The Doctors' Christmas Reunion

How many times—?

Enough!

The past belonged in the past. Here and now, he needed one hundred percent concentration on Jonah. Electrodes already attached to his patient’s body told the monitor everything was stable, and Ellie would keep an eye on it while he cut carefully into the pale skin on the lower abdomen, Tony beside him to mop the blood and cauterise any small bleeders.

Andy glanced across the table, and by chance met Ellie’s eyes above her mask. She winked at him—something she’d done a thousand times before—a ‘going well’ kind of wink, but the sight of such a silly, insignificant facial tic brought an arrow of pain into his innermost being. One he tried to ignore...

The infection was obvious, the culprit a small piece of metal—a tiny scrap had broken free from a barb on the wire. No wonder the boy had been complaining of pain.

Andy irrigated the wound and searched for any secondary sites of infection, but everything was clean and clear.

‘I won’t leave a drain,’ he said, as much to himself as to the staff around the table. ‘In that position it could be easily dislodged, especially considering he’s an adventurous young boy.’

He closed the wound, and nodded to Ellie to reverse the anaesthetic, then stood back while Tony did the dressing.

He should go and change. This team knew what they were doing. The boy would be transferred to a bed and wheeled through to the small recovery room. Ellie was in charge of him now and would be watching over him until he was fully conscious and aware of his surroundings.

But sometimes Andy needed to watch his wife—to watch and wonder what had happened to them to end up on either side of what was now an abyss.

Was it his fault?

Those final, hurtful words about the state of their marriage had certainly marked the end of life as they’d known it, but what had brought them to that?

Did he still feel a lingering resentment about the money the IVF had cost?

But it had been he who’d first suggested IVF, so it couldn’t be that that burned inside him.

Yet something did.

He’d been keen to have a family—as keen as Ellie was—but that had been back before he’d known about the pain of loss; how much each failure would hurt, although that was nothing compared to the terrible piercing pain of losing the baby.

But worst of all had been watching Ellie’s pain and being unable to take it away from her. That was the part he’d found so bloody impossible...

It wasn’t that she’d pushed him away at the time, more that she’d wrapped herself inside it—made a cocoon of her pain—and had no longer been part of him, no, of them, cutting their oneness...

Now Andy watched Ellie sadly as she followed the trolley out of the theatre, before heading for the shower. There was nothing like water to wash away pointless suppositions and what-ifs that were too late...

Ellie waited as the youngster came around, checked he was sufficiently conscious to be given a few sips of water, and tell her who and where he was, then she departed, hurrying now, as she’d been due to see a patient at one-thirty and it was already close to two.

But her thoughts remained firmly stuck on Andy.

His skill as a surgeon was undeniable, and while still at university he’d even considered making a career of it, but during their time in Africa he’d realised that his skill lay with people; with helping them, comforting them and, yes, healing them when it was humanly possible.

And it had fired his determination to return to the isolated regions of Australia—areas always crying out for doctors—where his patients would be people he would get to know and care about, not simply a person needing an appendectomy or a new knee.

Ellie caught up as she worked through the afternoon’s patients, so had seen the last one out when Chelsea returned, laden with bags and filled with excitement.

‘You should rest,’ she told the young woman as she locked the surgery door then walked up the front steps and along the veranda to the room Chelsea had chosen.

It had belonged to one of Andy’s sisters, and although Ellie had put fresh sheets on the bed in case of unexpected visitors, she’d done little in the way of redecorating, so it still had posters of old rock bands on the walls and a bookcase full of science-fiction books that the whole Fraser family had loved to read.

Ellie half-smiled, remembering how she’d felt an utter alien herself among people who knew a genre she’d never read as well as the Frasers knew sci-fi.

After depositing Chelsea’s few possessions, Ellie showed her the nearest bathroom, then led her into the kitchen.

‘You’ll probably remember that the kitchen is the centre of the house, it’s where we mainly live,’ she said, adding rather ruefully, ‘That’s when we’re actually at home.’

And living together... She had to talk to Andy!

She’d barely finished the thought when her cellphone buzzed in her pocket.

‘Can you come back up, Ellie? Jonah’s temperature has shot up, and his heart rate is ninety-five. I’m afraid I must have missed something and he could be heading into sepsis.’

‘I’ll be right there.’

She looked at Chelsea, new in town, still uncertain of her welcome, and crossed the room to give her a hug.

‘I hate having to leave you like this on your first day here but I have to go up to the hospital, and from what Andy said I could be a while,’ she said. ‘There’s food in the fridge, or you could walk up the road and get a burger and chips. The TV in the sitting room only has a couple of channels, but feel free to use it, and there are plenty of books around the place. Do you think you’ll be okay?’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Chelsea assured her. ‘I sat up all night on the train and I’m exhausted. If it’s all right with you, I’ll just get a drink of milk and a sandwich and go straight to bed.’

‘Bless you,’ Ellie said. ‘But I’ll leave both my and Andy’s numbers and if you’re at all worried about anything, please phone one of us.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Chelsea assured her. ‘I have stayed here before and I know my aunt and uncle were often called out at night. You go and do your work.’

But as Ellie walked swiftly up the road to the hospital, she couldn’t help thinking of the young woman alone in the big house, and wonder just what she was thinking, not to mention what Andy was going to make of it all...

She arrived to find Andrea, a senior nurse who had specialist anaesthetic training, already in Theatre.

‘I’ll need you to assist,’ Andy said, as Ellie walked in. ‘There’s gear set out in the ante-room, and Tony will help you scrub.’

Ellie took a deep breath. It wasn’t that she hadn’t assisted in operations before. It was part of their medical training, and they’d done a lot in Africa, but surgery had always made her feel anxious, as if she had no business having her hands in someone else’s body. It was impersonal, yet at the same time deeply moving.

Shaking away the thoughts, she changed, scrubbed her hands and arms and held them up for Tony to slide on the gloves. He tied an extra apron around her waist, and she was ready.

‘Will you enlarge the wound you made earlier?’ she asked Andy as she took her place beside him.

A quick headshake.

‘It was big enough, but I must have missed something.’

The tightness of his voice told her how stressed he was—stressed because he felt he’d somehow failed the boy.

‘There was nothing obvious,’ she reminded him, ‘and you didn’t want to interfere with his bowel by poking around under it.’

She paused then added, in a deep, terrifying voice, ‘Never touch the bowel.’

Andy laughed. Her mimicry of a lecturer they’d had in third year had always been good, and the words took him back to when, as students, they and their friends had used the words in more earthy ways.