The Consultant's New-Found Family

This was a very straightforward case and she really shouldn’t be asking a registrar for help with it, but Joel was good at the Sir Galahad bit. And if he did coastguard rescues, he’d probably dealt with a lot of really frightened children—boys around Sam’s age who went out on an inflatable full of bravado but then got trapped by the tide and ended up in tears.

And she’d just bet he’d be able to charm Sam’s mum. No woman would be immune to a smile from a man this gorgeous.

She screwed up her nose. ‘Have you got a minute, Joel?’

‘What’s up?’

She closed the curtain behind her and lowered her voice so her patient and his mother wouldn’t hear. ‘I’ve got a young lad who’s fallen off his bike. His arm’s a bit of a mess—and I’m not sure if he’s broken or dislocated something. He’s a bit chary about letting me look at it, and he’s scared stiff of needles. I need something to distract him so I can get a proper look and work out if he needs an X-ray. And I could really do with getting the mum to stop nagging him.’ She didn’t dare tell Joel she wanted him to use his sex appeal on the mum—because that would be a dead giveaway that she found him sexy. She’d concentrate on the little boy’s needs. ‘Are you good with kids, by any chance?’

Joel gave her an unreadable glance. ‘You could say that.’ Then the odd expression on his face vanished, and he smiled at her. ‘Want me to come and talk him into letting us have a look?’

Oh, yes. That smile would definitely work on Sam’s mum. It had just made her own knees go weak. She nodded. ‘Please.’

‘OK. I’ll distract him and you sort out the business end of the needle—assuming you’re comfortable with that?’

‘Sure. I’ll use a fine needle—and I’ll warm the local an-aesthetic and buffer it.’ That would help to make the injection less painful, and if Joel could keep Sam distracted she could inject the anaesthetic really slowly, which made it easier for children to tolerate. The last thing she wanted to do was make the little boy’s fear of needles worse.

Joel followed her back into the cubicle and allowed her to introduce him to Sam and his mother.

Within seconds Joel had Sam laughing at a stream of silly jokes and had drawn him into talking about his favourite football team. Lisa prepared a syringe, waited for Joel’s signal and swiftly eased the needle into place.

Sam was so busy telling Joel about the last football match he’d gone to with his dad he barely noticed what Lisa was doing. Gently she removed the needle and nodded to Joel.

‘Right, then, Super Sam. Going to let us look at that arm now?’ Joel asked.

‘I…’ The little boy went white. ‘You’re not going to put a needle in me now, are you?’

‘No. Because I’ve already done it,’ Lisa said quietly.

He stared at her, clearly surprised. ‘But…but I didn’t feel a thing!’

‘Told you I was good at this.’ She winked at him. ‘I’m a doctor. I don’t tell fibs. Any second now your arm’s going to stop hurting.’

Sam’s mother smiled in relief. Now Sam had stopped making a fuss, she seemed to have calmed down, too. Or maybe—as Lisa suspected—she’d been so stunned by how good-looking Joel was that she’d forgotten to be angry with her son. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘That’s what we’re here for. Now, let’s have a look at that arm.’ Gently, Joel examined the boy and Lisa noted the way he was checking Sam’s pulse and hand for any circulatory or neural problems. The discoloration of Sam’s skin, the swelling and the odd angle of his arm made Lisa think the little boy had a fracture. Joel clearly thought so too because he said, ‘I’m pretty sure you’ve broken your arm, so I’m going to send you for an X-ray to see what’s happened.’

‘Will it mean I have to have a plaster?’ Sam asked.

‘Yup. Though what sort of plaster depends on the type of fracture,’ Joel said. ‘And I need to know what sort of fracture it is before we can make it better. Do you know what an X-ray is?’

‘Yes, we did it at school. It’s like a camera and it shows your bones.’

‘That’s right. And the best thing is, it doesn’t hurt,’ Joel said with a smile.

‘I’ll get you booked in and clean up your arm while we’re waiting for a free slot on the X-ray machines,’ Lisa said.

‘All right,’ Sam said, perking up.

The local anaesthetic was working, she thought. Clearly the pain had eased, and Sam had turned from a sullen child into a chatty, interested little boy.

‘Can I see my X-ray?’ he asked.

‘Of course you can. Do you think you might want to be a doctor when you grow up?’

‘And have a white coat and stethoscope like yours? Mmm. I think I’d like to make people better. But not if someone’s sick over me.’ Sam pulled a face. ‘It smells disgusting when someone throws up at school. The classroom stinks for ages afterwards. And it always looks like chopped carrots. Gross!’

Lisa laughed. ‘I’m afraid we get quite a bit of that in here.’ Particularly on Friday and Saturday nights, when people tended to overdo things in the pubs and clubs.

Sam looked disappointed. ‘Oh. Maybe I won’t be a doctor, then.’

‘I’ll be back in two ticks, when I’ve booked you in,’ Lisa said, ‘and then we’ll get all the gunge out of your arm.’

Joel left the cubicles with her.

‘Thanks for that,’ she said. ‘It really helped.’

‘No worries.’

Just what he’d said when he’d rescued her on the hill. She smiled wryly. ‘You seem to be making a habit of this.’

‘Of what?’

‘Rescuing me,’ Lisa said. ‘First on that hill, now today when I needed help with a scared kid and a mum who’d lost her patience. I owe you.’

‘Hey, everyone gets the odd case where they need help. We’re a team here. Anyway, you’ll probably return the favour by the end of the week. Kids I can do. Geriatric men—now, they loathe me.’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said with a grin. She couldn’t imagine anyone loathing Joel Mortimer. There was just something about him: he was the sort men would want to be their friend and women would want to be their lover. Those gorgeous eyes…She could just imagine them, slightly hooded, looking at her across a crowded room. A private signal, telling her exactly what he was going to do when they were alone…

Oh, lord. She needed to get her thoughts under control. Fast. Joel wasn’t free and she didn’t do relationships anyway. And fantasising about the man who was practically her boss would definitely end in tears.

‘Just call me if you need me,’ Joel said.

Down, girl, Lisa scolded her libido silently. She wasn’t going to make a move on Joel Mortimer. Even if he did have the most beautiful eyes in the world and a sensual mouth that made her quiver. ‘Thanks,’ she said, in the most professional tones she could muster, and went to book Sam’s X-ray before she said something really stupid to Joel.

She cleaned all the grit out of Sam’s arm while they were waiting for the slot in Radiology and immobilised his arm in a sling. She asked for two films—one lateral and one antero-posterior, both including the joints and covering the entire radius and ulna so she didn’t miss any problems—and was just checking them against a lightbox when Joel came up beside her. ‘How’s it looking?’

‘Greenstick,’ she said, showing him the section on the X-ray where it was clear that one side of the ulna shaft had bent while the other side had broken. ‘I’m just checking in case there’s an ephiphysal injury. It looks normal, but…’

‘Worried about a Salter-Harris type V?’ Joel asked.

She nodded. With a Salter-Harris Type V injury—also known as a crush injury to the growing plate—the X-ray could look absolutely normal. It was notoriously difficult to diagnose the injury, but it had the greatest risk of causing the growth plates to fuse prematurely so the limb would always be too short.

‘It’s very rare,’ Joel reassured her, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the films. ‘And it’s more common on the distal tibia. It’s much more likely you’d find a Salter-Harris II fracture—’ this was where the epiphysis separated from the bone, with a shape almost like a reverse tick ‘—but it looks as if he’s been lucky.’ He traced the outline of the cortex: a procedure Lisa had been taught to do as a house officer to make sure she didn’t miss a subtle fracture by mistaking it for an ossification centre on the growing bone. ‘Anything else you’d be worried about?’

‘With an ulnar fracture, you need to check for a Monteggia fracture-dislocation,’ she said. If you fell onto your ulna, as Sam had done, you could dislocate the head of the radius, the other main bone of the forearm, and the dislocation needed to be treated as well as the fracture. ‘But there aren’t any signs of it on the X-rays.’

‘Agreed. This looks like a pretty straightforward case. What’s your treatment plan?’ Joel asked.