‘So you want me to assess the car?’
‘They told me to just triage, go for the most critical injuries and stop bleeding. I’ll be quick. Hopefully we can stabilise everyone until help arrives. Can’t worry about what we can’t do. The flying doctor is on the way as well. Whatever we do has to be better than nothing.’
She wasn’t sure if she was talking to Sienna or herself. Goodness knows how ambos did this full time. It terrified her every time she went out, not knowing what she’d find.
‘The flying doctor will probably land on the road.’
Their vehicle crested the final rise and they saw the wreckage.
‘Shit.’ Sienna got the word out before Eve.
‘Yep. I seriously hate this part of the job.’
‘You do it well.’
Eve dragged in a huge breath, and then another. ‘We will both do the best we can with what we have.’ Like a mantra. ‘Okay.’ She looked at her sister. Pale in the morning light.
Eve licked her lips as they sped towards the rear of the road train, which lay across the road on its side. ‘It’s huge.’
The trucks looked big enough when they drove past, but stationary, with only one trailer over on its side, this one seemed to go on forever. Eve shuddered as they drove along it towards the front. She couldn’t help but wonder how anyone in a car could survive hitting that thing.
She reached forwards and threw Sienna some gloves. ‘Put them on.’
There wasn’t much to see on this side of the wreckage so they drove off the road and over the thick red dust until they could park near the remains of a white twin-cab four-wheel drive utility, the type you saw about fifty times a day out here.
Except that they recognised the tiny emblem on the door. Eve gasped. ‘Bennet’s truck.’
Sienna jumped out as soon as their vehicle stopped. ‘Stay on plan. Check the other driver, then meet me here.’
Eve sprinted to the cab of the truck. She didn’t want to check the other driver but it was protocol when two medics were present. She sure as hell didn’t want to look in the car either.
The driver was sitting on the side of the road, dazed and clutching his upper arm. Blood oozed around his fingers and a stripe of it ran from his forehead down over his cheeks and onto his neck. There was a small puddle in the dirt, at least a couple of hundred millilitres’ worth but he wouldn’t die if that was all he’d lost. Eve knelt down and opened her pack. She pulled out a thick trauma dressing and eased his fingers away. Blood instantly welled thickly but it didn’t spurt. She put his fingers back over the dressing.
‘I feel a bit faint.’
‘Not surprising. Lost blood and shock.’ She wrapped his dressing in place firmly. Checked the forehead gash and gave him another wad to push onto it. ‘You hurt anywhere else?’
Another car pulled up and Eve waved the elderly couple inside over to her.
The driver of the road train was staring in the direction of the white dual-cab with a quivering lip. ‘They will be.’
‘Yep. Going there now.’ She pushed him gently to lie back against the little bank. ‘Keep your head low and you won’t feel so faint.’
‘Eve!’ Sienna’s voice.
She lifted her head towards the car. ‘Gotta go.’ As she ran she prayed. She slowed as the elderly couple stepped gingerly over what Eve assumed were pieces of Bennet’s truck that had spread across the area. ‘Can you get him further away from the truck? He should be fine.’
‘Now!’ Sienna’s voice was hoarse.
‘I’ll watch him,’ the lady assured her. ‘My husband can go with you. He used to be a paramedic. I’ll call if I need help.’
Eve nodded and kept running. The elderly gentleman hurried as fast as he could behind her and she hoped he wouldn’t have a heart attack.
‘Here.’ Sienna’s voice was strained as she held a wad of tissues against Callie’s neck and Eve gulped as she came around to crouch beside her sister on the passenger side. Callie was awake and Eve took that as a good sign as she glanced across to Bennet, who was unconscious with a purpling bruise on his forehead. His legs looked trapped beneath the steering wheel where the front of the car had been crushed into the cabin. But he didn’t look seriously injured at first glance. ‘Can you take him?’
The older man nodded. ‘Got him.’
In the back, his white face shocked and eyes wide and fixed on his father, Adam whimpered and shook like a little rabbit, miraculously safe in a pocket of the car that didn’t seem to have been damaged at all.
‘It’s all right, Adam.’ Incredibly, Callie’s voice was calm, if a little spacey.
Eve let out her breath in relief. She leaned in to ask Callie how she was when she saw the blood. Litres of it. Her stomach rolled and she hoped she wasn’t going to be sick.
‘She told me to look at the kid first.’ Sienna’s voice shook.
Eve clamped down on the panic. ‘Uterine?’
‘She’s losing the baby. I can’t do anything to stop the blood.’
Another car had pulled up and a young man and his girlfriend hurried to them. Eve stood up and spoke to them. ‘Can you help me get the boy out? Take him to that lady over there,’ she said, pointing to the older woman beside the truck driver. ‘I want to lay this front seat back.’
The guy swallowed when he saw the blood. He wrenched open Adam’s door and reached in to unbuckle his lifesaving seatbelt and lifted him out easily. Adam began to struggle but the guy shushed him.
‘It’s okay, mate. We can help by getting out of the way.’
‘Daddy?’
‘The lady has to help your mummy.’
‘She’s not my mummy.’
Eve winced at the words as Adam was carried away. ‘And back the ambulance over here, will you?’ she called after them.
It didn’t look like Callie would ever be anyone’s mummy. But she couldn’t think like that. She wouldn’t. Disassociate. This was not her sister. This was an unnamed woman. Then it was as if a new clarity sharpened every sense. She would not let it happen.
The next few minutes seemed to pass in slow motion. Without the necessity of keeping Adam calm Callie suddenly let go of her tenacious grip on consciousness. Her eyes rolled back and she shuddered as Eve helped Sienna lean the seat back to get a little more blood to Callie’s brain before she blacked out.
Callie’s eyelids fluttered and her skin shone white as a cockatoo’s wing as her lifeblood seeped away underneath her. Too little too late.
‘She’s going into heart failure.’ Sienna’s voice was harsh with an underlying panic.
They heard the ambulance backing closer, and sensibly the young man had jumped out and opened both rear doors before he ran back to Eve and Sienna. Eve glanced across to where the older lady and the young girl had Adam between them. She heard a siren.
Douglas. Good. More hands, but they were running out of time. Do the best you can.
There were pounding footsteps as Douglas ran up to them.
‘We need to get her flat so we can work on her.’ Eve glanced at the two men. ‘Lift her out as fast as you can. Don’t worry about anything. We just need her flat on the stretcher in the back of the ambulance.’
‘We can’t move her.’ Sienna shook her head.
‘We have to. She’s going to arrest and we can’t save her in the car.’
‘We can’t save her.’
Eve pulled Sienna away. ‘Take her, guys. Now.’
They looked at each other and between them managed to get a limp and blood-soaked Callie maneuvered from her awkward position into their arms. The young man’s eyes widened in horror as he realised she was heavily pregnant.
Eve sprinted ahead and climbed into the back. Grabbed an oxygen mask as the men heaved Callie onto the stretcher. Sienna seemed to shake herself as she saw what Eve was doing. Her emergency maternal resuscitation procedures must have flooded back into her shocked brain because now she spoke smoothly.
‘Wedge one hip. Roll her a bit t
o get the weight of her uterus off the big arteries. Get the blood from her legs into circulation.’
Eve handed her a cannula and a tourniquet, and gave the bag of fluids to Douglas to sort once the line was in.
Sienna nodded and bent to the task while Eve ripped open Callie’s shirt and stuck the monitor leads on her chest. Frantic, high-pitched irregular heartbeats raced across the screen.
‘Hold this bag upside down and squeeze while I stab it with this line connection,’ Eve said to the young man and he grabbed the floppy bag of fluid as Eve thrust the line connection into her bag. The man squeezed the air pocket in the bag into the filling chamber and the line of life-giving saline raced down the tubing as Eve hung it downwards. ‘Kink the line to stop it when the fluid gets to the end, and give it to me when I ask for it.’
Eve bent and inserted the intravenous cannula in the crook of Callie’s arm and held out her hand for the connection. She taped down the line and handed the tape to Sienna, who did the same on her side. At least they had started to replace some fluids.
The frantic heartbeat accelerated and then Callie stiffened as her heart stopped.
‘Noooo,’ Eve said fiercely. ‘Douglas. Cardiac massage.’
Sienna squeezed past Douglas and grabbed the oxyviva bag and mask to ventilate two breaths after thirty compressions, but the only change in the cardiac rhythm was the spikes of compression from Douglas.
Four minutes, four cycles and no change. Eve grabbed an emergency pack from the shelf and stared steadily at Sienna. ‘Crash caesarean.’ Then she leaned across and yanked Callie’s skirt down to expose the shiny white mound of her veined stomach.
Sienna seemed to shake herself and then she nodded.
The young man crossed himself. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God.’
Eve glanced at him. Too focused for sympathy. ‘Jump out and lean over from the front so you can do the bagging while Sienna and I do this.’ She caught his eye. ‘She’s lost too much blood. There is no chance without this.’
The young man jumped out, and Sienna pushed past Douglas again so she could come around to the other side.
Eve opened the pack. Not much in it. Fresh gloves. A scalpel, some heavy sponges for holding back the abdominal layers, a pre-threaded needle and forceps for suturing that she’d made up herself. In memory of a young mother many months ago. Two forceps for clamping the cord and some scissors for cutting it.
Eve splashed antiseptic liquid straight onto Callie’s belly and swirled it over the bulging skin with a large dressing. Her eyes met Sienna’s and she saw her sister’s gaze sharpen and focus on the task at hand. Relief swelled in her chest. If anyone could do a slash and grab in record time it was Sienna.
Two minutes later Sienna passed the limp body of her half-sister’s baby girl to Eve, scooped out the placenta from the pool of blood behind it, squeezed the uterus empty, and shut and sutured it with huge figure-of-eight stitches, packed the rest so they could get back to keeping Callie alive.
THIRTY
Eve lay the lifeless little girl on her back on the folded sheet on the side box, the only space left to work. She briskly rubbed the tiny baby with the towel and watched the blue limbs wobble with the movement, but nothing else.
She settled the miniature bag and mask over a snub nose and sagging mouth and began to inflate the tiny lungs. One a second. One, two, three, four, five . . . She didn’t worry about cardiac massage because it was more important to get air into the lungs during this first thirty seconds. Meanwhile Sienna taped a wad of dressing over Callie’s wound for repair later. Or not – Callie wouldn’t bleed if her heart wasn’t beating.
Douglas kept pumping and the young man kept squeezing air into her flaccid lungs. They nearly missed the extra beat of Callie’s heart because the baby tensed and opened her hand and Eve gasped, almost dropping the green bag she was squeezing. She steadied herself and kept bagging but the skip of her own heart reminded her to breathe herself.
The baby wriggled again, and another beat on Callie’s monitor, closely followed by another, had all eyes turn incredulously towards the green blips on the screen. The sudden surge of blood that had been rerouted from the uterus returned to the mother’s circulation like a bolus blood transfusion.
The fluids began to run again, the baby gasped and cried, and whether or not the sound penetrated the mother’s unconscious brain, the rhythm of her heart steadied and fell back into pattern – it was too fast, but Callie was alive.
Douglas slumped back from the heart that didn’t need compression any longer.
Sienna eased the bag and mask from the young man’s death grip and slid the mask back up Callie’s porcelain face. She connected the oxygen as their patient began to breathe for herself.
The drone of a plane in the distance penetrated the tense airlessness and the sweating ambulance occupants began to look at each other and return to the real world.
For Eve, the thirty minutes after the RFDS arrived and took over – when she saw Callie, still breathing but unconscious, being transferred into the aircraft, her face the colour of the white sheet beneath her – seemed to last forever. And yet it was over in a flash.
Another small helicopter landed and Lex, appearing beside her, took her hand, turned her to him and pulled her into his arms so that she stopped the sway she hadn’t realised she was doing.
‘Callie nearly died.’ Her mouth seemed stuck together as reality set in. Her vision blurred.
‘I know,’ she heard him say. He kept patting her. ‘I know.’
Eventually. Distantly. When she was ready to listen, he asked, ‘Would you like me to fly you to Charleville?’
She blinked. Focused on the fact the RFDS aircraft had taxied away. Callie would have another operation to get through. She could still die, though her chances of survival were good. ‘Yes, please. Now.’
Then she looked back at the scene, slumped, and realised she couldn’t leave yet. She still had a job to do.
The huge trailer was still on its side. She was glad it hadn’t been a cattle carrier – dead or dying animals would have made things even more gruesome – or still more ghastly, one of the three-trailered fuel tankers. The general freight that hadn’t been damaged would be unloaded and the crane from Charleville would be here in a few hours to right it.
But she had an ambulance parked beside it. Already she could see Douglas talking to volunteers for directing traffic off the road and around the blockage.
‘I can’t. I have to take the ambulance back.’
‘Sienna can do that. You can come with me. You’ve all been incredible, from what I’ve heard.’
‘Sienna might not want to.’
But when Eve asked her, Sienna took one look at her face and nodded. ‘Sure. You go with Lex. Ring me later when Callie is out of theatre. I’ll stay with Bennet now that he’s conscious, until they can cut him out. Go.’
So she went, her mind filled with images and a mix of disbelief and horror until suddenly she thought of that morning all those months ago, when she’d come out of work and wondered what good could possibly come of a mother losing her life in such circumstances.
This time Eve had had Sienna, skilled and able to respond, the stalwart Douglas and the brave young man; she’d been driven to take a leadership role by heartbreak at the prospect of not succeeding. But without the trigger of Eve’s memories from that long-ago day, the experience of that sequence of events, they would have lost Callie.
A new father would have been left to weep forever.
One day she would find that other father, Jason, and thank him, just so he knew what a gift his wife had given.
THIRTY-ONE
Lex landed at Charleville and ushered Eve into the shed that held his car at the airport. Before they left, he took her to the little toilet block and helped her wash the blood from her skin and hands, and stripped off her blood-stained shirt. She saw his eyes widen as he noticed the blood soaked into her bra, saw him wince at what she must have seen.<
br />
He gave her one of his own R. M. shirts and helped her shaking fingers button the front and roll the sleeves. The shirt swam on her and she probably looked like a lost waif, but she was at least externally free of gore.
During the drive to the hospital she still trembled in shock, but incredibly, as if a switch had been thrown, when they arrived she straightened and slowly morphed into the determined Eve she wanted to be.
But the unexpected obstacle of an officious nurse who denied them entry had her shaking again. That was when Lex came into his own. He demanded to see the nursing supervisor. Told her who he was. Who Eve was. What she’d done. And Eve listened like it was a tale about somebody else. But the result was impressive.
She just needed to see Callie. Had tunnel vision.
On the way the apologetic woman reassured them that the baby had settled into the neonatal intensive care unit and would be able to come out when Callie was able to feed. Eve looked at Lex and thanked him with a touch on his arm, and he squeezed her fingers back at their tremendous good fortune as they followed the supervisor to high-dependency.
There Callie lay, her face pale, her eyes closed, amid the beeping and alarms of machines, in a private room.
Eve stared at her sister. At the machines. At the proof her Callie really was still alive. She tried not to think about brain injury from extended loss of oxygen. Would she even wake up?
The supervisor explained quietly that they had taken Callie back to theatre to properly repair her caesarean wound, give transfusions of blood and blood products, and massive antibiotics. Callie’s observations and bodily responses looked very promising but she was heavily sedated. Even Lex understood the gist of that.
Distractedly, Eve noticed that Lex hung back from the myriad of drips and drains and monitors and tubes, and she could see he was trying not to think of the horror smash he’d only seen parts of.
Distantly she’d heard him arrange her accommodation. Some food. Ensure she was given the respect she deserved. She couldn’t imagine the logistics of being with Callie without his help.
Red Sand Sunrise Page 22
