Christmas Angels

by Nadine Dorries

  Just as she was about to leave, she remembered that she had one more call to make, to the priest’s house. She would call herself, just to make sure he knew the urgency of the situation. In a trice she was out of the back door and stepping into the dark, damp entry. She nipped back into the phone box on her way to St Angelus and had a brief conversation with Father Brennan’s housekeeper, who informed her that he was not at home. She impressed upon her that it was a matter of life and death and then she hurried on along the cobbles and up to the hospital.

  The ward was in darkness when she arrived. The red night lights cast an eerie glow and as she walked up the stairs she noticed that PC Norman Bartlett’s black uniform both absorbed and reflected the light as he sat at the entrance to the ward.

  He jumped to his feet when he heard her footsteps. ‘Who might you be?’ he asked, one hand flying to his leather truncheon-holster as he spoke.

  ‘I’m Sister Emily Haycock,’ she replied as she moved the basket handle from one hand to two and held it out in front.

  Basket met truncheon. Basket won and Norman’s hand flew to his helmet as he raised it in acknowledgement.

  ‘Matron has asked me to call over and check on baby Louis. We’ve sent for the priest, Father Brennan. Has he arrived yet?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Sister.’ Norman replaced his helmet. ‘No, no priest. But that doesn’t sound good, does it?’

  Emily looked down. She would never discuss the condition of a patient with anyone, not even a police officer, not without good reason. ‘Well, we will see,’ she said. ‘If Father Brennan does arrive, just send him into the cubicle, would you please.’

  Norman almost laughed out loud. ‘Father Brennan? You’ll be lucky. He’s usually asleep in his cups by now. Speak to him yourself, did you? Loves a bit of the Irish, does the father.’

  Emily turned towards the door. ‘He will be here,’ she said, with more confidence than she felt.

  As she opened the ward doors she was greeted by the familiar sight of the night nurses gathered around the large wooden table in the bay at the bottom of the ward. This was where they always sat at this time of night, when the children had been settled, the medicine round finished and the sluice and clean utility tidied. The dirty laundry would have been packed into the wicker basket on wheels at the end of the ward, ready for collection by the porter’s lad, who would replace it with a basket full of clean linen. Breakfast trays had been laid up by the auxiliary in the kitchen ready for the morning. In the pristine milk kitchen, bottles of feed stood lined up on the marble shelf for use during the night. Each had a chart next to it, ready to be completed and placed back on the end of the cot by the nurse who gave the feed.

  The fire in the grate cast a halo around the bay and Emily could make out the white caps bobbing around. She looked up at the clock. They would be finishing their reports now and enjoying a cup of tea. The ward was still and quiet. Emily had always loved nights on children’s ward. The large ward windows that looked out on to nothing but the black night outside; the stillness and the calm; the hushed footsteps and the sound of snuffled snores drifting on the air. Maybe it was because she thought she would never have children of her own; or perhaps it was that in the sleeping faces of the little boys she would see those of her late brothers, Richard and Harry.

  Emily thought children’s ward was special, but she’d loved working nights on adult wards too. She was especially attentive if she found a patient who was unable to sleep, perhaps worrying about work, home, their family or their children. She would make them a cup of tea and, breaking all the rules, would sit on the bed and chat through their concerns in the small hours, the time when demons plagued patients the most. It worked every time – on her next round the patient would always be fast asleep, totally oblivious to her creeping up with the torch and collecting the empty cup and saucer.

  Emily smiled at the sound of the night nurses’ hushed chatter and the sight of the auxiliary nurse in her daffodil-yellow uniform lifting her knitting out of a bag and settling herself into one of the large leather visitors’ chairs. She knew that baby Louis would be in cubicle one and so, not wanting to disturb the others or force them to do anything different because she was on the ward, she slipped into the cubicle with her basket.

  ‘Oh, hello, Sister Haycock.’ Newly qualified Night Staff Nurse McGee jumped to her feet. She was clearly taken aback by Emily’s sudden arrival.

  ‘Hello,’ Emily replied. ‘Matron knows I am here, and the priest has been called.’

  Staff Nurse McGee blessed herself. ‘Oh, thank goodness. I was going to call Night Sister and make just that suggestion.’

  ‘No improvement then?’

  ‘None. Sister Paige fed him half-strength milk down the nasogastric tube every ten minutes this afternoon. He even had a drip up, but it was useless. It’s as if he doesn’t want to wake up. He’s also burning up, all over. His pulse and respirations are fast. The poor thing has nothing to fight with. He’s very, very poorly.’

  Emily placed her basket on the floor. ‘Baby clothes,’ she said by way of explanation.

  The night staff nurse smiled. ‘I know it sounds daft, but I was just thinking of giving him a bit of a wash. Night Sister told me not to take his clothes off though, and to keep him warm, but he’s boiling up as it is. He still smells a bit and I thought that maybe it would cool him down, and the stimulation might do something. Get the blood flowing, you know? But I don’t know, maybe I’m just being fanciful.’

  Emily was bent over the cot, looking at baby Louis. Turning to the staff nurse, she smiled and began to undo the knot of the headscarf tied under her chin. ‘Not at all. That sounds like a jolly good idea to me.’ And then she dropped her voice to the lowest whisper. ‘Night Sister can be a bit old-fashioned about these things. What harm can it do? My own theory, and I teach this in the school now, is that if we can bring the temperature down using damp sponges, then the aspirin has a fighting chance at keeping it down. We are asking a lot otherwise, and nothing else appears to be working. It’s too late to worry about him getting sick. Why hasn’t he got a steam tent?’

  Staff Nurse looked embarrassed and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe because he’s a “no further treatment” baby? Although Dr Mackintosh said his breathing isn’t too bad yet, and he’s right, he does seem to be managing, it’s just the awful high temperature.’

  Emily breathed in sharply. She had nursed premature babies in her day and been instructed to hang a sign on the cot they were laid in, LTP – Leave To Perish, and that had tested her resolve to the extreme. Seeing a breathing baby on maternity, wheeled into the sluice room without the warmth of its mother’s arms around it, the mother already having been told her baby had died, had been very hard to deal with. But she was as shocked as anyone that the decision had been taken and applied to a six-month-old. ‘Look, have you had your break yet?’

  Staff Nurse stuttered her reply. ‘Oh… no… but I’m not bothered really.’

  ‘Well, tell you what, you fetch me a bowl of nice warm water and a bath trolley and then you go and tell the others that I am in here for the night now and then you can all have your breaks.’

  Staff Nurse knew better than to argue with Sister Haycock, and without another word she slipped out of the cubicle and into the sluice room to do exactly as she had been ordered.

  Emily picked up the charts at the end of the cot and saw that Louis had been given the feed of watered-down milk just five minutes earlier. Removing the cloth draped over the jug, she sniffed the solution and noted the syringe ready to be attached to the thin orange rubber tube snaking out of baby Louis’s nostril and pinned to the nightgown he was wearing. She slipped her hands under his burning back and head and lifted him as gently as it was possible to do. His bony form felt like a small bag of kindling; the only part of his body to weigh anything at all was his skull.

  Sitting down carefully, she began cradling Louis in her arms, just as Staff Nurse pushed the trolley through the door. ‘Thank
you,’ she whispered. ‘Off you go and have your break now and then take charge back from the student nurse. Tell her she is relieved. I will stay in here for the night. Matron will have informed Night Sister I’m here, so she may just pop in to say hello later.’

  Emily was letting her know in the nicest way possible that just because she would be trapped in the cubicle, the night nurses would still be monitored on the ward.

  As Staff Nurse left the cubicle, Emily felt the heat from baby Louis seeping into her side through her dress. Her nostrils filled with the stale odour of vomited milk and sleeping child. One thing was sure, baby Louis would spend the entire night in her arms, not in the cot. She was the sister in charge of Louis for the following ten hours and she would look after him her way. If they were making it up as they went along, why shouldn’t she? Hadn’t the child spent enough time without knowing the warmth of a mother or even another human being next to him? Judging by the state of his skin and hair and the bed sores on his back and ankles, it had been far too long.

  She half stood, crouching over the baby with her body as if to protect him, and picked up a towel from the bath trolley. Laying it across her knee like she would a napkin in a restaurant, with great tenderness she set Louis down on her lap and removed the hospital gown. Despite herself, she gasped at the sight of his skeletal form and distended belly. His nappy, as dry as a bone, had been folded into four in order to fit him, but it still hung halfway down his legs. Emily undid the large blue-topped safety pin. The thick nappy raised the bottom half of Louis’s body and legs almost clear of Emily’s lap, allowing the heat to escape.

  She stood up and as she carried him to the trolley she had a brainwave. He was so tiny that instead of just washing him she could actually bathe him in the enamel bowl. She dipped her elbow into the water – the temperature was perfect. Checking that the baby soap and towel were within easy reach, she slipped Louis into the water, supporting him with one arm while using the other to wash him down with the translucent brown Pears baby soap that Sister Paige had chosen to use on this ward.

  She massaged his warm soapy limbs and scooped the water over what hair he had. She could see it was working as the water, even in the night light, was turning murky, and, more importantly, as it trickled down his limbs, his body began to cool down as the water in the bowl warmed.

  For the briefest second, she froze as she thought she saw the stiffening of his little legs and sensed the slightest tension in his tiny shoulders as they pushed against her hand. But then his cooled and flaccid form flopped from side to side in the crook of her arm. Her mind was playing tricks, imagining things – it was what she had wanted to happen, she had almost willed it.

  But Emily could definitely feel the life flowing through his veins; she could feel him struggling to survive. He was not closing down, had not died yet. She refused to believe he would not last the night if he was cradled and given the love he had been missing so far. She would will all the love she held for him to flow straight from her heart to Louis’s and pray that somehow this poorly child would understand that he was wanted. That they – Matron and the staff of St Angelus – were on his side, fighting desperately, each and every one involved in the plan to defy the doctor’s orders, for his survival. She quickly sat down with him in her arms and patted his skin with the towel. Rubbing with long strokes across his limbs, bringing his blood to the surface to cool. She reached over and took the thermometer that staff nurse had placed on the bath trolley in a kidney dish of diluted Dettol and shook the mercury down with two swift flicks of the wrist. Lifting his legs by the ankles, she gently inserted it into his anus. She had no fob watch to count down the minute and so with her free hand, she stroked his arm and guessed the time instead. His temperature had plummeted and was now within normal limits. Emily smiled, happy knowing that the aspirin could now do its work and the chances of him keeping down and absorbing his feed were greatly enhanced. She drew up the milky solution into the syringe and, removing the rubber bung on the end of the nasogastric tube, made to insert the feed.

  ‘We are flying by the seat of our pants here, Louis, but this is hardly brain surgery,’ she whispered. She decided to increase his dose to eight fluid ounces. ‘You’ve been tolerating four for three hours now.’

  Emily was sure that if Sister Paige were there, she would agree. They were doing what nurses sometimes had to do, often on instinct alone, when they felt that someone was worth fighting for even though the doctors had long since given up. But defying orders was a serious risk – they could lose their jobs. In such cases, it was absolutely essential that they made the right call and won.

  She slowly injected the syringe into the nasogastric tube. It was as if Louis was sleeping deeply and contentedly as he neither stirred nor made a sound. Emily fixed her eyes on his chest and tried to count his respirations as it moved up and down. They were slower now than they had been before his bath. She placed her fingers on his wrist and although his pulse was too fast to count without the aid of her fob watch, it felt less thready. Did she dare think that it felt stronger?

  She had noted that the streptomycin had been given throughout the day and would be due again at midnight, ground up in a solution and passed into the tube at the same time as a dose of dispersible aspirin. That’s one stat dose of streptomycin when he was brought in and four on the ward over the day, she mused. If it’s going to have any impact at all, we should begin to see something soon. She looked hopefully down at the form in her arms, but there was nothing, no sign of waking or moving. Wherever Louis was, it was far away.

  Wasting no time, Emily lifted a clean nappy from the trolley, then leant down to reach into the basket at the side of her. From the clothes Maisie had supplied, she extracted a lemon matinee coat but then put it back down again. She would leave him loosely covered in the towel and his limbs exposed in order that the heat could evaporate. If Night Sister called in, she would be horrified, but Emily was driven by her instinct that the old way of keeping babies and children with a temperature wrapped up, was a dangerously wrong thing to do. Instead, she lifted out of the basket a crocheted baby blanket to lay him on, which Emily guessed had probably once been wrapped around Nurse Pammy Tanner.

  Within minutes she was sitting with him huddled into her chest, her arms firmly circled around him, and his back, arms and legs exposed to the air and still cool to the touch.

  Staff Nurse popped her head around the door with a cup of tea in her hand and two biscuits perched on the plate. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked. ‘Oh, goodness me, would you look at him! He looks better already. He has a bit of colour.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Emily, feeling secretly pleased with herself. Being director of the school of nursing meant that she missed the day-to-day contact with patients, and that had always been the part of the job that she had loved the most. ‘It’s so hard to tell in here. I think it’s just because he’s clean. You can see the colour of his skin now. Would you take the bath trolley out for me, please? I didn’t want to leave him.’ She was embarrassed, apologetic. One of the rules of the school of nursing was that you always cleared up your own mess and never expected someone else to clean your trolley away, no matter how senior you might be.

  ‘Sure, of course I will.’ Staff Nurse kicked off the brake, grabbed the trolley with both hands and began to wheel it towards the door. ‘I’ll leave you to explain to Night Sister why he isn’t covered up if she calls in.’ She winked as she spoke, something she would never have done had they been on day duty. The night brought with it an air of informality. Status was forgotten until the dawn came. ‘Are you not going to put him back in the cot?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m going to keep him in my arms, something I’m guessing he’s not used to. No sign of Father Brennan then?’

  Staff Nurse opened the cubicle door to remove the trolley. ‘None at all, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope we don’t need him. I’m going to settle myself in the comfy nursing chair with this l
ittle one after his next tube feed. I’ve upped the dose.’

  ‘Good on you, I was thinking that too. He’s not passed urine, which is not a good sign, is it…’

  Emily smiled and held up the damp towel. ‘He has now,’ she said as she revealed a small dark-brown stain. ‘Pass me a nappy from that trolley before you take it, please.’ She felt a surge of excitement run through her, and yet she had only been with this child for half an hour. His kidneys were working and that was a new vital sign of life they could pin their hopes on, a justification of their defiance.

  Staff Nurse grinned and handed one over. ‘Don’t you move. I’ll pass you a soapy cloth and the zinc and castor oil cream. That looks quite concentrated, it will burn his skin.’

  Five minutes later, Emily was settled back in the nursing chair. The lights were off and apart from the faint chatter and the clatter of metal knitting needles, the ward was almost silent. She strained to hear the sound of Louis’s breathing and gently brushed her fingers across the delicate papery skin on his shoulders and along the back of his neck.

  The clock on St Chad’s struck ten and Emily bent her head and kissed the top of Louis’s head. ‘Do you hear that, little one?’ she whispered. ‘That’s the church bell and you are going to hear it chime on the hour all night and safely into tomorrow morning. Do you hear me?’

  She kissed his downy hair again and her eyes filled with tears as she hugged the baby closer to her.

  *

  Through the night, Emily sat with Louis in her arms, his head tucked under her chin, his weak body pressed against the towel, flat against her, his back and limbs kept cool and exposed, his ear up close to her ribs, breathing in time to her own heartbeat. She administered the feed every fifteen minutes without fail, and the medicine at midnight and 4 a.m.