Patricia Davids - A Matter of the Heart

“I can’t allow just anyone access to their information.”

She was still fighting, even after the battle was lost. A part of Rob admired her tenacity. Yet while he admired her determination to get rid of him in spite of the pressure on her, Rob couldn’t help but wonder why.

“Do you have something to hide, Dr. Blake?”

Her head snapped around and she stared at him with wide eyes. For a second, he thought he saw fear in their depths, but it was quickly replaced with anger. The elevator doors opened and she rushed off. He followed at a slower pace, but he was more intrigued than ever.

Homecoming Heroes: Saving children and finding love deep in the heart of Texas.

Mission: Motherhood —Marta Perry

July 2008

Lone Star Secret —Lenora Worth

August 2008

At His Command —Brenda Coulter

September 2008

A Matter of the Heart —Patricia Davids

October 2008

A Texas Thanksgiving —Margaret Daley

November 2008

Homefront Holiday —Jillian Hart

December 2008

Patricia Davids continues to work as a part-time nurse in the NICU while writing full-time. She enjoys researching new stories, traveling to new locations and meeting fans along the way. She and her husband live in Wichita, Kansas, along with the newest addition to the household, a stray cat named Spooky. Pat always enjoys hearing from her readers. You can contact her by mail at P.O. Box 16714 Wichita, Kansas 67216, or visit her on the Web at www.patriciadavids.com.

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Patricia Davids for her contribution to the Homecoming Heroes miniseries.

May he turn our hearts to him, to walk in all his ways and to keep the commands, decrees and regulations he gave our fathers.

—1 Kings 8:58

To Lenora Worth, Marta Perry, Brenda Coulter,

Margaret Daley and Jillian Hart. Working with

y’all has been a pleasure. Thanks for all the help

you gave me.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Discussion Questions

“E xcuse me, where is the patient I’m operating on this morning?” Dr. Nora Blake stood impatiently at the nurses’ station in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. Two nurses in brightly colored uniforms were laughing about something until they heard her voice. Then they immediately fell silent, their smiles vanishing.

Nora knew she wasn’t a favorite with the staff. She didn’t possess the people skills many of her colleagues displayed. Her insistence on attention to detail and her intolerance of mediocre work had earned her the reputation of being difficult.

It wasn’t that she didn’t care what her coworkers thought of her—she did. It hurt to see how quickly their expressions changed from cheerful to guarded, but making sure her patients received the highest quality care was far more important than being popular.

Arching one eyebrow, the slender nurse with short blond hair asked, “Do you mean Cara Dempsey?”

Nora raised her chin. Her skill was saving children with heart defects, not winning popularity contests. Professionalism was the key to getting things done right in the hospital, not sociability.

“I’m looking for the patient who came in from Blackwater General yesterday with transposition of the great arteries. Do you have the chart?” The words came out sounding sharper than she intended.

The ward nurse held out a black three-ring binder. “The patient is in room five. Dr. Kent just finished talking to the parents.”

“Thank you.” Nora nodded, relieved to hear that her partner had arrived first. Peter Kent would have explained the coming procedure to the family. It saved Nora the time and headache of trying to make laypeople understand the complex nature of the upcoming operation.

If she found any fault with Peter, who was ten years her senior and had been her partner for the past two years, it was that he was too upbeat in dealing with the families. As far as she was concerned, he often sugarcoated the truth and offered false hope. She would need to impress on the Dempsey family the risks involved, especially for an infant. Not every patient survived open-heart surgery.

Thumbing through the chart, she paid special attention to the laboratory values and medications being given to the two-day-old infant. Satisfied that everything had been done correctly, she closed the binder and moved to the computer in the corner of the desk area reserved for use by physicians. She pulled up the echocardiogram images of her patient.

She had already studied the scans extensively in her office late last night, but she wanted to make sure that she hadn’t missed anything, so she watched the movie of the child’s beating heart one more time. As always, a profound sense of wonder and awe engulfed her. The human heart was a beautiful thing.

She quickly focused on gathering the information she would need to repair the child’s flawed heart. Operating on a newborn baby was always hard for her. It brought back too many painful memories. She preferred her patients to be at least six months old, but this child wouldn’t live a week without surgery. It had to be done now.

The quality of the echocardiogram and tests were excellent, but Nora wouldn’t know what she was actually dealing with until she looked inside the patient’s chest. If there was one thing that she had learned during her years of training, it was that every heart was unique.

Leaving the desk, Nora walked to room five. Outside, she paused a moment to brace herself. Drawing a deep breath, she pasted a smile on her face, knocked once and then entered.

Inside, she saw a young couple sitting on the small couch at the back of the room with their arms around each other for support. They both had red-rimmed eyes, either from crying or from lack of sleep or both. They looked shell-shocked and barely out of their teens—far too young to be facing what lay ahead.

They both rose to their feet, and their hopeful eyes begged her for help she wasn’t sure she could give. For a split second she envied them each having someone to hold on to during the coming hours. She had been in their shoes once with no one to comfort her. The memory of those terrible days haunted her still.

On the warming bed, a baby girl with thick dark hair lay unnaturally still. A white tube taped to her mouth connected her to a ventilator. IV pumps and monitors took up most of the space around her and beeped softly. Drugs kept her from moving and fighting the very machines that were keeping her alive. Even with the ventilator breathing for her, the child’s lips were dark blue. It wasn’t a good sign.

Nora nodded at the parents. “I’m Dr. Blake and I’ll be performing your child’s surgery this morning.”

The father spoke quickly. “You can make her well, can’t you? Doctor Kent, he said you were the best.”

“As you know, your daughter was born with the blood vessels leading from the heart in the wrong places. Outcomes are usually good with this procedure, but five percent of the children who have this done don’t survive or survive with serious brain damage. You need to be aware of that.”