Winning the Doc's Heart

by Jennifer Youngblood

  She arched an eyebrow. “That didn’t take very long.”

  “She didn’t have to push me very far to see how wrong I was.” He took her hand, a grin pulling at his lips. “Can you forgive me?” He put her fingers to his lips and kissed them lightly.

  She sighed. “This is one of those two steps forward, one step back kind of things. I’ll admit, just right back there on the highway before I got pulled over, I was thinking some pretty bad things about you. Now that you’re here though, those feelings are all gone.” She squared her jaw as she looked at this wonderful, frustrating man who had captured her heart and then pounded it to smithereens. And yet, he was here! “This is about you and me, and we can’t let someone the likes of Ascott Carson blow it up, as much as he’d like to.”

  Regret colored his features. “It was never about Ascott. Not really.”

  She held her breath, waiting for him to continue.

  “The truth is, I was scared.”

  She felt his pain as if it were her own, even though she wasn’t fully aware of what he was trying to tell her. “Of what?”

  “Of losing you like I did Annie.” His eyes grew moist. “I love you, Priscilla June Bandy.” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “I was afraid of hurting your career.” He chuckled. “I’m still afraid of that, but I’m willing to take the risk if you are.”

  She felt a glimmer of excitement. “I don’t think my career will be a problem.”

  He blinked. “What do you mean?”

  She told him everything Dr. Stone said, including his offer for her to replace him when he retired. When she finished, a large, joyous smile filled his face. “Wow, that’s great news!”

  “The best!”

  He paused, looking thoughtful. “Alright, while we’re on the topic. Let’s make a new rule.”

  She gave him a chiding grin. “Do you really think you’re in a position to be making rules right now?”

  He grimaced. “Maybe not, but I’d sure like to.”

  “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “Let’s try really hard never to mention the name Ascott Carson again.”

  She pursed her lips. “Well, I’ll do my best, but I did file a formal complaint against him for sexual harassment.” She shrugged. “So, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

  He blinked in surprise before a pleased expression overtook his handsome face. “Good for you,” he asserted. He took a breath. “I’m a jerk,” he groaned. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s forgotten,” she said, and she meant it.

  His hand moved to her face as he caressed her cheek. “I love you,” he uttered.

  “I love you too,” she barely had time to respond before his lips took hers. The familiar attraction buzzed through her veins, but with the sparks came a renewed sense of assurance that she was exactly where she needed to be … right here, right now … with the man who was tailor-fit just for her.

  A few minutes later, Kyle turned around and glanced out the rear window. “The highway’s clear,” he announced. “If you go past the rest area up ahead and take the next exit, I’ll show you the back way to Clementine.”

  She grinned, tempted to tell him that she already knew the way back. Then, she decided to just let it ride. After all, Kyle was a man’s man who needed to feel like he was in charge. She was okay with letting him take the lead … every now and again. She looked at his lips, a warm desire simmering through her stomach. “Are there any good make-out spots on the back way to Clementine?”

  A boyish grin streaked across his lips. “I know a few.”

  “And just how do you know them?” she guffawed.

  He made a zipping motion over his lips. “I’ll never tell.”

  23

  Around mid-afternoon, Kyle and P. J. strode into Marigold’s house and found her in the kitchen at the sink. It was interesting how quickly everything had changed. A short while ago, Kyle felt like his life was over. His own demons had almost destroyed the best thing that had happened to him in a very long time. He vowed that from now on, he would fight for his and P. J.’s relationship, proving to her every day that he was worthy of her love.

  Marigold spun around, her eyes filling with glee. “Oh, Kyle. Look at you. You brought Priscilla back. I’m so glad you did.” She held out her arms. Kyle returned the gesture. His mother pushed him aside and threw her arms around P. J. instead. They hugged for a few seconds, and then let go. Kyle looked at them both, his eyes stopping on his mom as he chuckled dryly. “You know, I was out there too, and I also came back.”

  Marigold grinned as she patted his cheek. “Shut up, Kyle. Just enjoy the moment,” she winked. A second later, she straightened to her full height. “Now, I have to walk over to Coralee’s house and pick up a couple of eggs. Why don’t you two come along?”

  Kyle glanced at P. J. “Sure,” he said. “We’d love to.”

  Marigold was falling behind, so P. J. and Kyle slowed down. Her breathing got deeper and heavier. “Kyle,” she squeaked, her eyes rounding with panic.

  Alarm shot through Kyle. “Mom!” P. J. let go of his arm and he turned to his mom just in time to catch her as she stumbled to her knees, clutching her chest. Her face took on a grey color as he gently lowered her to the ground, rotating her onto her back. Her eyes were closed.

  “Mom!” Kyle exclaimed in desperation. He looked at P J., his voice shaking. “Oh, no.” A prayer wrenched through his heart. Please, help her!

  P. J.’s expression was stoic but determined as she gave Kyle a nudge. “Call 911. Do it now,” she ordered.

  Numbly, he stood and did as she said. While he rattled off information to the operator, he watched as P. J. placed a hand inside his mom’s dress and felt for her heartbeat. She checked pulses at her neck, groin, and feet. “Jugular veins are pretty distended,” she murmured. “Skin is clammy. Slow nail-bed refill.” From across the park, a klaxon horn sounded at the fire station. Kyle was still on the phone with the 911 operator when the fire crew arrived. The ambulance and fire truck didn’t even bother with their sirens. They sped around the park to where they were.

  Coralee and Douglas Foster ran from their house. “What happened?” Coralee asked.

  “It’s called cardiac tamponade,” P. J. announced with a grave expression as she spoke to Kyle, who was back kneeling beside P. J. now that the first responders were here. “Something has sprung a leak, and her pericardial sac, the thing that covers her heart, is filling with blood. Her heart doesn’t have enough room to expand so it can beat fully and strongly. The blood in the sac is squeezing it down.”

  Two paramedics ran over. A burly fireman nudged Kyle gently aside. “All right, sir, we’ve got this.” A medic knelt next to P. J. The fireman put a hand on P. J.’s shoulder. “Ma’am, please step back and let us work.”

  Coralee spoke up. “It’s okay. She’s an open-heart surgeon.”

  The fireman looked doubtingly at P. J. “Her?”

  “Yes, I am. I transplanted a new heart into her a little over a month ago.” She held out a hand to the medic. “Stethoscope, please.” The medic obeyed. P. J. listened on the left of the sternum scar. She listened on the right, the top, the bottom on both sides. “Distant heart sounds. Bradycardia. Pulses?”

  “Weak and thready,” answered the medic.

  “No better than a minute ago. This is bad, really bad.”

  Hearing those words, Kyle went ice cold. P. J. glanced up at Kyle like she wished she hadn’t said that.

  Another medic set down a large tackle box next to P. J. She pulled a pair of scissors from a holster and cut the middle of Marigold’s bra. “Betadine?” the medic asked P. J.

  P. J. shook her head. “We’ll worry about infection later. We have to decompress the tamponade.”

  Kyle had no idea what P. J. was talking about with all of her terminology, but the medic understood as she nodded and opened her kit. P. J. glanced into it. “What’s the biggest needle you have?”

  “Six
teen gauge okay?”

  “That’s good. Give me a hemostat and a fifty-milliliter syringe. Have more syringes standing by.”

  “Sixty ml okay?”

  “Sixty is great.”

  “Gloves?”

  “I’m in too much of a hurry.” P. J. tore open the syringe wrapping, screwed the needle into place, and felt Marigold’s chest again. P. J. was efficient, the epitome of grace under fire, but Kyle noticed that her fingers were trembling. He offered up another prayer. Seeing his mom lying there unresponsive filled him with a black panic. He clenched his fists, feeling completely helpless.

  P. J. found the right spot, spread her fingers slightly, and jabbed in the needle between them. She pulled back the plunger and the syringe filled with blood immediately.

  The medic was ready with the hemostat and handed it to P. J. She clamped it onto the needle hub to hold it in Marigold’s chest while she took off the syringe. The medic held out a fresh syringe. P. J. screwed it onto the needle and took out what she announced to be another sixty milliliters of blood. They repeated the process twice more. “Check pedal pulses,” P. J. ordered. A fireman removed Marigold’s shoes.

  “Dorsalis pedis arteries are two-plus bilaterally,” he reported.

  A wave of nausea rolled over Kyle. Even though the events were transpiring quickly, he felt like everything was in slow motion.

  P. J. put another syringe onto the needle. “The feet arteries are the farthest from the heart,” she explained, “so I know that if they have a good pulse, then so does the leg, the pelvis, the abdomen, all the way up.” She handed a syringe full of blood to the medic, who immediately placed a sixth one in her hand. “Hopefully that’s a clue that there’s good blood flow to closer organs, like her brain and her heart.” The syringe filled to the twenty mark, and then the blood stopped. She adjusted the needle location slightly and pulled back again on the plunger. No more blood came out. “Reposition the needle once if you want to make sure you’ve got it all,” she explained to the firemen. “Don’t keep poking around though, or you’ll lacerate the heart.”

  Lacerate the heart? Kyle’s legs felt weak.

  “Where’s the nearest hospital with chest surgery capability?” P. J. asked.

  “Montgomery’s twenty-eight miles east, Doc, about a forty-minute drive if there’s not a train in the crossing. Dothan’s an hour and ten minutes south.”

  “Montgomery it is. Let’s go.” She looked up at Kyle. Reflected in her jade eyes, he saw her concern, her fear, her sympathy for him. “Kyle, are you going to follow us?”

  “Ma’am, if you’re not family, you can’t ride in the ambulance,” a fireman said to P. J.

  “She can ride,” said another fireman, giving the first one a stern glance.

  “Yes Sir, Captain,” the first one responded.

  They made the trip in far under the predicted forty minutes. All the while, P. J. kept praying. An image of Kyle’s ragged expression kept replaying through her mind. P. J. couldn’t bear the thought of Kyle losing his mother, especially not under her watch! She gave a report to the emergency room doctor, pushing her fears down as she went into professional mode. “We have Ringers running in her left arm and normal saline in her right. We need to keep her pressure up, but I don’t want her volume overloaded. Transfuse two units of packed red cells and have six more units standing by. Prep an OR for me and get a team together. I have to go talk to your chief of staff.”

  She walked out to the lobby. There stood Kyle and Coralee Foster, both looking lost and scared.

  Swallowing hard, P. J. walked up to them and reached for Kyle’s hand. It was cold as ice. It took all the fortitude she could muster to push back her tears. “It’s a setback,” she said. “A really dangerous one, but I’m going to take care of it the best I can. She’s far too critical to transfer to Birmingham, so we’ll have to try and fix her right here.” Her eyes locked with his. “I promise, I’ll do my best.” Maybe this was why the school board discouraged doctors from dating their patients, or in this case, her patient’s son. This was personal, for all of them. Then again, what good were P. J.’s skills if she couldn’t help those she loved the most?

  His jaw worked as he nodded. “I know you will.”

  Some part of P. J. wanted to stay with Kyle, but her common sense took over. The best thing she could do for Kyle was to save his mother. Releasing his hand, she gave him a hopeful nod before hurrying away.

  She found the administration office. Luckily, the chief of the hospital’s medical staff was in. He eyed her. “So you want emergency privileges to operate on your patient here?”

  “Yes, sir. We can’t move her right now.”

  His eyebrow rose. “And you haven’t finished your fellowship yet?”

  P. J. froze, panic fluttering in her breast. He had an excellent point. She was a transplant surgeon, almost finished with training, but only almost.

  “Dr. Bandy, do you understand what kind of a liability this exposes our hospital to?”

  “I’m sure I don’t.” She balled her hands as she looked him in the eye. “On the other hand, you can’t transfer this woman. You don’t have a thoracic surgeon available right now, even though you have the equipment we’ll need. I’m the best you’ve got.”

  The chief put his fingers to his lips, thinking for a moment. “All right. How soon do you need to operate?”

  Relief flooded through P. J. She forced her voice to sound confident as she spoke. “I want her fluids tuned up first. It’ll take an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to get the blood transfused. Then we’ll prep her and hopefully two hours from now be in there to find the leak and plug it.”

  “You can operate, but I want one of our staff surgeons in there assisting you. He’s not a thoracic surgeon, but I think that having him present will cover us legally.”

  “I can agree with that.” P. J. stood up and extended a handshake to the chief of staff. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I have to do one more thing. Marge?” he called out the door. A portly secretary bustled in. “We have two hours to make this official. Get on the phone and start calling the members of the credentialing committee. Explain the emergency and tell them we have a cardiac transplant surgeon here who needs to operate right away. Keep calling until you have a quorum of approval votes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  P. J. arrived back at the ER waiting room. She sat down next to Kyle. Mr. Foster had arrived and was holding Coralee’s hand. “Kyle, we’ve cleared the hurdles to be able to operate. There’s one formality that they’re working on, but in the meantime, we’re getting Marigold in the best possible shape before we go in there.” She reached for his hand and squeezed it. “I wish I could tell you not to worry.” Tears rose in her eyes as a shaky laugh escaped her throat. “I wish I could be out here with you to help you worry.”

  Kyle looked at her. She was struck by the trust and confidence radiating from his mocha eyes. “No. There’s nobody I’d rather have in there taking care of Mom than you.” He paused, a slight smile tipping his lips. “I trust you.”

  In that moment, a warmth that defied words flowed through her.

  She knew that Kyle really did trust her, with his mother, and with his future.

  And somehow, in a way she couldn’t explain, she knew that everything would be okay.

  Epilogue

  One Month Later …

  Kyle was in the offices of Asher and Dunforth. He sat between Steve and their client. They’d just given the man a demonstration of the new accounting and business management software package Kyle was developing for his company. “Well, what do you think so far?” Steve asked.

  “I love it,” the older gentleman said. “It looks better than I’d dreamed. The best part is, I hate computers, and I can still understand what you’re talking about. You’ve made it nice and simple. If I had to run this thing myself, I could probably do it.”

  “I still need another six or eight weeks to finish the programming,” Kyle explai
ned. “This is just a rough draft, so to speak. There are a lot of refinements and additional features to put in. Trust me. I’ll do my best to make it nice and confusing for you.”

  The client laughed. “Well, I guess that’s good. For what this pirate’s charging me—” he jabbed his thumb in Steve’s direction— “it’d better have lots of bells and whistles.”

  Kyle grinned. “Bells and whistles. Got it. Give me a few more weeks and I’ll get them in there.”

  They shook hands and Melanie walked the gentleman to the elevator. Steve looked at Kyle. “It’s good to have you back in town, kiddo. I’d say that was a big success. How’s the rest of your life? How’s your mom?”

  “It’s been a month since the emergency, and so far, she’s doing great. No more leaks. She’s as spunky as ever. Things couldn’t be much better for her.” What P. J. accomplished was a miracle. P. J. agreed wholeheartedly, saying that she’d felt the guiding hand of God in that operating room with her. Kyle was so grateful that their prayers had been answered that day and that his mother’s life was spared.

  “What about that pretty little surgeon?” Steve prompted with a twinkle in his eye.

  Kyle couldn’t stop a large grin from pushing over his lips. “We’ve been going out a lot. Things are better than ever.”

  “Are you gonna take it to the next level?”

  Kyle just smiled in response.

  “Well,” Steve said, “today’s my anniversary. I’ve got a date with the missus so I’d better get out of here. I hope you have a date too,” he winked.

  “Oh, I do. See you later.”

  Promptly at six o’clock, Kyle arrived at P. J.’s townhouse. His breath caught when she opened the door. She was a vision in jeans that hugged her slim hips and a green blouse that made her eyes pop. “What’s the big surprise?” she asked, her red curls bouncing on her shoulders.

  “You’ll see.” He drove to the park where they’d had their picnic back in early spring. Kyle’s nerves were jumping like a bucket of crickets, but he tried to maintain the appearance of calm. He pulled out a bag of bread that they used to feed the ducks until it was gone.