‘Helped you? In what way?’
His dark eyes met hers shyly. ‘I wasn’t much good at school…I got suspended a few times, then expelled. Mum didn’t have the money to pay for the bus to send me to Jandawarra or some place else. So I just bummed around, trying to do odd jobs.’ He looked away again. ‘When I went to prison I couldn’t read and write. I’d always thought I was dumb. But then the education officer helped me. Now I can read and write. I finished my high school education.’
‘That’s wonderful, Noel. What an achievement.’
His mouth moved upwards in what could almost be described as a smile. ‘I went on and did some other certificates and stuff…computers and that sort of thing. Mum…she’s proud I didn’t turn out like my father.’
‘Is your father still alive?’
He shook his head. ‘No, he died just before I turned sixteen. He couldn’t handle the drink…He’d go crazy on it—’ he gave a small grimace ‘—more than crazy, once. Down at Jandawarra, he got into a fight at the pub and stabbed a bloke. Wasn’t seriously injured, but one of his friends came after my father and stabbed him to death behind the rubbish bins.’
‘That’s terrible…’ she said. ‘That must have been so difficult for you at such a young age.’
He released a small sigh. ‘I reckon if he hadn’t got stabbed that night he would have come home and laid into my mum big time. He did that a lot. I tried to stop him a few times but…’ He let the sentence hang, as if recalling the memory was too painful.
In spite of his criminal background Holly couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. She’d seen studies about abuse and violence in childhood which had clearly shown that such an environment was a breeding ground for future criminal behaviour. It took a special person to rise above it and choose another pathway from that modelled by their parents or primary caregivers.
Noel Maynard had had everything against him from the start. He was a full-blood Aboriginal who had grown up during a time when racism was rife in the community, especially one as small and parochial as Baronga Beach. He’d had a drunk and violent father and, after his father’s brutal death, a disrupted education. He’d been a prison statistic waiting to happen, and it had happened—tragically. And not just for him but for the girl he had murdered and her still-grieving and angry family and friends, not to mention his own elderly mother, who must have suffered terribly in such a closed-minded town such as this.
‘I don’t want to take up too much of your time,’ he said, shifting nervously in his seat. ‘I’m in pretty good health apart from the copper thing. I’ll just get my script and get back to Mum.’
‘Sure, Noel. Yes, a script.’ Holly reached for her prescription pad and began filling it in. ‘But I’d like you to come back and see me in a few days. I’d like to go through your notes to familiarise myself with your case and I’d also like to run a couple of blood tests on you to—’
‘No blood tests.’
She looked up at him in surprise at the sudden vehemence in his tone. His eyes were wide with fear and he’d pushed himself out of his chair as if uncertain whether she was going to jab him right then and there.
‘You don’t like needles?’ She hazarded a guess, having seen a similar reaction too many times to count in her short time as a GP.
He gave a visible shudder. ‘I don’t have anything to do with needles. Ever.’
Holly wondered how best to deal with this, tapping her fingers on the desk beside the pathology form she’d reached for.
‘Listen, Noel. You should at the least have your sugar and cholesterol done. If it’s any reassurance to you, I’m known to have a good strike rate at getting the vein first go and—’ She stopped mid-sentence when he sprang out of his seat and thumped the desk with his hand, his dark eyes spitting chips of rage at her.
‘I told you—no needles.’
Holly swallowed as she leaned as far as she could back in her own seat, her stomach churning in fear. The sudden wildness in his dark eyes was frightening, as if he would do anything to stop her from taking blood from him and not regret it for a moment.
‘It’s all right…’ She pushed the pad away with a shaking hand. ‘No blood tests.’ She took a calming breath but it did little to dispel her fear. ‘Please sit down…Noel. It’s all right, I won’t take blood.’
‘Sorry…’ he mumbled as he resumed his seat, his anger disappearing as if it had never been. ‘It happens every time…I can’t control my reaction. I just can’t stand the thought of a needle in my arm.’
Holly looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. Aaron had told her IV drug use was rife in prison, especially amongst long-serving inmates, and yet here was a convicted murderer who clearly had no stomach for it. She wondered what he’d seen while serving his sentence—perhaps he’d seen the damage drugs could do and so had avoided them.
‘You really do have a full-blown phobia about needles, don’t you?’
He gave her a quick glance and stared back at his hands. ‘Not just needles. I just don’t like the sight of blood, my own or anyone else’s.’
Holly wanted to ask him if he’d felt the same revulsion when he’d strangled and stabbed Tina Shoreham, but she decided it wasn’t safe to do so. On the surface he appeared to be a nervous and shy man in his early forties, but she’d seen the flash of rage that had lit his eyes from behind when he thought she was going to insist on taking blood.
You are sitting less than three feet away from a man who killed a sixteen-year-old girl, a voice in her head reminded her. He could reach out right here and now and squeeze the life out of your throat before you could even call out for help.
Holly forced herself to remain calm and professional but still her stomach fluttered with unease and her heart seemed to be trying to make its way out of the wall of her chest every time Noel Maynard so much as shifted a millimetre in his chair.
‘Th-there are programmes you can do,’ she said into the silence that had fallen heavily. ‘Desensitisation programmes that allow sufferers of all sorts of phobias to get on with their lives without the reaction you’re having now. Would you like me to organise something for you?’
He shook his head. ‘No…I don’t have a driver’s licence yet so I can’t drive to any appointments. And anyway, I have to look after Mum.’
‘How did you get here?’ she asked, knowing the only bus in town was the school bus and, as it was the summer holiday, even that wasn’t running at present.
‘I rode my mother’s bicycle to town,’ he said. ‘It’s not too flash but it gets me around.’
‘Does your mother have a car?’
‘No. But I’m going to get some work and buy one so I can take her places.’
Holly wasn’t sure that he was going to have too much success finding employment judging by Karen’s reaction to the news he was back in town. If the receptionist’s reaction was any indication of the rest of the town’s feeling, Noel Maynard was in for a hard time ahead, even if a small part of her felt he deserved it for what he’d done all those years ago.
‘I’d still like you to come back and see me next week,’ Holly said. ‘Or perhaps you’d prefer to see Dr McCarrick instead?’
The flash of anger made a brief reappearance in his dark eyes when they met hers. ‘If I don’t get an appointment with you I won’t be seeing anyone else.’
‘Have you met Dr McCarrick?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t have anything to do with male doctors any more.’
‘I see…’ Holly wondered what had happened to make him so adamant about seeing her and only her. She knew all about cavity searches from what Aaron had briefly told her. She also knew that not all prison doctors acted with the same professional code that people on the outside expected.
‘Since you don’t want to have a blood test, how about a urine test instead?’ she suggested. ‘We can do quite a few health-type checks on urine.’
Noel appeared to think about it for a moment. ‘All right. I gu
ess I can do that.’
She handed him a urine specimen container and directed him to the men’s bathroom, advising him to leave the container with the receptionist on his way out of the clinic.
He gave a silent nod of agreement and, clutching the container, gave her one last unreadable look and left the consulting room.
Holly let out a sigh of relief as the door closed on his exit. Apprehension had crawled all over her skin the whole time he’d been sitting there, observing her with those dark eyes. Dark eyes that twenty-five years ago had watched a girl take her last breath while his hands had been around her slender throat.
She suppressed a little shiver and, swinging her seat around to face her desk, her eyes fell to the brown file of notes in front of her. The pages were yellowed with age, dry and crackling, as she turned through them page by page. The doctor’s handwriting was almost impossible to read in places but she could see that Noel had been brought in by his father as a small child with a burst eardrum, for which Dr Cooper had prescribed antibiotic drops. The writing became more difficult to read on the next few pages and, because she was aware there were still patients in the waiting room, she closed the file and put it to one side to read more thoroughly later.
Just then the intercom on her desk buzzed and Karen’s voice came through urgently. ‘Holly, we have an emergency coming in. Cameron’s still tied up in the nursing home. You’d better come out and get started until he gets back.’
CHAPTER FIVE
HOLLY rushed out to reception to find a man had just arrived with his left arm wrapped in a dirty piece of fabric, blood dripping all over the floor.
‘I’ve cut my arm with a chain-saw,’ he gasped, swaying on his feet.
She led him through to the emergency room next door, doing her best to calm him as she asked him his name.
‘Jack Gordon,’ he responded. ‘Where’s Dr McCarrick?’
‘It’s all right; I’ll soon have you sorted out. How did it happen, Mr Gordon?’
‘I was trimming a fence post…and the saw bounced off the barbed wire on to my arm…’ His face drained even further of colour.
She helped him on to the procedure bed as Valerie Dutton appeared. ‘I need a firm bandage to control this bleeding,’ Holly said.
‘Where’s Dr McCarrick?’ Valerie asked.
‘This needs attending to now,’ Holly insisted. ‘I can’t wait around for Dr McCarrick to show up. Pass me a crêpe bandage and get me a large bore canula and warm normal saline, stat. Get Karen to organise an ambulance for immediate transfer to Jandawarra for definitive treatment. Is there another nurse to help me stabilise the patient?’
‘I’ll call for Jenny Drew.’
Holly reinforced the ragged wound dressing with a crêpe bandage over the top. She was more than a little relieved that she could remember her EMST primary survey, even if she hadn’t confidently demonstrated it in her practical exam a few months before—A, B, C–C–circulation with haemorrhage control.
She inserted a large bore canula into the undamaged arm and started running in a litre of warm normal saline full bore, doing her best to keep calm and in control, at least on the outside.
She’d done a term in A&E but she’d never been personally responsible for managing a major injury before—she’d always just observed as more senior doctors took control. Now, for the first time, with no warning and no support, she was in the firing line, directly responsible for the care of a significantly injured patient. The amount of blood Jack Gordon had lost was worrying—he looked pale, was becoming slightly confused and was cold and clammy.
She administered five milligrams of IV morphine, two grams of penicillin IV and took blood for cross-match, addressing Valerie as she returned from organizing the ambulance call. ‘Get Jenny Drew to check the fridge for O negative blood. And Valerie, get me a suture tray stat, and gown and gloves.’
Holly applied a tourniquet to the man’s left arm above the bandages while Valerie set up the instruments. She uncovered the wound to find a deep ragged laceration through the front of the elbow, clearly severing the brachial artery, the accompanying veins and possibly the median nerve.
‘We have to transfer you to Jandawarra, Mr Gordon,’ she addressed the ashen-faced patient. ‘You’ve severed the main artery to your arm and it needs to be repaired within about an hour, otherwise you could lose the arm. I’m going to re-bandage the laceration to control the bleeding again, cool the arm with ice packs and release the tourniquet periodically to let in any blood from collateral circulation briefly without letting you bleed out.’
‘Just sew the thing up!’ Mr Gordon slurred roughly. ‘I’ve got another fence to finish before nightfall.’
Holly gave him an incredulous look. ‘You can’t possibly do any such thing, Mr Gordon. If we don’t get this seen to as soon as possible you’ll be fencing for the rest of your life with a stump instead of a limb.’
He gave her glassy-eyed look and growled, ‘Where’s Cameron McCarrick? I want his opinion. You look too young to be a doctor, anyway. Nurse! Get me the proper doctor. Nurse!’
‘Listen, Mr Gordon.’ Holly injected her tone with steel. ‘You have lost a lot of blood and are in no fit state to—’
‘Well, if it isn’t Jack Gordon causing trouble again,’ drawled Cameron as he sauntered in. ‘What have you done this time? Cut off your arm?’
‘He’s got a deep laceration to his—’ Holly began.
‘He looks like he’s in shock. Have you called for blood?’ Cameron asked as he inspected the wound.
She ground her teeth and bit out, ‘Yes.’
‘How far away is the ambulance?’ he asked the nurse.
‘Could be over an hour getting here, then two hours to town.’
‘Call for patient airlift instead,’ he said, donning gloves and goggles and reapplying the tourniquet. ‘I want him in Sydney, not Jandawarra. This needs microsurgery. You’d better call and warn them at the receiving hospital. St George is closest with that facility.’
Jenny Drew returned with two units of O negative blood.
‘Holly, attach one of those to your IV, run it in stat, then the other. And, by the way, didn’t they teach you in your EMST course to wear eye protection when dealing with trauma? Jack here could be Hep C positive for all you know. An eye splash could finish your career right here and now,’ Cameron pointed out as he finished firmly bandaging the arm and removed the tourniquet. ‘Jenny, check the obs, please.’
‘Pulse one hundred, BP 120/70, Dr McCarrick.’
‘Good, he needs continued IV resuscitation but he seems stable at the moment. Pain OK, Jack?’
‘What pain, Doc? Do I have to go to Sydney? You’re here now. You can fix it.’
‘Sydney for sure, Jack. Sorry. Your arm needs to be put back together again—you need a full-blown surgeon and operating theatre. You won’t be chain-sawing for a couple of months.’
Holly waited until the airlift team had taken Jack Gordon away before she turned to face Cameron. ‘I’d like a word with you.’
‘I’m already late for my clinic,’ he said.
‘What I have to say won’t take more than a minute or two.’
‘Save it, Holly. I have a full list of patients who’ve already been waiting well over an hour.’
‘I didn’t think it was appropriate of you to take over my handling of Mr Gordon. You made me look as if I didn’t know what I was doing.’
‘Did you know what you were doing?’ he asked.
She stiffened. ‘Of course I did! I controlled the bleeding, administered fluids and pain relief and organised for immediate transfer.’
‘To the wrong hospital. Jandawarra is almost two hours away, far too late to have saved that arm even if there had been someone qualified there to perform microsurgery, which there isn’t.’
‘How was I to know that?’
‘You should have asked.’
Holly bit her lip. ‘All right…so there’s no doubt I need to learn some local
knowledge, but my basic medical skills are good and I don’t think it’s fair to criticise those, especially in front of patients and staff and especially when it’s not warranted.’
Cameron scraped a hand through his hair as he looked down at her. Maybe she was right. He was being a bit hard on her. She’d only started that morning and it was undoubtedly a big change coming here from a city hospital. But her imperious manner had got under his skin from the start, reminding him a little too much of his ex-fiancée, Lenore. Holly’s flashy red sports car and designer clothes all spoke of an attitude to life he had no time for.
But she had agreed to work here, which he knew from experience was more than a lot of newly qualified doctors would do. He could tell it wasn’t exactly her first preference but he would have to make the best of it until someone else came along.
‘Look, let’s just get on with the day’s work and in future if you’re not sure about anything just ask me, right?’ he said.
‘Fine.’ She gave him a resentful scowl as she made to brush past. ‘That’s if I can find you.’
‘I told you I had to see a patient in the nursing home. I thought it was going to be a quick check-up but I ended up having to speak to the relatives about palliative care. Karen could have put you through to the extension or you could have called me on my mobile. I have it on me at all times. Hasn’t she given the number to you?’
‘I think she must have forgotten to. By the time she showed me around this morning the patients had already started arriving.’
‘Here.’ He handed her a card with his name, email address and contact numbers on it.
Holly took the card from him, her fingers brushing against his. She looked down at the card rather than meet his eyes, wondering why her stomach was doing a fluttery sort of dance all of a sudden.
‘Holly.’
She slowly raised her eyes to his. ‘Y-yes?’
His blue-green eyes seemed to hold hers for an interminable pause before he finally spoke. ‘Karen told me Noel Maynard had booked in to see you today. I take it she filled you in on his history?’
A Doctor Beyond Compare Page 5
