Sarah's Gift

Yes, if he had to find one word to sum her up it would be soft—soft and womanly, with curves in all the right places and not a skinny angle to be seen.

He hated skinny angles.

‘This is Resus.’

He jerked his head up and looked around, conscious of how little attention he’d been paying. Hell, he couldn’t afford to get distracted like that, someone’s life might depend on him paying attention in the next few minutes so that he knew the ropes.

He forced thoughts of the soft and delectable Sarah Cooper out of his mind—for now. He’d have to get to know her, but he had plenty of time. Three months.

Suddenly it didn’t seem long enough.

Sarah was uneasy about the quietness. She shouldn’t be, she knew. She should just be taking advantage of it to do the mundane routine things like the stock-check and putting that curtain back on the hooks that a drunk had half pulled down over the weekend, but she found she was restless.

Was it because of the unaccustomed quietness, or because of Matt, their new member of staff? He was supposedly over in England to study the way trauma units here worked, and he was going to go away with a false impression of how little they worked unless something happened, Sarah thought—and then the phone rang.

‘Elderly female, hypothermic, suspected fractured femur, on her way in—and the paramedic with her needs looking at. He’s been bitten.’

‘Bitten?’

Sarah could almost hear the woman on ambulance control shrug. ‘So they said. ETA ten minutes.’

‘OK, thanks.’

She put the phone down and went to find Ryan. ‘Hypothermic lady with a hip on the way in—and she’s bitten the paramedic, by all accounts, so I suggest we send her up to Orthopaedics nice and quickly!’

Ryan grinned. ‘I think we’ll let Matt take his first case—I wonder if she’s got rabies?’

‘Gee, thanks, I can hardly wait,’ Matt murmured, rolling his eyes, and Ryan laughed and slapped him on the back.

‘Come on, let’s get you a white coat and a stethoscope so you look like a real doctor, and then you can come and play.’

‘Wow, I haven’t played doctors and nurses for years,’ Matt said with a grin. ‘Who gets to take their clothes off first?’

‘You, if you’re not careful,’ Sarah quipped, and left them to it, trying not to think about playing doctors and nurses with Matt. Instead she concentrated on playing nurses for real, and prepared a trolley in case they had to rewarm their patient with peritoneal dialysis, warming some saline in readiness.

In the event their patient was only mildly hypothermic, and they wrapped her in a foil blanket, treated her with warmed, humidified air and forty per cent oxygen, and because she was very dehydrated they set up an IV line to dribble in warmed fluids to boost her gently.

While she was waiting for an X-ray they turned their attention to the paramedic, who was clutching his groin and looking pained.

Sarah’s eyes widened and brimmed with laughter. ‘What on earth did you do to her that she bit you there?’ she asked, astonished. ‘You must have really upset the poor woman.’

‘What? What woman?’

‘Mrs Pomfrey—wasn’t it her that bit you?’

The paramedic gave a pained chuckle. ‘Whatever gave you that idea? It was her dog that bit me—some bloody pit-bull cross, I reckon, from the jaws it had on it. She said it was a terrier—called it Fifi.’

‘Really?’ Sarah snapped some gloves on and grinned. ‘I thought the woman had bitten you—that’s what ambulance control said. Oh, well, off with your trousers, let’s have a squint at this. Did Fifi get anything vital?’

‘Bloody well tried,’ he muttered, undoing his zip and sliding his trousers down. Sarah helped him remove them, then the torn boxer shorts, just as Matt came in.

‘One chewed paramedic, name of Tom Hallam,’ she told him. ‘It was a dog called Fifi, by the way, not the patient, who bit him.’

Matt grinned. ‘That’s a relief. Human bites are usually dirtier than dog bites, but I think our old dear could only have gummed you to death, Tom. What’s the damage?’ Sarah swabbed the bloodstained skin and revealed a nasty tear and a couple of puncture wounds just at the top of his left thigh, in the groin area.

‘Looks like the extent of it,’ she told him.

Matt nodded, checking the area for any other puncture wounds. ‘Lucky. A couple of inches to the right and you’d have been singing falsetto. Maybe she thought you were the postman.’

‘The vet, more likely—and a couple of inches to the right and the dog would have been in orbit by now,’ Tom said with a grin, propping himself up to see the damage. ‘Reckon I got away with that quite lightly, considering.’

‘Absolutely. I think we need to suture that tear, though, Sarah, if you could give him some local?’

She was already there, drawing up the lignocaine. As she swabbed his thigh and lifted the syringe, Tom caught her wrist, laughter playing in his eyes.

‘Anybody says, “Just a little prick,” and I’ll sue,’ he said softly.

She froze for a second, and then the mirth just bubbled over. By the time Ryan came to find out what was going on, she was leaning against the wall, tears running down her cheeks, the half-naked paramedic was doubled up on the couch and Matt was sagging over the foot of it, wheezing.

Matt, speechless, waved a hand at Ryan and hissed something unintelligible. Sarah straightened, struggling to regain her composure, and Tom unwound himself and lay down again with a little groan.

Ryan glanced at the man, now lying flat, and arched a brow at Sarah and Matt. It was enough to set them all off again, and Ryan, shaking his head, walked off in amused disbelief.

It was twenty minutes before they managed to finish off and send the hapless paramedic on his way, still grinning.

They were just on their way to find Ryan for the rest of the A and E tour when the phone rang again, just as the waiting-room doors opened on a great swell of people, all unrelated, all arriving at the same time.

‘Told you it was too good to be true,’ Sarah said drily. ‘Let’s see how you cope under pressure.’

Well, was the simple answer. Any fears they’d had about the language barrier and different terminology were swept aside by the sheer volume of work they had to get through.

There were two RTAs, one serious with fatalities and the other a driving instructor and his pupil who had both been caught out by the black ice and had suffered minor whiplash injuries, sliding into the kerb. In between were all manner of walking wounded—what Matt called ‘street and treat’ cases.

‘They walk in off the street, you treat them and send them back out again—hence the term.’

Some of the ones who walked in didn’t walk out again, of course. One young man had been driving a tractor with a flail on it, cutting the hedge, and it had tangled in a wire fence. He felt a little stinging cut near his hipbone but ignored it, carried on and finished the hedge.

‘I just felt a bit strange at lunchtime and I can feel a little sharp lump—I thought I might have a splinter from the hedge,’ he told Sarah.

‘Hmm. Can you hang on? I’ll just get someone to look at that,’ she told him, and went to find Matt who was just finishing up with the whiplashed driving instructor. ‘Could you check a patient for me? It doesn’t look much but his blood pressure’s a bit low and he looks pretty rough—you know how you just feel something’s missing in the history?’

Only too well. What do you know?’

She filled him in, and he went into the cubicle and took a quick look at the ‘splinter’. ‘Right,’ he said calmly. ‘I think we need an X-ray to check this out. Just stay there, I’ll get them to come to you.’

The mobile X-ray machine was there in seconds, and within a very few minutes they had their answer—a piece of wire from the old fence had penetrated his abdomen and by a miracle had missed all but the smallest vessels.

‘He needs the OR,’ Matt said quietly. ‘Who do I need to speak to?’