‘It’s a good job he doesn’t know you’re going to stick a needle in him,’ Jem commented with glee as he watched her swab his friend’s grubby arm then slide the needle in, hitting the vein she was looking for first time in spite of the limited lighting. ‘Tel doesn’t like needles. He says just looking at them makes him feel sick, but I think he’s scared they’ll hurt.’
‘You don’t mind them, though?’ she asked, quite taken with this self-possessed young boy. He was certainly far braver than she would have been in a similar situation.
‘Nah,’ he said dismissively. ‘I watch all the medical programmes on TV…not just the fiction ones but the real ones in real hospitals, too…so needles don’t bother me. Do you want me to hold that bag of water up, too?’
‘That would be great,’ she confirmed. ‘And it’s not just water in there—it’s called saline because it’s had a small amount of salt added to it.’
‘Salt?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why?’
‘Because our bodies don’t work very well if they don’t have the right amount of salt. It causes problems if we eat too much of it, but we also need to have it replaced if we’ve been losing fluids.’
‘Otherwise you can get cramp?’ he suggested brightly. ‘Like I did after last sports day when we were running and got very sweaty when the sun was so hot?’
‘Exactly!’ Maggie exclaimed, keeping up the conversation while her fingers covered as much of Tel’s body as she could reach, searching for any obvious injuries. ‘It’s very similar to that.’
She paused to sit back on her heels, delighted to confirm that, apart from a large goose egg on the back of his head, her young patient didn’t have any obvious cranial injuries. As far as she could tell, the swelling was nothing more than a surface haematoma. If he was lucky, he would wake up with nothing worse than a mammoth headache and suffer from the effects of concussion.
But none of that was as daunting as the enormity of the next task she faced before she could complete her survey of Tel’s injuries. There were an awful lot of rocks that had spilled into the mouth of this cramped tunnel and she was going to have to find out exactly how many of them were pressing down on him to know what the likelihood was that he was in danger of developing crush syndrome. Only then would she dare remove the pressure from Tel’s ribs and legs.
And none of it was going to happen if she just sat here looking at it, she prompted herself. It seemed highly unlikely that Adam and Mike would have cleared enough from the heap by the entrance yet to be joining her any time soon. So that meant it was her job.
‘Jem, are you OK, holding that for a while?’ she asked with a shiver as the dank cold seemed to seep into her bones, suddenly realising that having to shift those rocks might have a good side to it. At least the physical activity would help to warm her up. ‘I need to try to shift a few of these rocks so I can see where this blood’s coming from.’
‘Otherwise all the…the saline will be leaking out again?’ he suggested cheer fully.
‘You’ve got it.’ She smiled across at him, strangely proud that he’d remembered the word she’d taught him, and wondered if that was what life would be like if she had a son of her own.
Unfortunately, the image that flashed into her head was a child with Adam’s dark sapphire eyes and mischievous grin, and she knew that prospect was a complete impossibility. It wouldn’t matter how much she still loved him or how attracted he was to her, she would never break her own code of ethics and sleep with a married man…not unless he was married to her. And that could certainly never be the case with Adam because he was already married to the elegant long-limbed beauty with the curtain of blonde hair that she’d seen in the wedding photo beside his bed.
She gave herself a shake and a silent talking-to for wasting time with painful memories and pointless daydreaming, and reached for the first rock, surprised as ever how very heavy even a relatively small piece of granite could be.
It was fairly easy to shift the smaller stuff that had rolled away from the pile and she quickly cleared a space right down one side of Tel’s body. Unfortunately, that only told her that, battered and bruised as it was, that leg wasn’t the one that was bleeding. It did, however, tell her that the position of the rocks made crush syndrome unlikely, so that was one good point at least.
‘We’re getting there,’ she reassured Jem, conscious that he was following her every move as she reached for one of the larger rocks poised atop the whole heap piled against the wall of the tunnel.
‘Careful!’ Jem called, as she set off a minor avalanche as soon as she gave the rock a tug.
It seemed to take for ever before everything stopped moving and even then there were odd creaks and groans as the debris settled into its new position. ‘What happened?’
‘Are you guys all right?’ demanded an instant chorus at the opening to the tunnel.
‘We’re OK,’ Maggie said when she could draw breath in the dusty atmosphere, knowing they needed reassurance from the only adult in the vicinity. For several very long seconds all she’d been able to imagine was that she was about to be buried alive, and her throat had closed up completely.
‘Jem, can you shine the torch over a bit?’ she asked, hoping they couldn’t hear how much her voice was trembling with gratitude that it had only been a rearrangement of the rocks that were already there and not a fresh fall. It was bad enough that she was down here, having to cope with a lifelong phobia—at least she had the mental reassurance that at any time she had the option of climbing back up the stope to get out. She definitely couldn’t cope if she knew she was trapped down there, like Tel.
Her thoughts suddenly flashed back to that awful afternoon in the London underground when a man and a woman had fallen—or jumped—off the platform into the path of an approaching train.
Maggie had been certain that she wouldn’t be able to deal with squeezing herself between the rails, with the dark smelly bulk of the train just inches above her head, while she tried to staunch the bleeding from the girl’s partially severed arm. Only the fact that Adam had been there, calmly talking her through the whole ordeal, had kept her rational enough to do what had to be done.
Even having Adam with her wouldn’t be able to keep her sane if she were trapped deep underground, so she would just have to get moving and get everyone out as fast as possible. And that meant starting all over again, laboriously clearing the little stones and rocks first, and then tackling the bigger ones until she could find and deal with the injury that was causing Tel’s blood loss.
‘None of the rocks hit you, did they, Jem?’ she asked as she settled into a rhythm for grabbing the next rock and stacking it out of the way against the opposite wall of the tunnel.
‘Nah!’ he said dismissively. ‘But I bet you got a few bruises on your legs. I saw some of them hit you. Are you all right?’
‘I might be all the colours of the rainbow in a day or two,’ she conceded, her breathing becoming slightly laboured with the repetitive effort. Or was it the start of air hunger? a little voice inside her head suggested insidiously. Were they running out of air? Would all of them pass out because there wasn’t enough oxygen to support…?
Enough! she admonished herself silently. Adam and Mike were widening the entrance. There was plenty of air coming in. Concentrate on talking to Jem and moving the rocks to find out where his friend was injured. There wasn’t time to think about anything else. ‘But bruises are quick to heal,’ she continued lightly, ‘especially if you’re reasonably healthy, so it’s not really a problem unless it causes a major bleed.’
‘Anyway, you’re a girl, so you wouldn’t be a haemophiliac, would you?’ he said knowledgeably. ‘We learned about haemophilia when we had a boy in our class who had to be careful that he didn’t fall in the playground and Miss Venning was telling us about the Russian king whose children had it. They got it from our Queen Victoria, didn’t they?’
‘She was a carrier of the condition, I believe,’ Maggie agreed.
‘It always seems odd,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that a woman can give her children a blood disease or…or colour-blindness, without knowing about it because it doesn’t affect her.’ He switched the bag of saline from one hand to the other, and the way he was bracing it against the wall told her that although his arms were obviously beginning to ache, he wouldn’t be complaining. ‘And eye colour is another thing,’ he went on. ‘There’s someone in Mr Tolliver’s class who’s got one blue eye and one brown one. It’s really cool. Mine are just brown, ‘cos both my mum and dad’s were.’
‘Well, mine turned out a mixture of green and brown,’ Maggie volunteered, and found herself wondering pointlessly what colour her children’s eyes would have been if she’d married Adam. She knew that brown was dominant over blue, but would her hazel eye colour have been dominant over his dark sapphire blue or vice versa?
‘Maggie…?’ called a voice in the distance, and even though it was distorted by echoes, her heart recognised it and gave an extra thump.
Adam!
Had he and Mike cleared enough of the entrance already?
Was he on his way down to join her?
Her knees complained when she straightened up enough from her cramped position to call over the mound of rocks that still blocked the entrance to the tunnel.
‘Adam,’ she called back, suddenly guiltily remembering that she’d been going to keep up a running commentary for those left outside. ‘We’re OK.’ Well, that was true up to a point, and it would be even better once she’d finished shifting these rocks and could see where Tel’s injury was.
‘How many injured?’ he shouted—at least, that’s what it sounded like when she’d unscrambled the echoes.
‘Two,’ she yelled back, horrified to find that her exertions had left her panting. She’d honestly thought she was fitter than this. She certainly wouldn’t allow herself to think about her disappointment that he obviously wasn’t on his way down to help her yet. ‘One minor and one major.’
Suddenly, the fact that he was a married man didn’t matter. She was just so grateful that he was there and that he was checking up on her safety that, had he been close enough, she could have thrown herself into his arms without a qualm.
‘Coming out?’ he asked, and she had to take a guess at the first part of the question.
For a second she contemplated the order that things should be done and balanced them against what was possible. She had another bag of saline, but the rate that the first one was emptying meant that it wouldn’t last very long. Then there were the three boys waiting at the bottom of the stope. She certainly couldn’t guarantee how much longer their patience would last, and if they tried to climb that treacherous stepped wall without adequate lighting, there was no knowing how many injuries they could end up with.
‘Five minutes,’ she shouted back, and from the muted cheer from the other lads she knew they had been following the exchange.
‘You’re never going to be able to shift all those rocks in five minutes,’ Jem said a minute later, after she’d resumed her efforts with the slowly diminishing heap. ‘And we can’t just go and leave Tel down here. We can’t!’
‘Jem, I’ve got no intention of leaving Tel down here,’ she said quickly, stricken that he’d been left thinking that it was even a possibility. ‘I’m hoping that I can clear enough rocks away to find out where the blood’s coming from, and stop it. But I’m going to need to fetch some more saline and I’ll need to bring a backboard down to put him on before he can be carried out, so I may as well get the rest of you out of here at the same time. Your parents are probably all waiting up at the mouth of the stope, terrified that they’re never going to see you again.’
‘Oh.’ He subsided, and she saw his grubby forehead pleat in a thoughtful frown before she turned to choose the next rock to pit her puny muscles against. There was just one last big one that, thank fully, had landed between Tel’s legs and had prevented several others from hitting him, but if she tried to move it, she risked setting off another avalanche. But if she could just remove some of the smaller ones and slide her hand in underneath, she might be able to discover whether the bleeding was in the upper or lower half of his leg.
It was closer to ten minutes before she’d achieved her aim and was able to explore the wet proof that the injury was in his lower leg before she realised that her gloves had been totally shredded by her exertions with the rough granite.
‘Damn,’ she muttered under her breath as she quickly pulled her hand out and stared at the evidence. Hopefully, Tel was too young to have any of the more serious blood-borne infections, because the blood coating her scratched and grazed fingers couldn’t help but find plenty of ways into her own system.
Well, she certainly didn’t have any water to spare to wash her hand off and there wasn’t enough time or sterile wipes to do the job, or light enough to see how thorough a job she was doing, so she was just going to have to get on with it and hope for the best.
The fact that his foot was facing in the wrong direction told her that there had been some sort of serious damage to his leg, but until she completed her examination she wouldn’t know whether it was a dislocation of one of the joints—with all the concomitant dangers of impingement of nerve or blood supply, a femoral break—with the danger of life-threatening blood loss, or damage to the tibia or fibula, or both.
She gritted her teeth and slid her hand back between the rocks, only to have to stifle another groan when she felt the obvious evidence that both Tel’s tibia and fibula were broken. At least she could feel that he still had circulation in his foot and his reflexes appeared to be intact. Added to that, it seemed as if the bones were only marginally displaced, so perhaps the bleeding was from the gash on his skin where the rock had impacted to cause the fractures.
Still, his pulse had become steadier and stronger since she’d set up the IV, and with the rocks moved away from his chest his breathing wasn’t being impeded any more, although there were definitely several cracked ribs to worry about when the time came to move him onto a stretcher. The last thing he needed was a punctured lung or, worse yet, damage to his heart.
For now, she’d done everything she could until he either regained consciousness or the rescue team was able to join her down here to shift the rest of the rocks.
‘Right, Jem,’ she said as she straightened up from checking the IV site and showed him how the new pile of rocks she’d been building as she took them away from Tel could just about be used as a temporary support for the second bag of saline. ‘It’s time I got the rest of you out of here. Let’s go.’
‘I’m not going,’ Jem announced with a stubborn expression on his pale face.
‘Jem…’ she began, but he shook his head.
‘I’m not leaving Tel down here all by himself,’ he said firmly. ‘If he wakes up and there’s no one here…no one to tell him that someone knows he’s here and that they’re just making the hole bigger so they can get him out…’
Maggie shuddered at the very thought of waking up to utter darkness with the weight of millions of tons of granite looming over her head, but she could see that there was going to be no changing the youngster’s mind.
It took her a moment to rearrange her thoughts. She wouldn’t dream of leaving Jem in the dark. It had been bad enough thinking about leaving Tel without any light, and he was unconscious.
‘Ok, if that’s what you want…’ She took the torch Adam had lent her and propped it carefully on the heap of stones still partially blocking the entrance to the tunnel. If she positioned it just right, it should light their way up the stope while she and the other three boys were climbing. ‘I’m leaving the torch here with you,’ she said, only just remembering boyish pride in time to add hastily, ‘It would get in my way while I’m helping Chris keep his balance—he can’t use his hand to hold on to anything. I’ll need you to be in charge of it to show me where I’m going on the way back down, too.’
‘I can do that,’ he said,
his voice far steadier than her own as he moved forward a little bit so that he could keep an eye on the torch and the drip at the same time. ‘Just tell me where you want me to point it.’
‘I will,’ she agreed, before clambering over the rocks to join the lads waiting impatiently at the foot of the stope.
‘Maggie…?’ Adam’s voice echoed, the strange reverberations making it seem as if it was coming from several directions at once.
‘Coming,’ she called back, and gestured for the two able-bodied lads to start climbing. ‘Don’t go too fast,’ she cautioned when they began to race up the potentially deadly wall. ‘I might need your help with Chris.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ the injured youngster said bravely, but the expression on his face as he craned his neck to eye the climb he was going to have to make said something else entirely.
‘You probably will, but I’m worried about your hand. I don’t want you to do it any further damage before we can get an X-ray taken,’ she explained as she steadied his elbow for the first, relatively easy step.
By the time they reached the last climb—the step that nearly came up to her shoulder—Maggie was shaking with exhaustion and desperately glad that Jonno and Dwayne were there to help her get Chris up the last hurdle between them and freedom.
‘Don’t run on ahead,’ she warned when they were all on relatively level ground again. ‘There’s a big piece of wood hanging down from the roof and I don’t want any of you to knock your selves out.’
She might as well have saved her breath as far as Dwayne and Jonno were concerned. They could see light at the end of the tunnel…literally…and all they could think of was to get there as soon as possible.
‘Hang on, lads. One at a time,’ said a firm masculine voice up ahead as she matched the slower pace that Chris was forced to adopt so that he didn’t jar his injured hand. ‘It’s taken us a long time to get this entrance shored up. We don’t want you spoiling all our good work in your rush to get out.’
The Doctor's Bride by Sunrise Page 5
