The Surgeon's Convenient Fiancée (Medical Romance)

by Rebecca Lang

  Tomorrow she would go over the application forms, fill them in and get her résumé in order, but would not actually apply until other things had been sorted out. There would be the issue of getting the children to school. Even though they were old enough to get themselves there, she knew the dangers of leaving children to fend for themselves, of putting them in a position where they felt neglected, unsupervised, unloved. Even though Mungo was in his teens and Fleur would soon be there, she could not suppose that they were more sophisticated than they actually were, because it was convenient for her to do so.

  She would also make an appointment with her GP to get the name of a counsellor for herself—that was the top priority. With the other things, there was no need to rush. It all had to be just right. What had happened over the past little while had frightened her, the spiral down into a depression, into a kind of helplessness.

  Fiona wanted her to be the legal guardian of the children in the event of her, Fiona’s, demise, so they would have to go to see Fiona’s lawyer very soon to look into it. She rather dreaded that. She was coming round to the idea that she could never abandon the children. Shay’s story had left her with a feeling now almost like a physical sickness, an apprehension about what could happen to children who thought they had been abandoned by a parent, as indeed Mark had been by his mother. Not the least of her worries was the certainty of the fury that Jerry would be in when he knew the full extent of Fiona’s plans. There was no doubt that he would fight tooth and nail to prevent Fiona’s wishes from becoming a reality.

  ‘Here’s the poem,’ Fleur said, handing her a computer print-out. ‘It’s Scottish.’

  ‘Oh, heck,’ she said, laughing. ‘I hope you don’t have to do the authentic Scottish accent, because I won’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘Naw,’ Fleur said. ‘Dinna fash yourself… or whatever.’

  ‘I used to know this poem myself, believe it or not. Sit down there,’ she said, indicating the sofa, ‘and say on.’ She lowered herself to the floor at Fleur’s feet, the rest of the sofa being taken up with books. Mungo gave them a resigned glance, no doubt having had to listen to this recitation before.

  Deirdre grinned at him. Tonight she would get some sleep, and no doubt have pleasant dreams. The reality of those kisses would be like balm to her soul.

  * * *

  Later, when Fleur and Mungo were in bed, she cleared up the kitchen and stacked the dishwasher, a quiet time so that she could think. Only the cat stalked around the kitchen to keep her company.

  You got frightened when you thought that your mind might have become fragile, when you felt you were at breaking point and did not know where to go from there. Not too long ago she had felt like that, somehow on the edge of something, where she might fall over the edge and had no idea how to stop herself. It was all the more frightening because she had always thought of herself as strong, someone who could be strong for herself and for other people as well.

  Now she understood that it was time to look after herself, to find out what it was that she needed and work out how she might get it. If she were to go back to outside work, three days a week, say, she would have to elicit Fiona’s help to supervise the children’s journey to school on those days. Fiona still drove a car, her health appeared good in that regard, so she could drive them. The kids would have to sleep at whichever house was the most convenient the night before each working day. That meant disruption for them, but not so much as having Deirdre out of their lives altogether.

  She sighed as she put out the light and went up the stairs. Something would be worked out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘THE WEEK BEFORE Christmas is a good time to start your orientation. We’ve just had a bout of activity in surgery as the surgeons finished their pending cases, and now they want to relax in the run-up to Christmas,’ Darlene Reade, the head nurse of the operating suite, said to Deirdre as they stood in the main corridor just outside the head nurse’s office. ‘Of course, we’ll have emergencies—road-traffic accidents and everything else.’

  Deirdre nodded. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. A feeling that she recognized as elation, something rare, seemed to flood over her as she stood there in the familiar surroundings of an operating suite, with the familiar sights and smells, the scent of cleanness.

  There were four of them standing there on a Monday morning, three newly employed registered nurses who were about to undergo a three-week orientation period and the head nurse who was about to hand them over to a tutor for the department who would help them with the actual orientation. To Deirdre’s surprise and gratitude, there was such a shortage of experienced operating room nurses that the head nurse had agreed to let her do her orientation part time, and had given her the days that she wanted to work—Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The fact that these were Shay’s operating days had had something to do with her request.

  A middle-aged woman came up to them and introduced herself. ‘Hi, I’m Caroline Clarke,’ she said, extending a hand to each. ‘Now, you’re Deirdre Warwick.’ She peered at Deirdre’s ID badge which had her photograph on it, pinned to the top pocket of a white lab coat that she wore over a blue scrub suit. ‘And this is Suzy Jacobs, and you are Beth Strom. Right?’

  They all shook hands with her. The three new nurses had introduced themselves in the locker room earlier.

  ‘I’ll leave you now,’ the head nurse said, taking her departure.

  ‘First of all, I’ll show you around the place,’ the tutor said. ‘I know you’ve each been shown around at least once before, but this time we are going to poke into cupboards. I’m going to show you where we keep the emergency instrument trays, like the tracheostomy set, where we keep the defibrillator, the cardiac arrest drugs, the crash cart, and all that sort of stuff. We’re going to look in every cupboard and every drawer. As far as possible, we try to keep each actual operating room identical with the next one, although there are specialized rooms that have extras, of course. Got your notebooks and pens, everyone?’

  ‘Yes,’ they chorused.

  ‘Right. Off we go, then. We’ll go to the stockroom first.’

  The main corridor of the operating suite was busy, in a controlled way, with the comings of patients on stretchers for the first operation of the day, pushed by porters, to be parked outside the rooms where they were to be operated on. There were fifteen operating rooms in Stanton Memorial Hospital, which was quite a lot for a relatively small hospital. The time was twenty minutes to eight.

  Deirdre looked around her quickly at the busy scene, all carefully organized and choreographed, like a dance. Half her mind was on what Fleur and Mungo would be doing—being given breakfast by Granny McGregor and gathering together their stuff for school at Jerry’s house. Jerry himself had left on another business trip, thank goodness. He was to be in Hong Kong and China for several weeks, including over Christmas. Deirdre suspected that he had a female travelling companion, which she didn’t want to know about. It was none of her business, anyway. It was just great that he wasn’t around.

  She felt somewhat disorientated, but in a good way, as though she could hardly believe her luck—not in the strange way that had come upon her suddenly when she had been unable to get off the bus. She felt that she needed to tell herself frequently that this was really happening. Sometimes something good did come out of trouble after all, especially when one found the courage from somewhere to ask for help.

  They stood in the large stockroom, looking at the shelves of supplies that they would need every day in the operating rooms, from hypodermic syringes to plastic chest tubes, bladder catheters, latex surgical gloves and dressings, to name but a few.

  Yes, it was good to be back.

  ‘Hello, Caroline,’ a familiar voice said from the doorway, and Deirdre turned quickly to see Shay standing there in his surgical scrubs, looking very attractive. Her heart leapt in recognition as she strove to keep her delight off her face.

  ‘Hi, Shay,’ the tutor greeted him. ‘Meet
three new RNs, just starting orientation today. They’re all experienced in OR work.’

  Grinning, he came forward to shake hands, leaving Deirdre to the last. ‘I know Ms Warwick,’ he said. ‘Our paths have crossed.’

  ‘That’s good,’ the tutor remarked, ‘because she could be working with you later on today. Or maybe just observing.’

  ‘Throwing them in at the deep end, huh?’ he said.

  ‘That’s my style,’ she replied.

  ‘See you all later, then,’ he said, smiling at Deirdre, while the other two RNs looked at her.

  ‘How did you meet him?’ one of them whispered to her later when they had moved on out of the stockroom.

  ‘Not in the usual way,’ she said, laughing. ‘He almost ran me down with his car.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind him running me down.’

  The place became very hectic for a while until those first patients had been wheeled into their respective operating rooms from the main corridor. For the duration of those operations, both long and short, there would be relative quiet in the corridor, until the porters wheeled in the next patients from the wards or the holding areas. Some of the patients were from the day-stay unit, who would only be in the hospital for one day or maybe overnight.

  Just before lunch, the three nurses on orientation found themselves assigned to a different operating room each, for the purposes of observation. As she had hoped and expected, Deirdre found herself in operating room one where Shay was operating on a patient who was having a gut resection for cancer of the colon. She had ascertained that by looking at the posted list outside before entering the room.

  As Deirdre stood in the background, a mask on her face, her hair covered with the usual disposable paper mob-cap, she knew that Shay would probably not have time to say much to her, he had to concentrate on what he was doing. There was an assistant surgeon and a resident-in-training with him, scrubbed up to help him with the case. That made four in the sterile field by the patient, including the scrub nurse. An anaesthetist stood at the patient’s head.

  Deirdre felt excited, interested and somewhat stressed, trying to take it all in, not wanting to miss anything. Yes, she told herself again, it was good to be back in the familiar surroundings of an operating suite, yet she had got out of the way of being constantly alert, constantly on the ball, as it were. No doubt that would come back very quickly as her confidence rose. That was partly what the orientation period was intended to accomplish. For now, she stood silently watching, careful to keep out of the path of the circulating nurse, the RN who was in charge of the room and who was running everything outside the sterile field.

  Another thing that she had lost the knack of was being able to close her mind to her own life outside the hospital. A lot of the time she was thinking of Fleur and Mungo, wondering what they were doing, even though she knew the routines of their days in detail. For the first time since taking the job of looking after them, she had not been able to carry a cellphone with her to be available constantly. They knew the number of the department and would be able to find her in a few minutes, but it was not the same as having her own telephone in her pocket. It wasn’t as though they were really young, she told herself, and needed her constantly.

  With a conscious mental effort she dragged her mind away from the domestic scene. She had, of course, known that the transition would not be instant; neither had she expected to be torn in two with quite so much angst. What she was learning in these first hours, what was being confirmed for her, was that she could never abandon Fleur and Mungo while they needed her. How much worse would it be, she wondered, if they were her own biological children?

  Once the piece of gut was removed by Shay and passed to the scrub nurse, who put it into a stainless-steel dish, he turned to Deirdre where she stood behind him, well back, as though he had been fully aware that she had been there all along. ‘Hi, Deirdre,’ he said. ‘Come a little closer. This patient has a carcinoma of the descending colon and, as you can see, I’ve removed a large chunk of the gut. Fortunately for him, we’ve got it in the early stages and it hasn’t spread to the omentum or the liver. It has not invaded through the wall of the colon. He should do very well.’

  Deirdre nodded. ‘That’s good,’ she said, knowing that the prognosis for cancer of the colon was good if there was no spread. Once in the liver, it was a different story, unless there was one localized lesion, which could then be surgically removed.

  As she watched, he took a scalpel and carefully cut open the piece of intestine that he had removed, to reveal the tumour inside the lumen. ‘There you have it,’ he said. ‘Nasty.’

  Then he put on a new sterile pair of latex gloves.

  ‘I’m going to staple the two cut ends together,’ he said to Deirdre. ‘I’m sure you know all about that.’

  ‘Well, I expect you have some new gadgets since I last assisted with a gut resection,’ she said. She would just watch what the scrub nurse handed him, then what he did. The circulating nurse brought her a low standing stool so that she could be raised up a few inches and get a better view of what was going on with the operation.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  Shay turned back to the task in hand and said no more to her for a long time. The room was more or less silent, apart from some exchanged remarks, the muted sound of the anaesthetic equipment and the intermittent sound of the suction equipment. Deirdre forgot herself, even managed to put Fleur and Mungo out of her mind while she concentrated on what was going on in front of her, knowing that she was free to leave the room whenever she wanted to.

  There was the usual coffee-lounge in the operating suite for nurses and doctors, just off the main corridor. Already she and the other two nurses on orientation had been there for a coffee-break. The main staff cafeteria for the whole hospital was the one on the ground floor of the building that she had been to with Shay. Then there was the little coffee-shop in the main lobby where she and Shay had bought coffee on her first visit. That seemed like a long time ago. When this case was over she would go to the main cafeteria for lunch, so the tutor had instructed her, then they would all meet up later for a mini-lecture. So far, she was enjoying every minute of it.

  Eventually the final instrument and sponge count had been done by the two nurses to make sure that no instruments or gauze sponges had been left inside the patient’s abdominal cavity. Shay stripped off his latex rubber gloves and left the suturing of the abdomen to his assistant and the surgical resident.

  Beckoning Deirdre over to the side of the room, he proceeded to write notes on the patient’s chart about the procedure he had just done, talking to her at the same time.

  ‘Will you be going to the cafeteria for lunch?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Good. I’ll meet you down there in about ten minutes, if you like,’ he said.

  The others in the room were probably thinking that he was talking to her about the case as he wrote busily, Deirdre concluded. Yes, she would like to meet him.

  Deirdre nodded. ‘I’ll see you there, then,’ she said, her heart singing. At the same time she told herself not to read too much into his actions.

  ‘Right. Save me a seat,’ he said quietly, looking at her sideways and grinning. At least, his eyes smiled; she could not see the lower part of his face. She was aware that the circulating nurse was looking at her, probably wondering how this new nurse was familiar with the surgeon.

  When she went out of the room, she searched for the tutor to let her know that the operation was over, that she would be leaving for lunch. She would need to put a lab coat over her scrub suit.

  * * *

  Deirdre was part way through her light lunch when Shay came over to her table, carrying a tray with coffee and a sandwich on it.

  ‘Hi, can’t stay long,’ he said. ‘Nice to see you here, Deirdre.’ At close proximity he looked pale and tired, but nonetheless very attractive. There were fine lines fanning out from his blue-grey eyes that looked at her
with such intensity, and she found that she liked the signs of maturity in him. Parenthood and the demands of his profession obviously took a toll on him, something that she could identify with wholeheartedly.

  The twenty-four-seven man, she thought. But, then, that was part of the job—the rushing, watching the clock, being always available. ‘Can’t be helped,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m enjoying being here so far, even if I am a bit disorientated.’

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘I wanted to meet you here to ask what you’re doing for Christmas.’ He took a bite out of a sandwich.

  Since she had invited him to supper at her parents’ house, they had been out to dinner once in a restaurant, after which she wondered if that was to be the extent of their friendship as he had not contacted her again. At that time he had informed her that his professional life was hectic, that any free time he had left over he spent with his son, so she had accepted that, thinking she might not see him again outside work. He had paid his dues for almost running her down. Now his query about Christmas made her hope that there might be something else after all.

  ‘We’ll be having Christmas dinner at the children’s grandmother’s house,’ she said, thinking of the superb dinners that Fiona produced when she was in the mood to do so.

  ‘Would you and the kids like to come to my place for dinner on Boxing Day?’ he asked. ‘You don’t have to tell me right now if you want to ask them first. My housekeeper’s a good cook, but she’ll have the day off and Mark and I will do most of the cooking—something simple.’

  ‘I’d like to come. Leftover turkey would be fine,’ she said, smiling. ‘I expect that Mungo and Fleur would be happy to come.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what you’ll get, leftover turkey,’ he responded. ‘I’d really like you to meet Mark, and I’ve sounded him out about meeting Mungo and Fleur. He seems keen.’