Marion Lennox - Bushfire Bride

Stupid question, really. It was absolutely obvious that he wasn’t. ‘I just…’ He wiped his hand across his eyes. ‘My eyes… The smoke…’

And he’d been driving.

‘You need to go to the hospital,’ she told him.

‘That’s where we’re going. There was a shed-the farmer told us it was used for storing hay so we made an attempt to save it. What he forgot to tell us was that he stored fuel in there as well. The thing went up with a bang that scared us almost as much as we scared you. But that’s all the damage, thank God. There’s a few of us with sore eyes, but we’re thinking that we’ve been lucky.’

Lucky or not, they looked shocked and ill. Rachel’s personal problems were set aside in the face of these peoples’ needs. ‘You should have been treated before you drove.’

‘Doc’s been busy,’ someone said. ‘We heard up on the ridge that he couldn’t come up. He’s been caught up with a dogbite or something.’

Of course he’d been caught up. And there was no one else, Rachel thought. He was on his own.

Except for her. Hugo had her, whether he liked it or not. And a fat lot of use she was, she thought ruefully, hiking round the country with her crazy Afghan hound, looking for food and for shelter as if she were destitute. It was time she hauled herself together and started being useful.

‘Tell you what,’ she said, brushing gravel from her knees and trying to stop her knees from doing the shaking they were so intent on. ‘Let’s all go to the hospital. I’m a doctor and I’m needed there. But if it’s OK with you…’ She managed a shaky grin as she looked around their smoke-filled eyes which were now tinged with disbelief. A doctor in Crimplene… But she wasn’t going down that road. Explanations could take hours.

‘Indulge me with something I’ve always wanted to do,’ she told them. ‘I’m a country girl from way back. Once upon a time I even drove my dad’s truck at hay-carting so I have my heavy vehicle licence. So all you have to do is say yes. Let me drive your fire engine.’

Which was how Dr Rachel Harper, MD, dressed in glorious Crimplene and Doris Keen’s sandals, with gravel in her knees, nothing in her stomach and dog hair all over her, got to drive the Cowral Bay fire truck with a bunch of ten disgustingly dirty and slightly injured firefighters and one potential Australian champion Afghan in the back.

You told me to have a weekend to remember, she silently told her absent mother-in-law as they headed for the hospital. Well, Dottie, I’m doing just that.

Hugo wasn’t at the hospital, and Rachel was aware of a stab of disappointment. But at least the nurses knew her from that afternoon when she’d helped with Kim. They greeted her as a friend, and the orderly took over Penelope’s care as if she was no trouble at all.

‘You’ve come to help, miss,’ he told her as the firefighters milled around the emergency room, and it was obvious to everyone that Rachel needed to turn into a doctor again. ‘You’re very welcome. I’ll give your dog some dinner, shall I?’

Dinner… Yes!

‘Actually, I-’

But dinner wasn’t her destiny. ‘It’s great that you’re here.’ David, the ginger-haired nurse who’d helped with Kim, was looking more flustered than he had that afternoon. ‘One of our old farmers had a stroke an hour ago. Dr McInnes had to go out there in a hurry and here’s all these guys needing checking. Can I give you a hand and we’ll see what we can do together?’

She worked for an hour. It was solid medicine but straightforward, washing out eyes, checking bruises and cleaning scratches. One of the women was suffering slightly from smoke inhalation and Rachel decreed that she be admitted, but the oxygen alleviated the symptoms almost immediately. Great. She worked steadily through on. Minor stuff.

Except the man who’d been driving the truck. He had a sliver of something nasty in his eye as well as a cut that was deep enough to need stitching. But it was the eye she was worried about.

Rachel shoved her rumbling stomach aside and focused.

She dropped in fluorescein-a yellow stain-and examined the eye through the ophthalmoscope. And worried.

‘Can we X-ray?’ she asked David.

‘Sure.’

The X-ray came back-still worrying. She pinned it against the light and fretted some more as the door opened behind her.

‘Problem?’

She turned and it was Hugo. For a moment-for just a moment-it was as much as she could do not to fall into his arms with relief. She’d pushed hunger and exhaustion and shock away but the events of the day were catching up with her. She was really close to breaking point.

Falling into a colleague’s arms wasn’t exactly professional. She got a grip. Sort of. Mental slap around the ears. She hauled herself into as much of a medical mode as she could muster.

‘There’s a foreign body just at the edge of the cornea,’ she told him, turning back to the light-box and attempting to concentrate on the image. ‘There was fuel in metal drums that exploded while they were trying to save a shed. This looks like a sliver of metal, embedded in the cornea but not penetrating. His sight’s blurred but maybe that’s just the reaction to the pain and a bit of debris that’s on the surface. The eye won’t stop watering. There’s a couple of nasty lacerations around the eye itself that’ll need stitching but it’s the metal I’m worried about. It’s very near the optic nerve. If he moves while I’m trying to manoeuvre it out… Well, I don’t think I can cope with this under local anaesthetic.’

Hugo nodded. He crossed to stand beside her and they stared at the screen together.

‘It’s not touching anything crucial. I think we could do it.’ He stared at it a bit longer. ‘Maybe you’re right, though. It’s going to be fiddly.’

‘But under a local anaesthetic?’

‘I’d rather not.’ He looked down at her and smiled. ‘Like you, ophthalmology isn’t my speciality. It looks straightforward enough as long as he doesn’t move, but there’s a bit of repair work to do and I’m not super-confident. Eyes aren’t my area of expertise and if I have to fiddle and curse I’d prefer that the patient was sedated while I did it.’

‘That makes two of us.’ She looked at the X-ray some more and even managed a shaky smile. ‘We couldn’t evacuate him to the city?’

‘It’s a very small sliver. It’s not penetrating. Evacuating means bringing a helicopter from the city and visibility is making things dangerous.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘But we do have two doctors,’ he went on inexorably. ‘Even if one of them looks like she just came out of a welfare shop.’

‘From a home for battered women actually,’ she said with dignity. ‘I’ve had one offer to take me there in a squad car already tonight.’

‘Have you?’ The ready laughter she was starting to know flashed into his eyes. ‘The fire guys tell me they nearly ran you down.’

‘Yeah, but then they let me drive their fire engine,’ she told him. ‘Which was really cool.’

The deep smile lurking in the back of his eyes strengthened into the beginnings of something that looked like pure admiration. And surprise. She flushed but his eyes were sliding down to her legs, breaking the moment. He’d seen her bloodstained knee. ‘That graze wants washing.’

‘And we all need dinner and a sleep and it’s not going to happen,’ she told him, still strangely flushed. What was it with this man that had the capacity to unsettle her? She had to move on. ‘Our firefighter has an empty stomach which means he’s ready for anaesthesia now,’ she told him. ‘His eye isn’t going to get better on its own. If we’re going to operate there isn’t a better time than now. Is there?’