Joanna Neil - The Doctor's Longed-For Family

The parents were tearful, pleading with her to do something for their baby.

‘I know this is difficult for you,’ she told them. ‘Lucy is very ill, but we’re doing everything possible to help her. It looks as though she has a bacterial infection of some sort, possibly a form of pneumonia, and so far it isn’t responding to treatment. I’m going to change the antibiotics and add something to assist her circulation. We just have to hang in there and wait for the medicine to take effect.’

Turning to Sam, she said in an undertone, ‘We’ll add a vasopressor to assist the blood flow, and a steroid to see if that will do something to reduce the inflammation.’

Sam looked anxious, but she said softly, ‘You’re doing all right. You’ve done everything possible.’

‘I hope it’s enough.’

She nodded. It was frightening to see a child looking so ill, and Lucy’s desperate condition weighed heavily on her mind as she left the room.

Glancing across the expanse of the department, she caught sight of Matt Calder coming in through the main door, and her first instinct was to walk in the opposite direction. She resisted the impulse. Whatever her feelings towards him, she had a job to do, and she couldn’t simply take an escape route and avoid him.

Then she saw that he wasn’t alone. He had with him the head of administration, and the two of them were chatting amicably, almost as though they were old friends.

A nurse handed her a chart outlining another patient’s progress, and she quickly checked the details on it before adding her signature and handing it back. ‘You can reduce the observations to half-hourly,’ she told the girl. ‘His condition seems to be improving at last.’

‘I’ll do that.’ The nurse hurried away, and Abby headed for the trauma room so that she could examine a child who had just been brought in.

‘May we interrupt you for a moment?’ the head of administration queried gently.

‘Of course.’ She gave him a polite smile. She had nothing against the man personally, but his department was forever coming up with new edicts to be followed or targets that had to be met, and not one of them ever made her job any easier. The only way he and his kind would ever understand the constraints she was under would be if he was to try working at the rock face, but that wasn’t likely to happen in a month of Sundays.

‘I believe you’ve already met my friend, Matt, here?’ His smile was encouraging. Clearly he expected an enthusiastic response.

‘Yes, we ran into each other earlier today.’ So they were pals, were they? Abby mused.

‘Good, good. Then you two already have a head start. Matt’s writing an article about what goes on in A and E. You know the sort of thing…the challenges you come up against in your daily work, the kind of cases you see on a regular basis. Perhaps you could help him out? I can’t think of a better person to show him around.’

Abby glanced at Matt and forced a smile. ‘I don’t know about giving you the grand tour. It will be more a case of following me around as I work and getting questions in where you can, I should imagine. I don’t have the luxury of free time, but you’re welcome to tag along.’

The head of administration looked a trifle disconcerted at that, but Matt responded well enough.

‘That would be excellent, thank you. I really don’t want to put you out in any way.’

Didn’t he? So why did she get the feeling she was being coerced into doing this? Anyway, she wasn’t going to spend too much time worrying about it, whatever either of them thought about her manner to them.

The trouble with men in authority, from her experience, was that they expected to have everything work their way, and it didn’t matter who they trod on to get to where they wanted to be.

Wasn’t that what Craig had done? Her ex-boyfriend had begged her to help him study for his exams, had picked her brains, and then he had walked all over her to get the promotion she had been after. He had taken their shared research paper, the one she had worked on intensively and had been struggling to perfect for over a year, and he had taken all the credit for it himself, using what had mostly been her work to wow the interview board with his so-called expertise.

‘I was on my way to see a patient,’ she murmured. ‘If you’ll excuse me?’

‘Of course.’ The man from Admin clapped Matt on the back and said brightly, ‘I’ll leave you in Abby’s capable hands.’ Then he strolled back the way he had come, taking a leisurely route and pausing to admire the colourful murals along the way.

‘I don’t know how much help I can be to you,’ Abby said to Matt, continuing on her way to the trauma room. ‘I would have thought you already have some experience of A and E. We all do a stint there during training, don’t we?’

‘That’s true and, to be honest, I actually specialised in it at one time. What I’m really looking for is your take on things. How you feel about your work, and which cases have an effect on you above all others.’ He paused for a moment or two, giving her a thoughtful look. ‘I noticed that you seemed sad when we walked in here a few minutes ago. Was it because of a difficult problem you had to solve?’

‘I don’t deal with cases or problems,’ she told him. ‘I treat sick children.’

She might have expected him to draw back at the snub, but he simply studied her more closely, a glimmer of compassion in his eyes. ‘And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? That’s what makes yours such a heart-rending job.’

She winced at his perception. Why did he have to show that he understood? She didn’t like the man, neither did she want to have anything to do with him. He was the enemy, a thorn in her side.

‘If you can understand that,’ she said, ‘then it beggars belief that you should write an article on the pros and cons of vaccination. I have to deal with the fallout from that when parents read your stuff and decide that vaccination isn’t for their children. Then I have to try to save the lives of the ones who come in here with meningitis and respiratory infections that overwhelm their immune systems.’

‘Did you read the article?’

‘Bits of it.’ She grimaced. ‘Someone had left the magazine open on the table in the doctors’ lounge, and I glanced at it in passing.’

He gave a crooked smile. ‘I’m not going to win this argument when I’m up against a biased opinion like yours, am I? Perhaps you should have read the article in full before you made up your mind that I’m the devil incarnate.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ she said. ‘I tend not to think about you at all.’

That remark might have been a good payback for the putdown he had made on his website, but it didn’t have anything near the effect she’d wished for. He simply tilted back his head and laughed.

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