by Sarah Morgan
Ben got to his feet and gave his workmate a confident smile. ‘You know me, Davo, I will remain professional at all times,’ he said, pushing in his chair. ‘It shouldn’t be too hard. I bet she’s short and dumpy and wears thick glasses, just like her pompous, overbearing father.’
David turned from the coffee-machine with a twinkling smile. ‘She must take after her mother, then,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard she’s a bit of a stunner.’
Ben rolled his eyes. ‘Please, God, spare me from another female registrar who is more interested in how they look than how they learn. That girl before Matthew Chan was hopeless. I caught her checking her reflection in a bedpan, for goodness’ sake.’
‘Don’t tell me the notoriously easygoing Ben Blackwood is starting to get a little tough on his registrars,’ David said with a speculative smile. ‘Or is it just female registrars you have a problem with?’
Ben gave him a quelling glance. ‘Look, I couldn’t help it if Phoebe Tatterton developed a ridiculous crush on me. God knows, I did nothing whatsoever to encourage it. She followed me around like a lovesick puppy. It was embarrassing.’
David gave a chuckle of laughter. ‘What you need is another steady girlfriend, mate. What happened to what’s-her-name?’
Ben frowned as he refolded the newspaper. ‘Leila Ingham.’ He brought his nearly empty coffee-cup up to his mouth and added, ‘She decided it was time to find a nine-to-five playmate. I think she’s seeing a schoolteacher now.’
‘Oh, well, you know how it goes—one door shuts and another one opens.’
Ben looked back down at the headlines. ‘Maybe….’
‘Go easy on the registrars, Ben,’ David said into the little silence. ‘They’re still learning. You were the same. Heaven knows, I was.’
‘Yeah, well, my learning experience wasn’t the same, actually,’ Ben said in a weighted tone. ‘I had to work hard to get where I’ve got. I hate it when these young people come in here and expect to be hand-fed all the time and get positive feedback on everything they do, including their stuff-ups. We’re dealing with real people, not computer simulations you can reboot if you knock them off. Why the hell can’t I get someone dedicated working beside me, instead of someone trying to prove something to her father?’
‘You think that’s what this is about?’ David asked.
Ben ran a hand through his dark hair. ‘I don’t know … probably,’ he said. ‘Bevis Willoughby always had it in for me. He was a bastard from the word go. He used to single me out in tutorials, criticise me in front of patients and nurses—he even rejected my thesis research proposal. It was as if he was just hanging out for the boy from the bush to make a mistake.’
‘Yeah, well, we all know what he was like around here,’ David said. ‘Thank God he’s retired. I hated working with him, even though he was a damned good neurosurgeon, technically at least. But you really shouldn’t judge the daughter on his track record. She might be completely different.’
Ben gave a little snort as he picked up his mobile phone from the table. ‘Let’s wait and see,’ he said. Attaching it to his belt, he asked, ‘Are we still on for a cycle in the morning?’
David shook his head. ‘Sorry, mate. I promised I’d get the kids ready for school so Kate can go to her aqua-aerobics class. Do another twenty kilometres for me.’
Ben shouldered open the door with a grin. ‘I’ll do that.’
Georgie rushed back to her car from her early morning gym session, her hair swinging from its high ponytail as she threw her gym bag on the back seat. She glanced at her watch—if the traffic was kind to her she had forty-five minutes to grab a low-fat protein shake and get to the hospital in time for her first list with Mr Blackwood at Sydney Metropolitan Hospital. She was excited and nervous at the same time about her neurological term. It was a busy public hospital but she had heard nothing but positive comments about the staff and cutting-edge facilities.
She drove out of the car park and then realised she had left her mobile phone with the gym receptionist due to the new regulation restricting camera phones in the change rooms.
She parked again in the nearest space on the street and, turning off the engine, flung open the car door. But before she could even swing her legs out there was a loud Thwack and a very rude swear word cut through the air as a cyclist went sprawling from his bike right in front of her.
‘Oh, my God!’ she gasped, and jumped out to his aid. ‘Are you all right?’
The man looked dazed and his arms and legs were bleeding from the scratches he’d received from his fall onto the rough bitumen.
Georgie mentally rehearsed the techniques learnt at the Emergency Management of Severe Trauma course she’d completed the month before. ‘ABCDE—Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Disability, Exposure.’ She mouthed the words as she mentally ran through her priorities. ‘First establish his airway with cervical spine control, then check his respiratory movements, then pulse and BP and stop external haemorrhage, then AVPU neuro assessment, then undress him …’
Yep, airway clear, and he was breathing, she quickly assured herself. She unbuckled and pulled his helmet off and began inspecting the rest of him for injuries.
Ben opened his eyes wide as a touch as light as a feather skated over him. ‘What the hell—?’
‘Remain calm,’ Georgie said reassuringly. ‘I’m a doctor. Don’t you dare move. I’m calling an ambulance.’
‘I don’t need a bloody ambulance, I’m a—’ He frowned even harder. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’
Georgie had already spied the mobile phone on his water-bottle belt, so she quickly took it off, dialled 000 and gave the operator exact instructions as to their location as she went to the boot of her car.
Ben shook his head, trying to get the school of silverfish that were floating past his eyes to disappear. In all the years he’d been cycling he had never once been knocked off by someone opening a car door on him, and it was a Porsche no less. The silly woman hadn’t even looked!
‘The ambulance is two minutes away,’ she said, dropping to her knees beside him with what looked like a doctor’s bag.
He watched as she began to rummage inside it, his eyes widening again as she brought out a hard cervical collar.
‘Hey, I don’t need that!’ he said, trying to back away.
‘It’s a safety precaution,’ she told him. ‘You might have sustained a cervical fracture. You hit the road pretty hard.’
‘Look,’ he began again. ‘I’m fine. I just—’
The sound of a screeching siren cut off the rest of Ben’s words, not to mention the stricture of the collar around his neck. He lay back and grimaced as the young woman rapidly bandaged his scraped knees and elbows with enough bandages to make him feel like an Egyptian mummy instead of one of Sydney’s leading neurosurgeons.
Georgie shone a bright light into his pupils, relieved to find they were both equal and reactive. She couldn’t help noticing what dark blue eyes he had, fringed by long sooty lashes. He had a chiselled leanness to his features, his body toned and tanned, his unshaven jaw adding to his overwhelming maleness.
Focus, she reminded herself sternly. He might be super-fit and super-attractive but right at this moment he was a patient.
She took his arm, applied a tourniquet, and before he could protest through the choking cervical collar she warned him,
‘This will sting a bit,’ and had an IV line into his antecubital fossa just as the ambulance pulled up.
Once the paramedics joined in, Ben gave up protesting. He was placed on a spinal board with a sandbag either side of his neck, had a litre of normal saline running into his arm and an oxygen mask shoved over his face, pouring rubbery dry oxygen into his mouth and nose. After a final feeble attempt at freeing himself, he was loaded into the back of the ambulance, just as the police arrived.
‘It was all my fault,’ he heard the young woman tearfully confess to the officers, as the back door of the ambulance was slammed shut and the siren turned on
.
‘Yep, it certainly was’ Ben mumbled to himself as the vehicle accelerated towards his own hospital.
CHAPTER TWO
‘NOT your usual mode of transport to work,’ Rob Athol, the accident and emergency doctor, remarked dryly as Ben was unloaded from the ambulance. ‘They phoned through and told us you got knocked off your bike. How are you feeling?’
Ben gave him a scowl as he ripped off the oxygen mask and collar. ‘I’m perfectly fine, thank you,’ he said. ‘Some stupid girl flung her car door open on me. I was lucky another car wasn’t coming.’
‘You were lucky she was a doctor,’ Rob commented, as his gaze ran over the bandages on Ben’s arms and legs. ‘It looks like she did a pretty good job on you.’
Ben gave him another furious scowl as he struggled out of the bandages, tossing them in the bin as he went. ‘I’m more than half an hour late for Theatre,’ he growled. ‘And it couldn’t have happened on a worse day. I’ve got a new registrar to train.’
‘You sure you’ll be OK to operate?’ Rob asked, reaching for his ophthalmoscope.
‘Don’t you start,’ Ben said. ‘Besides, I’ve got a full list today. Too many public lists get cancelled as it is, without me adding to them. I’ve got ten patients fasted and all keyed up for their surgery—it’s not right to turn them away just because I took a tumble.’
‘If you’re not up to—’
‘I’m fine, for pity’s sake,’ Ben insisted. ‘I’ve got a bit of gravel rash, that’s all. I bet that girl was straight out of med school, brandishing her new skills on whoever she could. Pity she didn’t think to brush up on her driving skills while she was at it, especially since she was driving a Porsche.’
‘It could have been much worse, Ben,’ Rob said with a sober cast to his expression. ‘At least she stopped to help you. A lot of people these days would have driven off without a backward glance. Remember that teenage patient three weeks ago? I still have nightmares about telling his parents he didn’t make it. It made their ordeal all the harder, having no one stepping up to the plate to take the blame.’
Ben blew out a breath as he finger-combed his hair. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s why this morning rattled me so much. Not only did she stop, this girl was OK to look at, which is some sort of compensation, I suppose.’
Rob’s eyes began to twinkle. ‘So if you met her again, all would be forgiven?’ he asked.
Ben shouldered open the swing doors. ‘She was cute but not that cute,’ he said as he left.
‘Where’s the new registrar?’ Ben asked as he came into Theatre a few minutes later.
‘Not here yet,’ Linda Reynolds, the scrub nurse, said as she set out the instrument tray.
Ben gave cynical grunt. ‘No doubt she’s touching up her make-up.’
Linda raised her brows. ‘You are in a fine mood this morning, Ben. Did you get out of the wrong side of bed or something?’
‘Sorry Lindy,’ he said gruffly. ‘I had a run-in with a car door this morning.’
‘That’s what you get for cycling to work,’ Linda said with a hint of maternal chastisement. ‘Why don’t you drive a BMW or a Mercedes, like all the other neurosurgeons in
Sydney?’
‘You sound like my mother,’ he said with an easy smile. ‘It so happens I wasn’t actually cycling to work. I planned to go home and shower and shave and drive back in my ute but I ran out of time.’
The patient was wheeled in and he continued, ‘Come on, we’d better get started. I’m not going to wait around for the registrar to turn up.’ He looked up at the anaesthetist assigned to his list that morning. ‘Things OK your end, Matt?’
‘Yes, Ben. I’ve got all the lines in, and we’re ready to induce.’
Ben took the hand of the thirty-five-year-old woman as she was transferred from the trolley to the operating table.
‘Hello, Mrs Patonis. You’ve had a long wait to get into hospital but here you are now. Everything should be fine—we’ll resect that meningioma, and hopefully stop those headaches and improve that weakness,’ he reassured her.
‘Thanks, Mr Blackwood. I’ve waited nearly a year to get in,’ Maria Patonis said. ‘Do you think I’ll be able to take up my golf again?’
‘Maybe,’ he said, touching her arm briefly. ‘Let’s just stop the damage first, and take things a step at a time. I’ll see you after the surgery in Recovery.’
Georgie could feel her stomach churning and twisting with nerves as she ran up the stairs to the operating theatre floor. Turning up late was a no-no in any workplace, but in a busy public hospital, where every minute was so precious, it was not going to win her any favours with the staff. To make things worse, this was her first list on her new term of neurosurgery. Although from what she’d heard, Ben Blackwood was a very approachable and supportive neurosurgeon, she didn’t want to push her luck by getting off to a bad start with him.
She did the preliminary scrub and then gowned and entered the theatre just as the consultant neurosurgeon looked up from the now anaesthetised patient, his dark blue eyes meeting hers.
‘Oh my … God,’ she gulped, her stomach dropping.
‘You must be Georgiana Willoughby,’ Linda said, when Ben didn’t say a word. ‘Welcome to the unit.’
‘Er … thank you.’ Georgie mumbled. Grimacing, she added weakly, ‘Sorry I—I’m late … I had a bit of an accident …’
‘How nice that you could make it to join us in spite of your … er … little accident,’ Ben said with an unreadable look. ‘How about you come over here and draw out where you think the skull flap should be made.’
Georgie bit her lip as she shuffled over. ‘I—I can’t say I’m totally sure, Mr Blackwood. This is my first neurosurgical term.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Ben said. ‘But the best way to learn is on-the-job experience. So just draw where you think it should go, and we’ll correct it if it’s a bit off.’
Georgie drew a curved line over the right parietotemporal region of the shaved scalp with a purple marking pen, trying to keep her hands steady under the watchful midnight-blue gaze trained on her.
Wasn’t he going to say something? she wondered. Surely he wasn’t going to let such an incident pass without a comment or two. As coincidences went, it was up there with the spookiest, which no doubt her flatmate would insist was the celestial forces at work.
Georgie concentrated on the purple line she was drawing and thought about how relieved she was to see he was all right. More than relieved actually. She had been preparing herself for a jail term for negligent driving, although strictly speaking she hadn’t been driving so—
‘That’s pretty good really,’ he interrupted her wandering thoughts. ‘We just need to make it a bit bigger to make access easier, but the shape and position are fine.’
Georgie felt her shoulders go down in relief. ‘Thanks …’
‘I’ll show you how I like to position, prep and drape for a parietal craniotomy. From then on, I’d like you to set the patient up,’ he said.
She watched as he showed her how to position the skull in a head ring and stabilise it in position with braces attached to the sides of the operating table.
Once they had both re-scrubbed and gowned for surgery, Ben showed her how to prep the scalp with Betadine and then drape the skull with adhesive drapes, leaving the operating area exposed.
‘Now, if you can make the incision, Dr Willoughby, I’ll show you how to control the scalp bleeding with clips. Make the incision down to the periosteum,’ he directed.
Georgie made the incision along the pre-marked line, and Ben showed her how to apply stainless-steel clips along the length of the incision to control the bleeding.
‘I’ll make the first burr-hole,’ Ben said as he was handed the air-powered burr, ‘and you can do the second, but I’ll guide your hand to prevent you from inadvertently pushing too hard.’
Georgie held her breath as his gloved hands came over hers, the strength in his finge
rs making her stomach and legs go all wobbly. She could smell the warmth of his body, the hint of musky perspiration, not unpleasant but instead disturbingly attractive.
He was not as old as she’d been expecting. It was daft of her really but she was so used to her father’s generation of neurosurgical colleagues that she hadn’t factored in the possibility that she would be working alongside a man in his early to mid-thirties. It was hard to tell his exact age but she reasoned he’d have to be at least thirty-four or -five to have completed his training and developed the reputation he had for research.
Georgie also hadn’t realised that morning, when he’d been sprawled on the road, how very tall he was. She had vaguely registered his long legs and arms as she had tended to his injuries earlier, but standing so close to him now she could feel his broad chest against her shoulder, which meant he must be more than six feet, possibly three or four inches over, at the very least.
She had, however, noticed his jet-black hair when she’d taken his helmet off and the olive tan of his skin, not to mention the toned muscles of his lean body that suggested he was more than a casual exerciser, which was impressive really when she considered the long hours he worked.
Georgie still couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t yet referred to their accidental meeting that morning. She had seen some speculative looks coming from the scrub nurse from time to time, but he had remained totally focussed on the patient, his movements steady and controlled, his voice and manner giving no clue as to what had transpired between them a little over an hour ago.
She gave herself a quick mental shake and brought her attention back to the operation where Ben was showing her how to incise the dura without damaging the underlying brain, and within a few minutes the meningioma was exposed.
Removal of the benign tumour seemed very straightforward, although Georgie could see that this was because of Ben’s skill and experience, not because the procedure was easy—he just seemed to make it look that way. Within an hour the skull flap had been turned back, the scalp stapled and the head dressed.
Ben stripped off his gloves and tossed them into the bin as he turned to face the new registrar once the rest of the routine list was over. ‘I would like a few words with you in my office.’
