior betrayed by her friendly eyes. ‘Carrie, this is Rene Chalk. She’s from the rape crisis centre.’
Carrie smiled at the newcomer. ‘Come in,’ she invited.
Charlie performed the introductions and Carrie prepared to leave. ‘No, don’t go.’ Roberta demanded, her voice rising. ‘I want you to stay.’
Carrie looked at Charlie, surprised and startled by Roberta’s request. Charlie nodded. So did Rene. So Carrie stayed and listened to Rene talk things over with Roberta. They talked a little about the assault but mainly about what would happen next. The police and court proceedings. Rene offered and urged Roberta to seek free counselling at the rape crisis centre in the next few days and to continue it for as long as she felt she needed it.
The police were next. Roberta was adamant that she didn’t want Charlie collecting the rape evidence so Carrie performed that, too, in the presence of Rene and a female police officer, who bagged the evidence as Carrie collected it. The officer also took photos of the facial injuries and the bruising on Roberta’s thighs.
Two hours later Carrie was emotionally exhausted but also strangely elated. Roberta’s reliance on her had made her feel as if she’d actually made a difference to someone’s life again. And she hadn’t had that feeling for a long time. It was why she’d become a doctor in the first place. What she’d once thrived on. She hadn’t realised how much she’d missed it. Until now.
Rene had left with Roberta accompanying her to the police station to make a formal statement and then to the hospital for X-rays. Charlie was in his office, dealing with all the paperwork.
Carrie wandered down to the staffroom. It was after five and she really needed to get home. Now the crisis was over she felt strangely depleted and she sat at the table for a moment to collect herself, staring at her laptop—another wasted afternoon.
Carrie sighed. She was never going to get this finished. And she really, really needed to because the longer she was around Charlie the more she began to question the direction of her life. And she was very comfortable with that direction. Or at least she had been.
The door opened. ‘Well, that’s the paperwork done. Thanks so much for earlier, Carrie. You were wonderful,’ Charlie said, walking straight to the table and sitting down.
Do not listen to his praise. You are on track to becoming Australia’s youngest MD. ‘Didn’t really have a whole lot of choice, did I?’
‘That’s why we need the expansion.’ Charlie winked. ‘A female doctor around here would be very handy.’
Carrie shook her head. ‘You know there’s no way the board is going to agree to your plans.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m feeling suddenly optimistic.’
She shook her head again. He was smiling at her and his grey eyes, three-day growth and shaggy hair oozed sex appeal.
‘Well, don’t count your chickens,’ she warned wearily, packing up her stuff.
‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ He watched her zipping her laptop away. ‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Well, I made a decision today to get my life back on track. To stop treading water and get back in there again. But what about you? Today you demonstrated yet again how good a clinician you are. Isn’t it time you gave up all this—’ he picked up some of her papers and threw them in the air ‘—and got back to what you’re really good at?’
Carrie watched the papers float down, some landing on the table, the others on the floor. She glared at him. ‘They were in order,’ she snapped.
‘Good,’ he said firmly. ‘Stop hiding behind them, Carrie.’
Carrie gritted her teeth and collected the scattered papers. Her heart hammered as she bit back a hundred things she wanted to say. She jammed them in her briefcase. ‘What I do with my life is none of your business.’
Charlie shook his head. ‘You’re wasting your talent.’
‘Guess you know how your father feels now,’ she snapped, sweeping her briefcase off the table, ripping her jacket off the back of her chair and stalking out of the room, slamming the door behind her for good measure.
Charlie sat at the table unmoving for a few moments. Touché, Carrie. Touché.
CHAPTER SIX
CARRIE arrived at the centre on Wednesday morning and was surprised not to see Charlie sitting at his desk. Surely she hadn’t beaten him in? They’d barely spoken since his comment on Friday, trading polite, brief conversation only.
She opened the door to the staffroom to find him sitting at the table, turning an envelope over and over in his hands. His usual mug was in front of him.
‘Morning.’
Charlie looked up from the yellow envelope that contained his test results. For once her pinstriped primness didn’t register. ‘Morning.’
‘Would you like a refill?’ she asked politely, switching the kettle on.
Charlie tapped the envelope against the wood of the table. ‘Yes, please.’ He drank the cold dregs of his current cup and held it out for her to take.
Carrie put her laptop on the table and took the mug. She put coffee into both the cups, aware of his brooding presence behind her, and poured the boiling water, adding sugar and milk to his and milk only to hers. She carried them over to the table, plonking his down and taking a seat herself. Charlie was still staring at the envelope.
Carrie blew on the hot liquid and took a sip. ‘Worried it’s a letter bomb?’
Charlie gave a grudging smile. ‘What’s in here is potentially explosive.’ It could potentially detonate his whole life.
‘Looks official,’ she commented. The envelope looked just like the generic yellow ones they used in most government organisations.
Charlie nodded. ‘It is.’
Carrie took another sip. ‘So…you’re just going to look at it?’
Charlie threw the envelope on the table. ‘They’re my test results.’
She nodded. So he hadn’t given blood the other day. ‘From the blood test you had on Friday?’
‘You’re very observant.’
Carrie smiled. ‘I have a four-year-old. You have to be on the ball.’
He chuckled. ‘Yeah, I bet Dana keeps you on your toes.’
‘That she does.’
A few more moments passed where they both sipped at their coffee and stared at the envelope. It was hard to believe that a piece of yellow paper could be so compelling.
Carrie glanced at him. What was he waiting for? Obviously whatever was in that envelope was big for Charlie. Just what exactly did he have? ‘Are you sick?’
Charlie tore his gaze from the centre of the table. ‘I hope not.’ He picked the envelope up and stared at the address label. He couldn’t explain why he was reluctant to open it. A year of his life had been focused solely on what was inside this envelope.
He glanced up at Carrie. She was looking at him expectantly. Waiting for him to elaborate. What the hell—he’d do anything to delay opening the envelope.
‘A year ago I was pricked with a used syringe by an HIV-positive drug addict.’
Carrie gaped. She certainly hadn’t been expecting that. A familial disease maybe, hell, even cancer. But HIV? ‘Oh, n
o, how awful. How did that happen? Was it left in the clinic somewhere?’
Carrie knew that needle-stick injuries were an occupational hazard and that even the most careful practitioners could fall victim.
‘No. It was a deliberate attack here, late one night. It was Donny.’
Deliberate? ‘Donny? Tilly’s uncle?’
Charlie nodded. ‘He came in late one night armed with a used syringe and demanded my wallet.’
Her eyes grew wider. ‘So you fought with him?’
‘No, I gave him my money. I only had twenty bucks. He became enraged because it was nowhere near enough and lashed out with the syringe and buried it in my arm.’
Carrie listened, wide-eyed, not really able to comprehend what Charlie must have been through. ‘But Donny seemed fine to me.’
Charlie nodded. ‘He is. Now. I know it’s hard to believe but he was addicted to heroin for many years. The incident with me was the catalyst for him to get clean. His rock bottom, I suppose you can say. He’s off the stuff now and is training to be a youth worker. I’d love to be able to employ him when the expansion goes ahead.’
Carrie ignored the reference to the expansion. ‘That’s very forgiving of you.’
He shrugged. ‘Drugs mess with your head. They turn you into someone that you’re not. Was I angry with Donny that he jeopardised my health? Yes. Do I blame him? No. The Donny who stabbed me a year ago is not the man he is now. Kicking the habit is hard. Very, very hard—but he did it. He got clean. And his remorse is strong.’
Carrie nodded slowly, remembering the hushed conversation she’d overheard between the two men the night Donny had brought the overdose case to the clinic. Donny’s concern about Charlie’s medication.
Still, it took an enormous amount of human decency to turn the other cheek. ‘So you’ve been living under this cloud ever since.’ Things were starting to fall in place for her now. The medication he took and how he had double-gloved when suturing Dana’s chin. It hadn’t been to protect him from anything she might have had but the other way round.
‘Yes.’ He nodded.
Carrie searched back through her memory. It was amazing how much knowledge became rusty when it wasn’t being used every day. ‘I would imagine your risk of contracting HIV was very low, though.’
‘Yes, ordinarily transmission rates are much lower than those of say hep B, which miraculously he didn’t have. But Donny was completely non-compliant with his HIV meds and would have had a very high viral load. The occupational health team recommended I take the prophylactic triple cocktail.’
‘The meds I’ve seen you take are antiretrovirals?’
He nodded. ‘My HIV antibody tests at three and six months were both negative.’
Carrie felt the knot in her stomach loosen a little. ‘Surely that puts you in the clear?’
‘I’ve read of rare cases where the window has extended beyond six months. The occupational health people erred on the side of caution, too, and have kept me covered for the full year.’
‘And that’s your twelve-month result?’ Carrie nodded at the envelope.
Charlie nodded. ‘I know that the chances of it being positive are near to impossible but I have the feeling I’m holding my whole life in my hands and I just can’t bring myself to open it.’
Carrie felt his torment. Four years ago she’d had a similar letter that had held her whole future in it, too. She hadn’t been able to open it at all for fear of what it held.
His uncertainty appealed to her, her insides melting at his hesitancy. She was used to seeing him in command, in control. From the car accident the night they’d first met, to the OD, to her car being vandalised, to Dana’s sutures, to Roberta and his expansion plans. He was a take-charge kind of guy.
She felt strangely compelled to share her own experience. Let him know that sometimes life railroaded you and all you could do was hang on. That you couldn’t take charge of everything—sometimes circumstances took charge instead. Anything to put that teasing sparkle back in his worried grey gaze.
‘I know how you feel.’
Charlie glanced at her. ‘Oh, yeah?’
‘I had an official-looking letter like that four years ago, just after Dana was born. It held the results of the Medical Registration Board’s review into an incident I was involved in where a child died.’
Carrie held her breath. She’d never talked about the horrible incident to anyone other than her family. In fact, she hadn’t talked about it in a long time at all, just buried it and the churning emotions that usually overwhelmed her beneath mounds of paper.
Charlie noted the rigid way Carrie was holding her cup, the way her gaze didn’t quite meet his. This was obviously difficult for her to talk to about. It also explained a lot. He’d suspected all along something serious had occurred in her career.
‘What happened?’ he asked gently.
Carrie’s hand shook. Rehashing that awful night didn’t seem quite so easy now.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, and reached out a hand to cover hers. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
She saw the compassion in his eyes, the softening, his reassuring smile. Suddenly she wanted to tell him more than anything. To talk to someone who knew how crazy it could be at the coalface. Who could relate. Empathise even. Family understood because they loved you. Colleagues understood because they’d lived it.
She stared into the murky depths of her coffee. ‘I was an intern working in Accident and Emergency. It was one of those crazy Saturday nights where half of Brisbane seemed to either have food poisoning or flu. And it was full of the usual bloodied drunks and we had a major car accident that had just come in, along with a fractured neck of femur from a nursing home. It was mad.’ She looked up from her coffee. ‘Bit like here, really.’
Charlie chuckled and it was such a lovely warm noise it gave her the courage to continue.
‘A man bought in a friend’s child who he was minding for a few hours, complaining that the child had bad breath and he’d rung the mother and she’d told him to bring the boy into us.’
Charlie cringed—halitosis in a busy emergency department. That must have gone down like a lead balloon. ‘I gather the child wasn’t assessed as a priority.’
Carrie gave a small smile and shook her head. ‘So after an hour of waiting he starts to get annoyed and there was a bit of a lull amidst all the chaos so the nurses asked if I would see the little boy next.’
‘And you did?’
Carrie nodded. ‘Kind of. The chart was handed to me, I called the boy’s name—his name was Harry, Harry Pengelly…’ As long as she lived she would never, ever forget the boy’s name or his face.
Charlie heard her voice go husky as she mentioned the patient’s name. No wonder she hadn’t been able to function properly at the accident scene. This obviously still affected her very badly.
‘I didn’t open the chart. I asked what the problem was. He said, “The kid’s mouth stinks like an animal’s died back there.” And he was right, it did smell very offensive. I asked some basic questions—had he eaten anything unusual or different, had he choked on anything and about his medical history of which this guy knew nothing. At a quick glance the child seemed reasonably alert, a little pale but he was interactive and certainly didn’t appear unwell. So I said to wait there, I was going to get some equipment to look down Harry’s throat.
‘I left to get a tongue depressor and a torch and planned on doing a more complete assessment once I’d established he didn’t have a visible obstruction. I was stopped twice by nursing staff for different medical orders so it was probably ten minutes before I got back to the cubicle, but by then the man had gone and taken Harry with him.’
Charlie nodded. Too often people grew impatient at the wait and left emergency departments without being seen.
‘The triage nurse said he’d stormed out, muttering about incompetence. I planned to flip through the boy’s chart but a middle-aged man with a suspected heart attack came thro
ugh the doors and the chart got left on the doctors’ desk.’
‘I’m getting a sense that there was some significant medical history with Harry.’
Carrie nodded, tears pricking her eyes. She blinked rapidly. She hadn’t cried over this in a long time and she wasn’t going to start again in front of Charlie.
‘Two hours later a woman runs into the department, an unconscious Harry in her arms. It was his mother. She was crying hysterically. He was cold, shocked, shut down. Unresponsive. Whiter than a sheet. His abdo was distended. We rushed him into Resus. Mum was too emotional to put a sentence together and someone grabbed his chart and flipped it open and discovered that he was ten days post-adenoid and tonsillectomy.’
Charlie shut his eyes. ‘He’d had a bleed?’
Carrie nodded. ‘Massive. No sooner had we discovered this than he vomited, and it was just all blood, some old, a lot fresh. There was so much of it and it was so red against these white, white sheets, and it covered his pale floppy body like a river.’ Carrie shuddered. ‘I had nightmares for a year about the blood.’
Charlie remembered the way she had looked at the blood pumping out of the road-accident victim and her behaviour suddenly made sense. He cringed, thinking how insistent he’d been.
‘We cannulated him, filled him with fluid and rushed him to Theatre to locate the source of the bleed and have it cauterised, but it was too late. He arrested on the table. The coroner found that Harry’s operative site had probably been trickling for days and he’d been swallowing it and had presented the second time in irreversible hypovolaemic shock.’
Charlie felt for Carrie. She’d been through an awful experience. No wonder her faith in herself as a practitioner was permanently dented. ‘And because you were the doctor who saw him that night, you carried the can? That’s rough.’
Carrie nodded. ‘I was suspended immediately pending an internal hospital review. That’s when I inherited my desk job. The medical director was delighted to have someone with a business degree around. The review found I had no case to answer but it was automatically referred to the Registration Board so I was kept on suspension from clinical duties pending that decision.