Angela Hunt - A Time To Mend

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” he answered, his face as implacable as stone as he watched her open the door. “You’re a good nurse. Today I saw you pull organization out of turmoil and instill calm in chaos. You might even manage to keep me on schedule. Nurses with that kind of ability are hard to find.”

“Thanks.” She rested her arms on the open car door, then gave him a tight smile. “And I wish you the best with Mrs. Baldovino. I hope you are able to have that lasagna dinner.”

He nodded formally, then turned and moved toward his car.

Jacquelyn felt her smile fade as she slid into the driver’s seat. Given Mrs. Baldovino’s current condition, she wasn’t likely to be making those dinner reservations any time soon.

If Jonah Martin could overturn the death sentence looming over Mrs. Baldovino’s chart, perhaps he was a miracle worker.

“Of course, I understand, Craig,” Jacquelyn mumbled. With one hand she held the phone to her ear, the other hand lay imprisoned beneath Bailey’s massive head. “State legislators don’t come around every day.”

Craig droned on about the lucrative deal he was about to sign, and Jacquelyn yawned. Stretching out on her wide antique bed for a nap had seemed like a good alternative to wasting the evening in front of the television, so she and Bailey had fallen asleep waiting for Craig to come by. Her day with Dr. Baked Alaska had totally worn her out.

“Call me tomorrow and let me know how things turned out,” she murmured, slowly sliding her hand from under Bailey’s velvety jowls. “Yeah, I know you’re sorry. But you can make it up to me Friday night. Dinner out or something.”

“Where do you want to go?” Craig seemed sincerely apologetic.

“I don’t know.” Jacquelyn tried to smother another yawn. “Italian maybe. I’ve got a sudden yen for lasagna.”

Craig laughed and said goodbye, and Jacquelyn rolled onto her stomach to replace the telephone receiver. As she reached for the bedside table, she felt an unexpected twinge in her chest.

“Oh, brother,” she groaned, flipping onto her back. Bailey’s eyes opened and blinked, then the dog lifted his huge head and looked at Jacquelyn with a curious expression. “No big deal, sweetie,” she said, pillowing her head on her left hand. She slipped her right hand beneath the T-shirt she wore and slowly probed her left breast. There. On the side, at about two o’clock. A small lump, probably a cyst, nothing serious. The twinge was pain, and that usually meant there was nothing to worry about.

“Nurse, heal thyself,” she murmured, rolling onto her side. “No caffeine for a long time, and vitamin E at breakfast. The doctor’s recipe to counter fibrocystic disease.”

As her drowsiness thickened, she curled around a pillow and fell asleep to the sound of Bailey’s gentle snoring.

Jacquelyn was delighted when Labor Day dawned in a glorious burst of blue. Craig had suggested they spend the traditional last day of summer by the lake. “I’d love a picnic,” she had told him when he called Saturday to tell her he wouldn’t be over because he was entertaining a prospective client. “I can’t think of a better way to spend a day away from the clinic.”

She’d now put in an exhausting two and a half months with Dr. Jonah Martin. Though they had managed to be civil toward one another, she had to continually bite her tongue in his presence. With the patients he was unlike any doctor she’d ever met—boundlessly optimistic, encouraging, patient and attentive to every complaint. And yet with the nurses he was aloof, distant and rigidly controlled. In one moment he would be laughing with a patient in the exam room, in the next he would be impatiently thrusting a chart toward Jacquelyn with a mocking, exasperated look in his eye. The buzz around the nurses’ station was that Dr. Martin held a special contempt for nurses, orderlies and office workers. And for the first time in Jacquelyn’s memory, Stacy didn’t rise to defend a handsome man.

“He’s an angel,” Jacquelyn heard one patient gush enthusiastically. “With those blue eyes and that golden hair—just like a halo!”

“A fallen angel, maybe,” Jacqueline muttered as she cleared her breakfast dishes off the iron table in her backyard and headed into the kitchen with Bailey padding along behind.

Dr. Martin was difficult to work with, and yet part of Jacquelyn was glad that he had joined the clinic staff. He lightened the workload considerably, even accepting several of Dr. Kastner’s difficult terminal cases. In the course of a month, Jacquelyn noticed remarkable improvements in their attitudes, and happier patients generally meant healthier, longer-living patients.

She learned that an encyclopedic mind lay behind the doctor’s charming facade. He knew dosages, drugs and protocols—medical treatment plans—by heart; contraindications and advisability results rolled off his tongue as smoothly as the alphabet. The receptionist was constantly paging him; doctors from across the country regularly called to ask his advice about one protocol or another. By slyly peeking at his telephone messages, Jacquelyn learned that Jonah Martin was involved in an ongoing study at Johns Hopkins and another at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. In the mornings when Jacquelyn arrived at the clinic, he was already on the phone in his office, and he remained busy when she left in the evening, long after the clinic had closed to patients.

A masculine force enveloped him, a great presence fostered by his striking good looks and enthralling blue eyes. Jacquelyn could not deny that he was intelligent, powerful and charismatic—when he chose to be. But he was also enigmatic, quick-tempered and, she suspected, more than a little dangerous. He generated awe wherever he went, but in the beginning, she reasoned, so had a lot of people….

Jacquelyn shook the thought away as she started her dishwasher and tried to concentrate on getting ready for a day at the lake.

She wanted to dislike him, but she couldn’t. He was too good a doctor. She would have settled for a decided feeling of apathy toward him, but her heart quickened every time his gaze met hers. She told herself her body was only reacting to residual anger from their first confrontation, but why did her heart hammer foolishly on the occasions he called specifically for her? He radiated a vitality that drew her like a magnet, but she told herself the attraction sprang from his unusual commitment to excellence and his uncommon caring for his patients. He was a good doctor, even if his behavior sometimes seemed as erratic and threatening as a summer storm.

For the first time in five years she had begun to see oncology as an exciting and rewarding field. Medicine, as seen through the eyes of Jonah Martin, involved more than cutting, burning and rebuilding. It involved healing.

Patients who had given up hope began to go into remission under his protocols, and every time good news came back from the lab, Dr. Martin’s eyes gleamed as if each patient were the first he’d successfully treated. He held impromptu celebrations for happy patients in the employee lunchroom and had the nurses send congratulatory cards to those whose cancer had entered remission. Not only did he congratulate the “winners,” but he also sent cards of encouragement to patients who were still struggling through chemo or the prospect of more surgery.

At first, Jacquelyn rebelled at the thought of hand-addressing cards. “Doesn’t he know we have these names and addresses in the computer?” she griped to Gaynel at the front desk. “And that long ago someone invented a wonderful thing called a mailing label?” But then patients began to show up in the office with his cards clutched in their hands and stuffed into their purses, and Jacquelyn realized that the patients appreciated Dr. Martin’s unconventional beyond-the-office attention. Personal greeting cards were silly, senseless and totally inefficient in light of the other paperwork the nurses had to maintain, but the patients loved them. And since something so simple apparently meant so much, Jacquelyn decided the extra effort wasn’t too much to ask.