Emergency Doctor and Cinderella (6 page)

W
HEN
Erin arrived for night duty A&E was already full and had been for several hours. Michelle Oliver was the senior nurse on duty, a woman she had worked with many times before. Michelle was competent and steady under pressure but the downside was that she was one of the main arteries of the hospital gossip-network.

‘Well, well, well, aren’t you a lucky girl?’ Michelle said as soon as Erin placed her bag in the lockable drawer at the doctors’ station.

Erin kept her features as blank as possible as she straightened from the drawer. ‘Why is that?’

Michelle folded her arms across her chest and gave her a conspiratorial smile. ‘A little bird told me you had dinner with the new director last night.’

Erin felt a muscle ticking in her cheek but fought it back under control.
What little bird?
she wondered. Or had it been the man himself? ‘Dr Chapman rents the apartment next to mine,’ she said. ‘His sister was visiting and invited me over. But your source is wrong because I didn’t stay for dinner.’

Michelle’s light blue eyes twinkled. ‘Word has it he’s
determined to win you over to his plans for the department, it seems, by fair means or foul.’

Erin looped her stethoscope around her neck, trying to keep her expression coolly detached. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I have patients to see.’

‘There’s a bet running on how long it will take him to do it,’ Michelle called out after her.

Erin stopped and turned around to face the grinning nurse. ‘A…a
bet
?’ she asked with cold incredulity.

Michelle nodded. ‘The residents and registrars set it up. You’re the only one who’s against the changes. There’s a carton of beer riding on how long it will take Dr Chapman to get you on side.’

Erin aligned her shoulders in a rigid stance. ‘Does Dr Chapman know about this bet?’

Michelle met her gaze with equanimity. ‘Who do you think is providing the beer?’

Erin threw herself into seeing the line-up of patients, determined not to think about what Michelle had said, but even so whenever she had a spare moment her anger would kick in like a hot blast of fuel near dry tinder. To think Eamon Chapman was secretly reeling her in for the sake of a game, a puerile locker-room joke that would no doubt be laughed about for months on end. Each time she encountered a resident or registrar in the department, she felt as if they were sniggering behind their professional façades. How many people knew about this stupid bet? Was everyone laughing at her, like they had done in medical school after her one disastrous date?

She ricocheted with fury, determined to take Eamon Chapman on head-to-head. He was not going to make
a fool of her—not professionally, and certainly not personally. Not if she could help it.

Just when Erin thought she had things more or less under control in A&E, news came in of a high-speed-motorcycle-accident victim due to arrive via ambulance within minutes. She felt the rush of adrenalin flood her system as she mentally began to prepare herself. Motorcycle accidents were often serious, especially high-speed ones. It would take all of her concentration and professional training to set aside her private issues while she dealt with a life-and-death situation. This was not the time to be ruminating over Eamon Chapman’s despicable ploy to get her on side. A patient’s life was about to be placed in her hands; the responsibility had never felt more daunting. Only her experience at dealing with similar situations bolstered her confidence. The staff working with her were competent, especially Michelle, and the registrar, Tom Brightman, was one who had shown great promise right from his intern days.

The doors to A&E swung open as the ambulance personnel wheeled in the male victim, the more senior officer calling out the patient’s details.

‘Approximately twenty-five-or-six-year-old male involved in a motorcycle accident. He was found twenty metres from the bike, which appeared to have struck a guardrail after clipping a car. He was unconscious with a GCS of seven; the helmet was badly damaged. His right thigh was angled at thirty degrees with a compound fracture—we’ve splinted it and bandaged it to control blood loss. His left ankle was at forty degrees and also compound, and the foot pulse is weak. His pulse was a hundred and forty and BP eighty systolic. We’ve put in a fourteen-gauge canula and run in two
litres of saline. He’s been bagged and masked with high-flow oxygen. It took fifteen minutes to stabilise him and the trip took another ten.’

‘Thanks,’ Erin said, donning gloves, a mask and a face shield.

The patient was on a spine board and had a Donway splint on his right leg and a blow-up splint on his left ankle. He had been fitted with a hard collar to stabilise his neck. With the staff’s help they shifted the victim to a resus bed as Erin prepared to intubate him, suctioning the mouth to clear his airway.

Tom Brightman came in after being called up to the ward by the nursing staff. ‘What’s going on?’

Erin filled him in as she began to intubate the victim, which was proving more difficult than she had first realised, as his face was so badly injured. She felt the tension build in her body; beads of perspiration trickled down between her shoulder blades as each precious second passed. ‘He’s not intubatable. I’m going to do a cricothyroidotomy,’ she said. ‘Michelle, get me a scalpel and size-six tracheostomy tube, stat. Tom, undo that collar, but keep his neck stabilised. What’s his BP?’

‘Seventy systolic,’ the other nurse said. ‘His shock is getting worse.’

Erin stabilised the trachea with her left hand and made a transverse stab incision into the cricothyroid membrane. She lengthened the incision, then spread it open using artery forceps and inserted a size-six tracheostomy tube and connected it to the oxygen. Relief flooded her as the patient’s chest inflated with each squeeze of the bag. ‘We’ve got an airway, thank God,’ she said.

‘Good work.’ Eamon’s voice sounded from just behind her. ‘I’ll bag him.’

‘OK.’ Erin forced herself to remain focused on the patient, even though her own airway felt as if it was obstructed. Why was he here? He wasn’t on night duty according to the roster pinned to the cork-board in the office.

The second nurse had already adjusted the leg splint and re-bandaged the fracture site. ‘The bleeding seems under better control,’ she said. ‘His BP has come up to ninety systolic.’

‘You’d better check his chest, Dr Taylor,’ Eamon said. ‘He feels hard to ventilate.’

Erin listened to the patient’s chest. There was good air-entry on the left but none on the right, which was hyper-resonant to percussion. There was bony crepitus all over the right chest. ‘I’ll check his trachea before you put the collar back on, Tom,’ she said to the registrar. ‘His neck veins are elevated. He’s got a right tension pneumothorax. Michelle, get me a couple of fourteen-gauge cannulas.’

‘If you want to switch places I can do that right tension,’ Eamon said.

For a split second Erin wondered if he wasn’t confident she was up to the task. Had he somehow guessed how stressed she felt? She thought she had masked her feelings well. Her emotions were on lock-down; she couldn’t afford to think about this young man’s parents or family waiting outside. She couldn’t bear to think about facing them if he didn’t make it. She had done it many times; she had walked the seemingly endless corridor time and time again, facing human devastation at its worst. Raw emotion; people gutted by the dreadful pain of loss. She had never got used to it; she wondered if she ever would.

‘Dr Taylor?’

Erin met his gaze with gritty determination. ‘It’s fine,’ she said in a clipped tone. ‘I’ve done heaps of these.’

She proceeded to do a right-needle thoracocentesis in the second intercostal space. There was a distinctive hissing sound as the trapped air was released.

‘That’s it,’ Eamon said. ‘His ventilation’s improved markedly. What’s his pulse and BP?’

‘Pulse one hundred, BP one hundred. I’ve got pulse oximetry on. Sats are ninety percent,’ the nurse said.

‘OK, we’ve got airway and breathing sorted for the moment. I’ll take blood for path and cross-match, and we’ll start a couple of units of O-negative. Dr Chapman, can you do GCS? Michelle, get these clothes off for full exposure, then set up for catheterisation and an NG tube,’ Erin instructed, remaining in control of the resus.

After completing the secondary survey, Erin spoke to the general, orthopaedic and neurosurgical registrars, organised a head-to-toe CT scan once she was sure the hypovolaemia was managed and stable, and then formally handed the patient over to the general surgical team for definitive management.

Erin stripped off her gloves and bloody gown and placed them in the bin. She felt a wave of exhaustion swamp her as she washed her hands at the sink. Every bone ached with tiredness and strain. She was running on empty, and she still had six hours left on her shift. It was a depressing thought that this was night one of five. What had she been thinking?

‘Dr Taylor.’ Eamon put down the patient’s notes he was flipping through at the doctors’ station when Erin came back from the bathroom. ‘Can I have a quick word?’

Her brown eyes flickered with something. ‘I still have patients waiting,’ she said, shifting her gaze slightly.

‘I just checked, and you’re due for a half-hour break,’
he said. ‘Besides, Tom’s a good registrar. He’s quite capable of holding the fort for a few minutes. There’s nothing urgent in there. I’ve already checked with the triage nurse.’

A second or two passed in silence.

‘All right,’ she said, still with that off-centre, guarded look.

He led the way to his office, aware of her stiff carriage—such a change from last night when she had been like a warm kitten in his arms, until she had slammed the door in his face after he’d pressed too many of her buttons. He hadn’t been able to sleep for thinking about her, for wanting her. His body had throbbed for hours with the memory of holding her against him. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been more turned on. Although it had been a while since he’d been intimate with anyone, he was a normal, red-blooded male in the prime of his life. He enjoyed the physicality of sex; he had never sought more than that with previous partners, but something about Erin Taylor made him want more. He hadn’t worked out if it was because she was more of a challenge than most, or whether it was something more elemental. All he knew was he wanted to taste that soft mouth again, to feel her in his arms responding the way she had the night before.

He closed the door once they were both inside his office. Erin was standing with her arms folded across her body as if it was cold. ‘I should apologise for last night,’ he said. ‘Things didn’t exactly go according to plan.’

Her eyes hardened like brittle toffee. ‘No, obviously not.’

Eamon closed the distance until he was standing just
in front of her, not touching, but close enough to smell her light, feminine fragrance. ‘What’s going on?’

Her chin came up. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

A frown pulled at his brow. ‘You seem a little uptight. I’ve apologised for last night, but for most of the evening I thought we were getting on just fine. I even considered that we might start seeing each other a little more regularly, or at least that was the impression I got from you until you stormed out.’

Her mouth tightened. ‘Sorry. I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘What changed your mind?’

Her eyes glittered with sparks of anger. ‘A case of beer has changed my mind.’

His frown deepened. ‘What?’

She rolled her eyes in disdain. ‘Oh, come on, Dr Chapman, surely you don’t need me to spell it out for you? I know about the bet.’

Eamon felt like scratching his head. Had he missed something somewhere? ‘A bet? What bet? What are you talking about?’

She put her hands on her slim hips, in a pose that reminded him of his mother telling him in no uncertain terms what would happen if he didn’t do his homework when he was about ten. ‘The residents and registrars,’ she said tightly. ‘Apparently you are supplying the prize.’

Eamon raked his hand through his hair. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked.

Her eyes glittered with lightning flashes of anger. ‘It doesn’t matter who told me. Is it true?’

‘Of course it’s not true,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about a bet. What’s it about?’

She was still glaring at him. ‘The bet on how long it
would take you to get me to agree to your plans for the department. That’s what last night was all about, wasn’t it? The softening-up approach: a little flirtatious dinner by candlelight, a kiss or two to make me let my guard down. And then, hey presto, the one-and-only offsider finally capitulates and you punch your fist in the air in victory.’ She stabbed a fingertip on his sternum. ‘What a pity it didn’t work, Dr Chapman.’

Eamon snagged her hand before she could pull away. ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about this.’

Her expression was livid as she tugged against his hold. ‘Michelle Oliver told me all about it. And, let me tell you, if she knows then everyone knows. She also knew I was at your flat last night. How on earth would she know that unless you told her or someone else on staff?’

Eamon let out a long, low sigh as he let her hand go. ‘I think I know how she might have found out about that.’

She cocked her brows expectantly, her hands on her hips in a combative pose. ‘Well?’

He shoved his hand through his hair once more. ‘I ran into Sherrie Mason earlier today—you know, the nurse I introduced to you when we were having coffee the other day?’

‘Your ex-but-still-best-friends girlfriend?’ she said with a sarcastic edge to her voice.

Eamon flattened his mouth. ‘Sherrie goes to the same gym as Steph. Steph obviously said something, as Sherrie asked me this morning how my dinner-date with you went.’

She glowered at him. ‘What did you say? That you got to work on me with a few kisses before I saw through your seduction plan and left?’

‘Look, I realise this is exactly what you wanted to avoid—and me too, if it comes to that,’ he said. ‘I don’t like people speculating on my private life, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.’