A Nurse's Search and Rescue

The charge nurse nodded then sighed. ‘We’re short-staffed as it is, and with everyone possible shoved back into the waiting room when we went on code, it’s going to be hours before we get back to normal. Get yourself changed and I’ll assign your patients. Are you able to stay on a bit later tonight?’

‘Sure.’ Tori glanced through the doors to the ambulance bay on her way to the locker room and saw the beacons being activated on the ambulance now out on the main road. The sound of the siren kicked in a second later and Tori smiled. There was a bright side to be found here.

The longer she was on duty in the ED, the more chance she had of seeing Matt. And the more she saw of Matt, the more likely it was that they would become friends.

Matthew Buchanan had a lot of responsibilities. He probably had very little time to have fun these days but he seemed like someone who would be very good at it, given the opportunity.

Tori was good at finding opportunities. If they didn’t come along by themselves, she was quite capable of engineering them, given an incentive. And the thought of seeing that smile on Matt’s face at frequent intervals was an excellent incentive.

* * *

But it proved frustratingly difficult to get anything more than brief snatches of conversation with Matt, however hard Tori tried.

The turn-around time for an ambulance crew delivering patients to the emergency department was generally rapid, and Matt and Joe seemed slicker than most. The times they were held up for some reason— by a queue waiting for triage or a bigger than usual clean-up operation before being available for a new job—were invariably the times that Tori was tied up with patient care and could do no more than smile or wave across a busy department.

Happily, Matt seemed as determined as she was to renew their acquaintance. Over the first few days after the incident with the logging truck, both Matt and Joe were keen to get updates on the progress of the accident victims. Tori made sure she kept in touch with what was going on.

Chloe had been the first to go home.

‘She got a bright pink cast on her arm,’ Tori told Matt the next day. ‘She was delighted with it.’

A day later her siblings were allowed to go home with their father.

‘Mum’s still in ICU but she should go through to a ward later today or tomorrow. She’s doing well.’

The male passenger of the car had been transferred to a spinal unit.

‘He had a fracture at C6-7,’ Tori relayed. ‘I’m so pleased I got someone to sit there and hold his head. He’s had surgery to stabilise the fracture and he’s not showing any neurological deficit.’

The truck driver wasn’t doing so well, still in a coma a week after the accident.

‘I went up to see him.’ Tori shook her head. ‘He looks awful! His eyes are completely black and his face is so swollen it’s unrecognisable. His wife is in there with him most of the time and she’s so grateful for what was done on scene. She tried to thank me but I told her it was you guys who deserved the praise. I’m sure she’d love to say hello to you.’

‘We’ll try and pop in later maybe.’

‘Why don’t you go up now?’ Joe suggested. ‘Control wants us to wait for a patient coming down from plastic Outpatients for a rural transfer. I can go and get her by myself.’

Tori wasn’t going to lose this opportunity. ‘I’m due for a break,’ she informed Matt. ‘I’ll come with you.’

It was a satisfyingly long trip up to the intensive care unit after they bypassed the lifts and took the stairs.

‘This is good,’ Tori announced, pushing open the fire stop door. ‘I really needed to get out of the department for a few minutes.’

‘It didn’t look overly busy.’

‘More like boring today. I’ve had two abdo pains, a ninety-three-year-old with a rectal bleed and a sprained ankle so far. I’m on the trauma team but nothing’s come in yet.’

‘My apologies,’ Matt grinned. ‘I’ll see if I can arrange a good crash or a nice medical emergency for you.’

‘Awful thing to wish for,’ Tori admitted. She gave Matt a stern look over her shoulder as she led the way up the stairs. ‘I’m blaming you for how tame work seems to be lately.’

‘Hey, it’s not my fault if people are staying healthy and happy.’

‘No, but if I hadn’t enjoyed helping at that crash scene so much, I wouldn’t have started to notice how ordinary my job is most of the time.’

‘So join the ambulance service,’ Matt suggested calmly. ‘We get our share of boring, though, believe me.’

‘Yeah, but when it’s not boring, it’s really not boring.’

‘True.’

The easy conversation was interrupted for the short time they spent in the ICU. Mrs Judd was delighted to have the opportunity to thank Matt. She was also a lot happier than the last time Tori had seen her because Wayne was showing signs of regaining consciousness.

‘They’re keeping him sedated because he still needs the machine to breathe properly, but he opened his eyes this morning and I know he recognised me. He even squeezed my hand.’

‘That’s great to hear.’ Matt smiled.

Colleen Judd had a lot of questions she wanted to ask Matt about the accident and Wayne’s rescue, but Tori found her attention wandering. Her nursing career had led very directly to the area she had most wanted to work in and her position in the emergency department represented the goal she had been aiming for.

A career change that might take her in a completely new direction—onto the front line even—had never occurred to her. Until now.

‘I might think about what you said,’ she told Matt as they made their way back downstairs. ‘I could do with a new life.’

‘Really? You not happy with the old one?’

Tori could have sworn she read real concern in Matt’s eyes and she bit back the denial leaping to her lips.

‘It’s been a weird few months,’ she admitted. ‘I’m not enjoying anything right now as much as I used to.’

‘What happened to change things?’ Matt not only slowed down on the stairs, he paused on the landing. Tori stopped as well.

‘It’s your fault again,’ she said with a grin. ‘It was that USAR course that did it.’

Matt raised his eyebrows in both a silent protest and question.

‘You remember that cyclone that was happening in the Pacific then?’

Matt nodded but then frowned. ‘But USAR didn’t get activated for that.’

‘They sent a medical relief team, though, and thanks to doing that course, Sarah got called. I couldn’t go because my leg wasn’t up to it, but she went.’

‘Sarah’s your sister, yes?’

‘Foster-sister really, but we’re very close. We were both still living at home and we looked after Mum for ages before she died last year.’

‘I’m not quite following how this is my fault yet.’ Matt’s attention was fully focused on Tori and the sensation was far from unpleasant.

‘I went to that course and dragged Sarah along purely for your benefit, you know.’