The emergency doctor claims his wife

by Margaret McDonagh

  It was time for him to face reality, to take off the rose-coloured blinkers. As hard and painful as it was to admit, there could be no future for him with Annie. It was finally over. He couldn’t do this any more—would never risk the shattered fragments of his broken heart again. He would have to move on, find somewhere else to start over.

  Africa?

  There was a job there for him if he wanted it. The prospect didn’t fill him with the joy and excitement it should, but he knew it was a place he was needed, somewhere he could make a difference and do something worthwhile. It was also a place where his hurt and loss would count for little compared to the suffering of people he could help. But he knew that even thousands of miles and several countries away Annie would continue to haunt him…

  Already feeling on the ragged edge after his latest disaster with Annie the previous night, Nathan choked back emotion as he called the time of death, unable to tear his gaze away from the motionless body of their tiny patient. Tension and despair hung thickly in the atmosphere of the resus bay.

  After a sleepless night he had come to work early, both to avoid Annie and to inform his bosses that he would not be staying in Strathlochan. He had arrived at the hospital to find A and E in chaos, with an influx of emergencies coinciding with the change-over of shifts. Before he could take care of the issue of his resignation he had been called urgently to attend to the collapsed child. Finding that her three-month-old daughter Millie had stopped breathing, Jayne Lewis, who lived two roads away, had rushed the baby in herself rather than wait for an ambulance.

  With everyone else assigned to seriously ill patients, Nathan, as the most senior doctor available, had shouldered responsibility, taking Millie to Resus while her distraught mother was comforted in a private room by a nurse. The on-call paediatric consultant had been fast-bleeped, but had been dealing with another emergency on the children’s ward and was yet to arrive in A and E. Now it was too late.

  After their fruitless attempts to revive little Millie the rest of the staff filed silently away. Whilst they might not show their emotions outwardly, Nathan knew that everyone had been affected by what had happened. One of the nurses stayed behind to clear things away, remove IV lines and disconnect the monitors. Tears clustered on her lashes as she prepared the tiny body, wrapping Millie in a clean, soft blanket so that her mother could hold her one last time. A huge lump lodged in Nathan’s throat. He still had to face Jayne Lewis to tell her the news.

  Gail, her own eyes moist and filled with sadness, gave him a hug. ‘You did everything possible, Nathan. We all did. It’s tragic and horrible, but there was really no hope from the moment Millie arrived.’

  ‘If the paediatric consultant had been here—’

  ‘She could have done nothing to change the outcome,’ Gail interrupted firmly, staunch in her support and understanding.

  Nathan nodded, holding on to his composure by a thread. In his head he knew Gail was right, but it didn’t take away the pain and helplessness of the last thirty minutes. Although showing no signs of rigidity or blood pooling, they had all known there was zero chance of saving Millie. Yet she had been intubated at once, chest compressions started. Unable to find any viable vein, Nathan had inserted a needle into a leg bone in order to rapidly deliver fluids and drugs. Nothing had worked. There had been no hope. But they had had to try—for Millie, for her mother, for themselves.

  ‘I’ll come with you to see the mother.’

  ‘Thanks, Gail.’ Unable to produce a smile, he rested a hand on her shoulder, grateful for her empathy. ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Yes, I do. We’re in it together with this job. The good and the bad.’

  Following the standard procedure in place in this hospital, Nathan went to the room where Jayne Lewis waited with the nurse assigned to comfort her. Jayne’s aunt and a friend had arrived, to add their support. Breaking bad news was something that never became easier, Nathan thought, but he sat beside the shocked, sobbing woman, holding her hand as he tried to explain the unexplainable. Millie—healthy, happy and well-loved—had been a victim of sudden infant death syndrome.

  The awful task completed, Gail accompanied Jayne to see Millie while he shut himself in the office and forced himself to focus on completing the official paperwork. He had to inform the Procurator Fiscal of the death, as well as ensure that all samples and notes were properly labelled and recorded before he signed off on them. Next he arranged for photographs, should Jayne want them, then organised a bereavement counsellor and notified the GP, so that follow-up care would be offered.

  Nothing changed the outcome.

  Millie had died.

  It was the worst start possible to a dreadful day, and he didn’t even want to think what else could go wrong.

  Desperate for some space and a cup of tea, Nathan left the office and headed to the staffroom—only to run into Annie. He couldn’t deal with her now. Just looking at her hurt. Thankful that there were other people in the room, he kept his back to Annie and switched on the kettle, wishing he didn’t still want her despite everything. Why was he such a fool over this woman? He knew he had to walk away to save his own sanity, so why was it so hard to do?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NATHAN looked dreadful.

  Constrained by the presence of the others in the room, Annie bit her lip and watched in silence as he stood at the worktop and made a cup of tea. His back was ramrod-straight, his shoulders stiff—everything about his pose screamed unapproachability.

  She hadn’t slept a wink last night. And she had arrived home, tearful and in despair, only to find that Will wasn’t even there. He had been out with Anthony. Her flight from Nathan’s, her thoughtless words that had hurt him so deeply and created completely the wrong impression, had all been for nothing. Feeling horribly alone, she had curled up on her bed, her arms wrapped around herself, her brain struggling to come up with a workable plan on how to explain things to Nathan.

  Her gaze lingered on his tense, silent frame. Even the shapeless scrubs he wore couldn’t detract from his impressive looks and masculinity. At the moment he refused to even look at her, so how was she ever going to get him to listen to what she needed to say? It would be difficult, but she had to tell him the whole truth…and then she could only hope he could forgive her.

  She couldn’t imagine the rest of her life without Nathan being part of it. Or how she had survived the last five years without him. The extent of her self-delusion, her denial and her mistakes took her breath away. As did the uncomfortable knowledge that she had never even considered how Nathan might have felt when she had left him. She’d been so selfish. Where had he been these last five years? What had happened to him? And why wasn’t he a specialist registrar already?

  She had so many questions but, having kept him at arm’s length and lied to him, the tables were now turned on her and it was Nathan who was blanking her.

  Annie’s troubled thoughts were interrupted when the staffroom door opened and Will all but bounced into the room. In contrast to Nathan’s pale face and bleak expression, Will looked happiness personified—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the other staff in the room.

  ‘You look even more disgustingly chipper than normal, Will,’ one of the nurses teased him. ‘I thought you were off today?’

  ‘I swapped shifts with Gus—Julia isn’t feeling well, so he’s taking her for a check-up with her obstetrician.’

  As Will explained his unexpected presence, Annie noticed Nathan heading towards the door. She rose to her feet, determined to follow him and try to arrange a time to talk. Before she could move, however, Will was scooping her up and swinging her around.

  ‘And I am disgustingly chipper,’ he said, laughing in answer to the other part of the nurse’s comment. ‘Because I’m in love!’

  Seeing the hurt and anger in Nathan’s dark eyes as he cast her one fulminating glare before leaving the room, Annie smothered a cry of frustration and wriggled out of Will’s arms.

 
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, stepping back, a frown of concern sobering his face.

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ she whispered, anxious that no one should overhear. ‘I have to catch Nathan.’

  By the time she reached the corridor Nathan was striding ahead of her and about to disappear around the corner. She ran after him, calling his name. He hesitated, glancing over his shoulder, clearly reluctant to stop.

  ‘Please,’ she begged as she closed the distance between them, conscious that other people were milling about, affording them no privacy.

  ‘Not now, Annie.’

  ‘When, then?’ An edge of desperation crept into her voice. ‘I need to talk to you—to explain things.’

  He strode off towards the A and E department. ‘I’m not interested in whatever arrangement you have going on with Will.’

  ‘It’s not like that!’

  She wanted to protest further, but was worried about making a scene in public. The department was hectic, crowded with staff and patients, and already people were looking at them. However much she wanted this settled, she couldn’t shout out in front of everyone that Will was gay. Neither did she want her colleagues to know how badly she had behaved, nor that she had lied. Caught in a trap of her own making, she could do nothing but wait.

  As Nathan walked away from her Annie hesitated, unsure whether to go after him or not. Wrestling with indecision, she was startled when Gail came up beside her.

  ‘Give him some space, love,’ the older nurse advised.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Gail’s smile was understanding. ‘Now isn’t the best time for Nathan,’ she added, explaining what had happened with baby Millie.

  ‘Oh, no.’ A lump lodged in Annie’s throat. She wanted to go to him, to comfort him, but she feared his rejection. ‘Nathan will be devastated.’

  ‘He’s taking it hard. It was upsetting for all the team.’

  ‘No matter how many times you see these things, you never get hardened to it,’ Annie mused sadly.

  ‘You and Nathan are such good doctors because you haven’t lost your compassion and the ability to care.’ Gail gave her hand a squeeze. ‘I’ve sensed from the first that you two have something of a history. It’s the way you look at each other. Whatever’s gone wrong, Annie, I’m sure you can work things out.’

  Touched, Annie managed a watery smile. ‘Thanks, Gail.’

  As the kindly woman left, Annie sucked in a ragged breath. She hoped her friend was right and it wasn’t already too late to make amends with Nathan. From across the crowded department she saw him standing at the desk, reviewing the next set of case notes from the tray. He looked so distant, so sad, so alone. And it was all her fault.

  There was nothing she could do at this moment to right the wrongs she had committed against him, but later she would try again. Despite all the setbacks, she was determined she was going to see this through. Far too late she acknowledged just how much she had always loved him—still loved him. Whether or not she had hurt him one too many times for him to forgive her, and whether or not they could ever have another chance at being together, she wouldn’t rest until she had apologised and explained everything—she owed Nathan that much at least.

  With the department stretched to capacity, Annie scarcely had a moment to draw breath. Amongst the many patients she saw, whose problems were varied and ranged in levels of seriousness, were two regulars. One was a nineteen-year-old girl battling a drug problem, who had been brought in for the second time since Christmas after being assaulted by a man who had picked her up on a street corner. Annie was very concerned at the danger the girl was placing herself in as she tried to get money to feed her habit. Frustrated that the system and target pressures didn’t allow her the time necessary to spend talking to the girl, Annie finally persuaded her to visit the drop-in clinic, where she would get full support, care and advice from Thorn and his staff and hopefully help to come off the drugs and get her life back on track.

  Her second regular was a middle-aged alcoholic man who had been found collapsed in one of the town’s parks by a morning dog-walker. He had apparently fallen while making his unsteady way home from the pub in the early hours, spending the night in the cold with a broken leg that needed plating, a very sore head and mild hypothermia. Annie finished the paperwork and handed him—and the battle with the hospital’s bed manager for an admission slot—over to the orthopaedic registrar.

  Although time passed in a blur of activity, she found it uncharacteristically hard to focus on her job. All she could think about was Nathan. She caught herself straining to hear the sound of his voice, or trying to catch a glimpse of him as she hurried from Reception to waiting room to examination cubicle, from one patient to another.

  A couple of hours ago, while chasing up X-ray and blood test results for a twenty-seven-year old man with sudden-onset abdominal pain and vomiting, who had been given analgesia and was being monitored pending further investigations, she had managed to exchange a few words with Will—sufficient to inform him of her latest faux pas with Nathan.

  ‘For someone who is normally so intelligent, sensible and attuned to people’s feelings, you’ve been a complete idiot over Nathan,’ he’d told her, shaking his head and holding nothing back. ‘You have to tell him everything, Annie.’

  ‘I’m trying to! But he won’t speak to me. Not that I blame him.’

  Thankfully Will had refrained from saying I told you so.

  Back in A and E, and with the results of the young man’s tests suggesting caecal volvulus—a twisting of the bowel—she signed him over to the surgical team, who were anticipating the need to perform a right hemicolec-tomy to correct the problem. Next she was caught up in treating casualties of the third motorway traffic collision of the day. She had long since given up hope of grabbing a reviving cup of coffee, let alone any lunch.

  She was at the desk, wiping the details of the patient she had just dealt with off the whiteboard, when further chaos erupted in the shape of two burly, heavily tattooed men. Dripping blood from assorted cuts and bruises, they were escorted inside by five harrassed-looking police officers. Voices were raised and language was foul. The entourage had barely crossed the threshold before the head receptionist, without whom the department would cease to function, was calling for additional security and organising things so that existing patients would be disturbed as little as possible by the new arrivals.

  Robert Mowbray emerged from an examination cubicle to speak to the police sergeant in charge, and Annie hovered at Reception in case she was needed, instinctively keeping herself between the children’s play area nearby—where a volunteer nurse was keeping watch over three youngsters—and the swearing, bloodied men, who were trying to fight each other and the policemen struggling to restrain them.

  As the scuffle intensified, one of the arrested men made a bid for freedom, punching one of his captors and knocking aside the other. With the A and E exit guarded, the man turned, his eyes wild and frantic as he searched for another means of escape. To reach the corridor to the rest of the hospital he’d have to go by the children, Annie realised, and with no other thought in her mind than sheltering them she maintained her position.

  The panicked man closed the gap between them. Annie heard shouts before the man grabbed her. Then she was aware of a sharp bloom of pain in her chest, and she glanced down in disbelief to see the man withdraw what looked like a screwdriver clutched in his hand.

  Shocked, Annie cried out as he shoved her roughly aside. Disorientated, she felt herself falling. Unable to slow the momentum, she hit the floor with a thud. She thought she heard Nathan’s familiar voice calling her name, and she tried unsuccessfully to lift her head to look for him, but her vision was blurry. People were yelling. An alarm was sounding. Running footsteps pounded closer. She knew a warm wetness on her skin under the top of her scrubs. Once again she tried to open her eyes, but they wouldn’t obey. She felt strange. Scared. Nathan’s name was a whisper on her lips. She had the cr
azy thought that he would never know she loved him. Then everything went black.

  Having spent time stitching up a deep cut on the leg of a middle-aged woman brought to A and E by her sister, Nathan had just finished referring her to Dr Cameron Kincaid, a specialist in self-harm at the Ackerman Centre, on the outskirts of town, when he had heard the commotion in Reception. Advising the two women to wait in the cubicle, he had stepped out from behind the curtain to see what was happening, his horrified gaze taking in the scene unfolding before him as if it was happening in slow motion.

  An injured man had broken away from the police officers attempting to restrain him, and his attempt to flee was taking him close to Annie, who was near the play area. Before Nathan could react, the man was grabbing Annie, shouting obscenities. Then his arm rose, and Nathan saw that he had something clutched in his hand. It looked like a screwdriver, and he wondered how the man had managed to secrete it and get it past the policemen. He watched in horror as the man plunged his hand down at Annie’s chest, before pushing her away and rushing towards the opening to the corridor out of the department.

  ‘Annie!’

  Nathan rushed towards her, but he was too late to catch her before she hit the floor. The next moment he was kneeling beside her, every part of him shaking in fear as he looked at her too-pale face, her closed eyes. She was unconscious, failing to respond to him, her pulse thready. He checked her head and could find no sign of a fracture or a cut, although a bump was forming. And then he saw the welling of blood beginning to stain the top of her baggy scrubs.

  ‘Oh, God. No.’ Whilst aware of activity all around him, as the police and hospital security attempted to apprehend the fleeing assailant and control his cohort, Nathan’s sole focus was on the woman he loved. ‘Resus!’ he shouted, drawing attention to the desperateness of the situation. ‘I need help here. Annie’s been stabbed.’