Meredith Webber - Fairytale on the Children's Ward

And the tension he was feeling at the base of his spine was because he was working with a new team, nothing else.

Other members of the team breezed in, inconsequential chat filling the air as people went about their allotted tasks while the atmosphere in the theatre seemed to tighten in expectation of the operation that lay ahead.

‘You’re opening?’ the circulating nurse asked Oliver.

In work mode now, totally focused, he nodded, then examined the instruments she’d laid out on a trolley. It would be his job to open the tiny chest, cutting through skin and the rib cage, using retractors to hold the ribs open and allow a clear field for operating.

‘Do you need a small suture?’ the nurse asked, and Oliver thought about what lay ahead. As he separated out the pericardium—the fine sheath of protective tissue that surrounded the heart—he would often take a tiny piece of it, and secure it to a spot in the baby’s chest, in case the surgeon needed it later to repair a hole in one of the interior walls of the heart.

The baby!

It seemed impersonal to think of him or her that way, but every one of them was very real to Oliver and every one he was involved in saving was special, even though his contact with them, at this stage, was minimal.

The baby!

His mind wavered for a moment—Clare’s baby, the one he hadn’t wanted, intruding—but only for a millisecond.

‘Leave a suture there—I’ll ask Angus when he comes in. I know from working with Alex that he always likes to have a piece of tissue in reserve.’

The nurse slipped the threaded needle onto the tray, while Oliver checked he had all he needed, shifting a couple of instruments into an order he was used to, in spite of the fact he would rarely pick up an instrument himself.

‘Okay, folks, we have a baby to save.’

Kate Armstrong, the anaesthetist, erupted into the room, nodding and smiling at everyone, then stopping beside Clare to discuss drugs and dosages. Oliver studied the two women—Clare, tall and straight, Kate smaller, but with so much animation in her face she seemed more of a presence. Her vibrant red hair was wrapped in a scarf, but its energy seemed to escape so she had an aura of liveliness about her.

Yet it was Clare who drew his eyes, although he didn’t know this Clare at all.…

He likes her. The thought came to Clare as she watched Oliver looking at Kate, and it niggled in her chest in a way it had no right to niggle, especially after the angry, hateful accusations he’d thrown at her earlier.

No, apart from whatever relationship he developed with Em, Oliver was no longer her concern. He could like whomever he cared to like, though for a moment Clare wished she had the same kind of lively personality Kate had—a personality that attracted men. Instead, she had a face and figure—outward things—that drew their attention.

The arrival of their patient put an end to any extraneous thoughts. As the nurses set the patient up for surgery, and Oliver, as the first assistant, began the simple part of the operation, Clare checked and rechecked her machine, watching the monitors, talking quietly to Kate from time to time, discussing the blood values they were getting.

But she watched Oliver as well, noticing how gently his hands touched the infant, how carefully he cut and opened up the little chest. She smiled to herself, remembering how much he’d loved his paediatric patients, back when they were together, how special he had thought each and every one of them.

Was that why she’d been so stunned when he’d said he didn’t want children? Although they’d never discussed the subject until she brought it up that fateful time, she’d always assumed, somewhere down the track, Oliver, loving children as he did, would want children of his own.

ANGUS arrived and the operation proceeded smoothly, Clare relieved for the baby’s sake when it was successfully completed. But her job wasn’t done, not with the baby still on a support system. She and Kate accompanied him to the small recovery room off the main cardiac PICU, Clare concerned about her first patient as part of this elite team, while Kate explained that she always wanted to see her patients come out of the an-aesthetic. When Kate left for a moment to check something on the ward, Clare looked down at the little boy with tubes and monitor leads practically obliterating his small body.

‘They’re so vulnerable,’ she whispered to herself. ‘But so valiant.’

‘They are indeed! We do terrible things to their bodies and they come out of it so well.’

She looked up at his voice, still startled by it, still unnerved by the coincidence of Oliver being in the same team.

Unnerved, unsettled and, remembering his remarks in Theatre earlier, angry.

Definitely angry.

Very angry.

But when Angus came in to check on the patient, Oliver left.

‘Look, there’s no point in all three of us being here,’ Kate said, soon after. She waved her hand towards Clare and Angus. ‘Why don’t you two grab a coffee break—in fact, it’s past lunchtime. The canteen is good, and cheaper than the coffee shop on the ground floor. You know where to go?’

Why was Kate so keen to send them away?

Not that it mattered. Kate was right that they did not all need to be there. It was a very small room. Angus was apparently open to the suggestion, for he was already holding the door for Clare.

But it was Oliver she should be talking to. As hateful as his words had been earlier, she had to tell him! Not that she could tell him in a hospital canteen…

Although where could she tell him?

Was there an optimal place for telling a man he had a nine-year-old daughter?

‘Yes, I’m glad that first one’s over,’ she said to Angus in reply to his polite conversation about the op. But as they reached the canteen she knew she had to stop asking herself impossible questions about the Oliver situation and toss the conversational ball back to Angus.

‘I’m using the same machine, but did you find the set-up much different to the way you worked in the States?’

After that it was easy, normal conversation about work, but although Angus was a very good-looking man with dark hair and eyes and a soft Scottish accent that should be sending ripples up her spine, neither looking at nor listening to him did anything to her.

He was a nice man, she decided, a little reserved and without the magnetism that drew her to Oliver, but very nice all the same.

Magnetism?

Oliver?

Wasn’t her reaction to him—the physical attraction thing—just a hangover from the past?

And how could she even think of being attracted to a man who thought so little of her?

There were no ripples up her spine from Angus because she was totally spineless!

‘I really should go back,’ she said as, coffee finished, the conversation dried up. She needed to escape, preferably to a dark cave where she could hide out while she sorted out her life.

Or at least until she worked out how to tell Oliver her child was also his.

A week ago, life had seemed so simple, been such an adventure. She and Em coming back to Australia, setting up house, just the two of them, for the first time. Now everything had erupted into chaos.

‘Are you all right?’ Angus asked, and Clare realised she’d been twisting her table napkin so tightly it had curled into something that looked very like a miniature noose.

‘Nervous about the baby,’ she said, hoping her voice wouldn’t reveal her lie.

‘So, let’s check on him together,’ Angus said.

Together was good. She wouldn’t be on her own if they ran into Oliver.

Which they didn’t, although the baby—now named Bob—had his parents with him at the moment, so Clare contented herself with sitting by the nurse on duty at his monitor, watching the information feeding out from all the paraphernalia attached to him.