This was something she could seize on. ‘See? We lead different lives! I don’t want to go to live in London – or America!’
He smiled. ‘I don’t believe that. Or perhaps it’s not important. One, I’d rather live here. Two, I know you. If you were in love and it was necessary, then you’d follow your lover anywhere. But now I’m going for my five minutes. Then I want an answer.’
He stretched his hand along the log, took hold of hers. ‘Just to calm things down a bit, I had a phone call from my sister this morning asking both of us go to John’s birthday party next week. I said I’d let her know.’ Then he stood and walked till he was out of sight.
Lyn didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He didn’t know it but his last remark had been the clincher. She had been wavering – perhaps she could tell him, perhaps all would be well, they could sort things out.
But his delight at the prospect of seeing his sister’s children was so great. How could she deny a man like this the chance of his own family?
She didn’t have to think any further. She sat there, letting the tears run down her cheeks. She would tell him there could be nothing between them. He was to go back to London, follow his career.
She heard the crackle of footsteps. He was returning, but she didn’t look up. Only when he was directly in front of her did she look up at that wonderful face. She said nothing but guessed he could read her expression. Certainly, she could read his. There had been hope, a little smile. But as she gazed at him she saw the smile disappear, to be followed by great sadness. Then there was the bleakness of acceptance.
Still no word had been said. She would have to tell him, she owed him that. Around them the hot wind grew stronger, shaking the trees. But she would have to tell him.
She opened her mouth – and it happened again. His mobile rang.
He muttered something but he answered it. And as he listened she saw his face change, become alert. Then he looked strained, angry almost. This was not about them any more, this was something else.
She found she could speak to him now. ‘Adam, what is it?’
He took her hand, pulled her upright and hurried her down the path, back towards the cars. ‘How far are we from Laddenside Forest? The east entrance from the Theakstone Road?’
She considered. She knew the area, he didn’t. ‘About two miles. We could be there in five minutes. Why?’
‘There’s a forest fire there, a bad one. They have three appliances fighting it and there are casualties. They need at least one doctor. They radioed to ask if anyone was handy. Eunice picked up the call and remembered I was out this way. If you can show me the way there then you can go and …’
‘No. I’m coming, too. If they need a doctor then they could do with a nurse. And that’s me.’
‘But it could be dangerous! Lyn, I don’t want you …’
‘Adam! This isn’t a decision you can make for me! I’m coming and that’s final. Now, follow me. We’ll be there quite quickly.’
By now they were both trotting along the path, sweat breaking out all over their bodies.
They came to their cars, opened all the windows and set off at once. She worked out the route and led him through the tangled little roads towards the east entrance of Laddenside Forest.
After she had travelled a mile a new smell came into the car through the open windows. It was acrid, unpleasant, the smell of something burning. And the wind was growing stronger, buffeting the car. She remembered that the combination of wind and fire was a deadly one.
Eventually they turned into the east entrance. There was a barrier across it and a policeman there waved them down. ‘Sorry, ma’am, I’ll have to ask you to go back to the main road. We have an emergency here, a forest fire.’
‘I’m a nurse and the man behind me is a doctor. We’re needed and we’re expected.’
The policeman saw her uniform, opened the barrier and waved her through.
She bounced along the path, conscious of Adam’s car close behind her. Both were driving vehicles suited for this kind of terrain.
It was hot! And the air was thick, hazy. It was hard to breathe. White ash danced in it. Now she knew they were close to a fire. She could even hear a distant crackling. The flames must be quite close.
They turned into a clearing and she realised that this must be some kind of a command post. There was a giant red appliance there. To the side of it there was an awning and there were bodies lying under it.
A fireman ran up to them. ‘This is a danger area. We’ve no time for tourists so will you turn round and …?’
Adam got out of his car. ‘We’re a doctor and nurse,’ he called firmly. ‘We were sent for. Now, who do we report to?’
‘Sorry,’ said the fireman as he looked at them properly. ‘Have a word with Jack Leonard over there. He’s Divisional Officer, in charge.’ He pointed to a man bending over one of the bodies under the awning.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Jack Leonard said, briskly shaking hands. ‘If you can do what you can for our injured, it’ll free up another two men for firefighting.’
‘You have sent for ambulances?’ Adam asked.
‘I’ve sent for them. But there are three other fires, each with injured, and so we have to wait our turn. The ambulance service is stretched pretty thin.’
He looked at the bags that both Lyn and Adam were carrying. ‘For the past couple of weeks we’ve been carrying a pretty good medical box ourselves but I’ve no idea what most of the things in it are supposed to do. We usually just call an ambulance but, as I said, they’re stretched thinner than we are.’ He pointed to the awning. ‘The box is there. Now, I’m going to leave you to it. Call for me if there’s anything you need.’
‘Seems a good man,’ Adam muttered. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got here.’
He beckoned to one of the firemen who had been tending the injured and led him out of earshot of those lying still. ‘Tell me what you’ve got,’ he said, ‘I know you all get some medical training so you must have some idea.’
The fireman obviously was pleased at being consulted. ‘A set of forestry workers were trying to fight the fire and left it too late before pulling out. Should have left it to us. Anyway, they were in a lorry, moving too fast, and it overturned. We got there just in time. Everyone’s a bit bruised and cut. All suffering from smoke inhalation, but not too badly. Two men badly burned, not life-threatening but in pain. One of the others seemed to be all right at first but he seems to be having difficulty breathing now. Perhaps his chest is bruised. All we’ve managed to do so far is make sure nobody is actually dying.
‘Was it only woodsmoke?’ Lyn asked. ‘No chemicals or anything like that burning?’
The fireman looked at her with respect. ‘Just woodsmoke,’ he said.
‘This man with the difficulty breathing – was he trapped at all?’ Adam asked.
The fireman nodded. ‘The driver. He was thrown out of the cab, the mirror was pressing into him. We managed to prise it off.’ He handed Adam a piece of paper. ‘These are the names and what we’ve noticed so far.’
‘This is excellent! You’ve done a really good job. We’ll take over now.’ He turned to Lyn. ‘You said you’ve worked in A and E? D’you want to check the two burned and the smoke inhalations? See if anything’s been missed, try and make them comfortable. I’ll look at this crushed chest.’
‘OK. I’ll call if I need you.’ This was work totally different from the midwifery that had occupied her for so long. But as she moved towards the five men she found that half-forgotten techniques and protocols were surfacing. She could do this.
Smoke inhalation. Fortunately no chemical smoke; that could be far more serious. And a combination of burns and smoke inhalation could be dangerous, too.
She shouted a general greeting to the prone men, then told them not to move and she’d check them one by one.
First of all she looked for facial burns, sooty sputum, evidence that the men might have heat-damaged airways
. Then she looked at respiratory rates and chest-wall motion. They all appeared to be breathing quite adequately. Well, that was a relief. There would be no need to pass any endotracheal tubes. She went to the medical chest – it was a tremendously well-stocked one – and found a cylinder of oxygen and a mask, which they could share.
Next were the two burned men. The fireman had gently pulled away the scorched clothes from one man’s back and bathed the burns with a sterile saline solution. The second man had badly burned hands, which she also bathed. ‘Does it hurt?’ Lyn gently asked them both.
It did hurt, and that paradoxically wasn’t a bad thing. It meant that they were only second-degree burns. Had there been no pain, the tissue would have been damaged beyond repair.
Lyn gave the two ibuprofen as a painkiller, then dressed the burns with a topical antibiotic. That was all she could do in the field. The men needed hospital treatment. She made sure that they were kept warm – even in this heat it was necessary. They were wrapped in space blankets, and she knew she’d have to keep a wary eye on them in case shock set in. But so far … well, it could have been worse.
‘If you’ve got a moment, Lyn,’ Adam said behind her. ‘I think we have a tension pneumothorax here.’
He was kneeling over the man with the crushed chest, listening with his stethoscope. ‘Chest pain, body spasm, anxiety, difficulty in breathing,’ he muttered to her. ‘Hypotension and jugular venous distension. And no sounds from the left of the chest.’
Lyn knew what that meant. There was now a puncture from the lung into the pleural cavity surrounding it. With every breath, air escaped out of the lung into the cavity – and that reduced the lung’s ability to inflate. And now the lung had collapsed.
‘There’s a good kit here,’ she said. ‘I’m sure there’ll be a needle and cannula. Shall I prepare the site?’
‘Please. I’ll go to see what I can find.’
‘You’re going to be all right,’ she comforted the man. ‘In a couple of minutes you’ll be breathing OK.’ She swabbed the chest with alcohol then took the man’s head so he couldn’t see what was happening. It was a large needle Adam was going to insert!
Deftly Adam thrust the needle through the chest wall into the pleural cavity. Then he inserted the cannula, and they both heard the air hissing out from a flutter valve on the end so that air could not be drawn back in – and then Adam strapped the cannula to the chest.
‘It hurt a bit … but I can breathe now,’ the man muttered weakly. ‘Thanks, Doc.’
‘You should be OK now,’ Adam said. ‘Things could have been a lot worse.’
He checked what Lyn had done with the other four men and agreed with all of her decisions. Then the two of them wrote down what they had observed and how they had treated their patients.
She hadn’t realised that they had been working for over an hour. She was kept busy tending her patients, making them as comfortable as she could. Now there was nothing to do but wait. This wasn’t a hospital, they weren’t trying to treat people. All they could do was relieve some of the pain, make sure things didn’t get worse and wait for the ambulances.
She thought that she had never worked in a worse environment. The heat she could cope with – just. But the air was thick with dust and ashes, and coated her skin, got down her throat. Next to her was a bottle of lukewarm water, given to her by one of the firemen, and she drank from it constantly.
Then, over the hum and crackle of the flames, she heard the roar of diesel engines. She looked up to see two ambulances slowly pull into the clearing, green-clad paramedics jump out. ‘Soon have you out of here.’ She smiled at her charges. ‘The cavalry’s come at last.’
‘Rather stay here with you, Nurse,’ one of the burned men said with a smile, ‘You’re better-looking than those ambulance men.’
Adam was talking to a paramedic, giving him full details of what had been done. Then the five men were expertly loaded into the ambulances and she and Adam were finished. ‘A job well done,’ he said. ‘Now perhaps we can …’
‘Doctor!’ They turned to see Jack Leonard running towards them. ‘We’ve got another emergency, a bad one this time.’ He looked at them both critically. ‘But it’s right by the fire, I don’t like letting you near. Perhaps, Dr Fletcher, if you …’
‘I’m coming with him,’ said Lyn. ‘We work as a team.’
‘And I make all the decisions. All right, you can come. But, remember, if I say move, you do so. That goes for both of you.’
‘We’ll do as you say,’ Adam said, and Lyn nodded. She appreciated that Jack took his responsibilities seriously, was doing his job as well as he could. She respected him for it.
He gave them protective clothing and hurried them across to a smaller vehicle, a red-painted Land Rover. Another two firemen carried the medical chest.
‘We’re in real trouble now, this wind is all over the place. We get things under control on one front, the wind veers and we have to start all over again. And this wood is like tinder! It can flash faster than a man can run.’
If Lyn had thought that conditions in the clearing were bad, they soon got worse. They jerked down a narrow forest path, bouncing from rut to rut. The sky grew even darker, it appeared now to be raining dust and ashes. A burning twig fell across the bonnet, was brushed aside. The wind through the open window was like a blast furnace. And she could hardly breathe.
‘A birdwatcher,’ Jack said, with barely concealed anger, ‘a twitcher. Waiting till the last possible minute. He thought it would be interesting to observe how the birds dealt with fire. Then he gets into his vehicle, drives like mad and rolls into a ditch. When he comes to he finds he’s trapped, uses his mobile to ring for help. He’s left it a bit late!’ He looked at the sky, watched the wind bending the trees. ‘The fire’s coming this way. We need some luck.’
The Land Rover came to a halt. Lyn could see a similar vehicle on its side, jammed into a ditch. A fireman waved to them, stepped over to speak to Jack. ‘There’s no way we can free that leg with the kit we’ve got. We need the hydraulic jack and mechanical cutters.’
‘Where are they?’
‘They’re being used. We’ve asked for them and they’re being sent, but they’re half an hour away.’
Jack looked at the sky, the trees, the redness coming their way. ‘The fire will be here before the tools,’ he said. ‘Doctor, do you want to have a look?’
Lyn slithered down into the ditch with Adam, reached for the medical case and put it handy. Adam was wriggling through the hole where the windscreen had been. He disappeared inside, then she looked through herself.
A middle-aged man with a white beard was looking up at them, remarkably calmly, given the circumstances. He was twisted in a most uncomfortable position. There was blood dripping down the side of his face from a cut in his head. And his foot appeared to disappear into a mass of mangled metal.
‘Hi, I’m Dr Adam Fletcher and this is Nurse Lyn Pierce,’ Adam said. ‘We’re going to see what we can do for you.’
‘I’m Dr Jeremy Brice,’ the man said, ‘but my doctorate is in biology, not medicine. This fire is terrible, no end of creatures are going to be killed.’
‘Quite so. Now, I’d like to look at your foot, and then tell me where else it hurts.’ Adam wriggled some more, his head now down by Jeremy’s foot. Then he pulled himself upright again. ‘We’ll leave the foot for the moment,’ he said with a carelessness that fooled no one. ‘Lyn, could you put a dressing on Jeremy’s head? A temporary one will do. Any other pains, Jeremy?’
‘Fractured ribs,’ Jeremy said, with biological precision. ‘It doesn’t hurt too much until I move. And then it hurts like hell.’
‘I’ll strap them up.’ Adam reached for the roll of plaster Lyn had automatically felt for. ‘But first I’ll give you something for the pain.’
‘I can stand the pain. It’s a perfectly natural and useful function.’ But Lyn had noticed the whiteness of his face the way he winced whenever Adam got
near him.
‘An anaesthetic dose,’ Adam muttered to her. She drew up some morphine sulphate and handed it to Adam without saying anything. Adam swabbed Jeremy’s arm and prepared to inject him.
‘You’ll feel better after this,’ he said neutrally.
Jack slid down into the ditch to join them. ‘Can you get that foot free? We have to get this man out in the next ten minutes. The wind is up, the fire is flashing this way, we don’t have much time.’
‘How desperate are we?’ Adam asked, ‘because there’s no way to free that foot.’
‘We couldn’t be more desperate.’ As he spoke Lyn realised that the heat was, if anything, more intense, the noise of the fire roaring ever nearer.
Suddenly Jeremy worked out the coded messages passing between the two. ‘You’re talking about cutting off my foot?’
She saw Adam study Jeremy, assess whether he could face the facts. ‘Yes, it could come to that. But not for a while yet.’
‘I absolutely refuse to give my permission. I’d rather take my chance in the fire. I’ll hide under a blanket and it’ll pass quite quickly.’
‘No, it won’t!’ Jack shouted. ‘See these thickets, these bushes, all this dry dead wood on the ground? It’ll flash first then it’ll burn for hours. You’d stand a better chance in a furnace.’
‘Then that’s the chance I’ll take. I … aagh!’
In his excitement Jeremy twisted, and they could see the pain lance through him. Adam took the opportunity to lean forward and inject him. Jeremy’s voice became drowsy, the morphine was taking effect. His last words were, ‘You are not to take …’
‘Is there a kit there for amputation?’ Adam asked harshly.
She looked in the box. There was a kit, sealed in a set of sterile bags, tourniquets, scalpels, even a surgical saw. There was also a large bottle of antiseptic. ‘There’s a kit,’ she said, ‘but this must be the most unsterile area I’ve ever worked in.’
‘Have you ever assisted at an amputation? You can go now if you want and I …’
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