More Than Caring

‘Well, I can tell you that she’s been in your old city hospital for nearly a month and needs another week or ten days of your gentle ministrations before she’ll be ready to go home again. Apart from that, I’ll just tell you that she’s either been remarkably unlucky or extremely lucky. I’ll leave it to you to decide when you’ve spoken to her.’

With that, he hung up, leaving Lauren spluttering.

At the end, there, she’d been sure there had been an almost playful tone to his voice and it certainly wasn’t like the formidable man she’d first met to taunt her with a ‘wait and see’ situation.

Now she could hardly wait for the woman to arrive. She was also going to have to find some way to turn the tables on him, unless…

She grinned when she remembered what day it was. Tonight she was due to teach the second self-defence class, and if Marc fulfilled his intention of providing her with a demonstration opponent, she was going to be able to do more than turn the tables on him. She might actually be able to turn his whole world upside down.

She grinned at the image of Marc lying in a crumpled heap at her feet, the victim of yet another crime-busting manoeuvre.

‘Mrs Roker’s here, Sister,’ said a voice behind her, and she suddenly realised that she was still standing there with the telephone clutched in her hand and an inane grin on her face. She hadn’t even had time to run a critical eye over the bed that her new charge was to occupy to make sure that everything was exactly the way it should be.

‘Good. I’m coming,’ she said hastily, cradling the phone and smoothing her hands over her uniform before she hurried out into the ward.

‘Please, Sister, call me Cissy,’ her new patient requested when they’d finally got her settled into her bed.

‘If that’s what you’d prefer,’ Lauren agreed as she retrieved the thick file of notes that had arrived with her latest charge. ‘It looks as if by the time I’ve read all this lot I’ll know your complete life’s history.’

‘Oh, no, Sister,’ Cissy exclaimed. ‘That’s just the last couple of months. The rest of my life would probably fit on a single sheet of paper, and that includes having four children.’

‘Wow.’ Lauren blinked when she had her first inkling of what Marc had been hinting at. ‘How about if you give me the edited highlights as an introduction?’

‘Well, Sister, I think you’d better make yourself comfortable. This is more of a saga than a two-minute short story.’

Lauren chuckled as she perched one hip on the edge of the bed, careful not to move the cage keeping the weight of the bedclothes away from Cissy’s injured leg.

‘It all started when I went in to have my blood pressure checked just after my seventieth birthday,’ she began. ‘Well, my doctor—not one of the ones at Denison Memorial, by the way; we live a little further afield—he said it was fine and did I have any problems he could help me with? I said I was fit as a fiddle apart from the nasty scrape on my shin from where I’d caught it when I walked into the edge of the coffee-table. He took a quick look at it and suggested I went straight along to the practice nurse to have it cleaned up and a protective dressing put on it.’

Lauren suddenly noticed that the room seemed strangely quiet. A quick glance around told her that almost every person in the room had tuned into the tale and was waiting with bated breath for Cissy to continue.

‘Well,’ Cissy went on, her softly lined face animated, ‘she cleaned it up and put some stuff on it. Then, because my skin’s a bit thin, she put a bandage on instead of a sticky plaster and told me to come back in three days to have the dressing changed.’

Apparently blithely unaware of her audience, she drew a quick breath and continued. ‘It was a different nurse the next time and when she took the bandage off she said it was an awful waste of dressings for such a little scrape. I tried to tell her what the first nurse had said about my skin but she got all huffy.’

Cissy stuck her nose in the air and put on an affected voice. “‘I do know what I’m doing, Mrs Roker. I’m a fully qualified nurse, you know.”’

Lauren couldn’t help joining in the round of chuckles. The woman was evidently a wicked mimic as well as a natural storyteller.

‘Anyway, when she put the sticky plaster on, I had to tell her that she’d stretched it too tight and it was pulling the skin. Well, she took hold of the corner and whipped it up—the way you nurses often do to get it over and done with—and she took off a chunk of skin with it.’

This time it was a chorus of sympathetic murmurs and winces and Lauren noticed that Cissy had started playing to the gallery.

‘She stuck it straight back down again, pretending that she hadn’t realised what she’d done, and told me to come back in four days, but by that time it was pretty sore.’

Lauren guessed that that was probably an under-statement. If this was the first real medical problem she’d undergone in her life, Cissy obviously wasn’t one to complain lightly.

‘It was the first nurse again, thank goodness, and she was cross when she saw the plaster, especially when I told her I’d explained about the bandage to the other nurse. Then, when she took it off and saw the mess underneath, she had to ask the doctor to come in—not my own doctor because he was away on holiday by then.’

‘So, how was the graze you’d needed the dressing on in the first place? Was it healing while all this was going on or had it got worse, too?’ Lauren asked.

‘It was nearly gone, dear,’ Cissy said. ‘It was the place where that other nurse had pulled the skin off that had flared up, so the doctor gave me some antibiotics and told me to come back in three days to have the dressings changed again. Only I couldn’t wait three days because the pain got so bad and my leg kept swelling up more and more.’

‘You saw your own doctor again?’ Lauren was suddenly aware just how long this tale might go on for if she didn’t give it a gentle nudge along.

‘No, it was the locum standing in for my own doctor while he was away on holiday. He took one look and told me I needed to go to the hospital straight away. Not Denison either, but the big one in the city.’

Bearing in mind that this had all happened nearly a month ago, Lauren was almost dreading what would come next. It must have been a serious problem to have kept her in hospital all this time.

‘Well, when I got to the hospital they poked and prodded and took blood and X-rays and then a young man asked me to sign a piece of paper. “What’s that for?” I asked. “For your amputation tomorrow morning,” he said as calm as you like. “We’re going to be cutting your leg off because you’ve got gangrene.” And he never batted an eyelid.’