The One Day You Were My Husband (18)

The beautiful man shook his head, apologizing silently. He made to leave, but the officer put up a hand to stop him. “Also, we need to know what sort of injuries the victim has sustained, because we believe we’ve now found and apprehended the hit-and-run driver, so…”

The monitor alarm escalated.

“Out!” I shouted, as the world around me narrowed. Deniz’s lung had completely collapsed, putting pressure on her heart. She was close to cardiac arrest. It was too late to open a new chest drain kit, and besides, I had nobody to help me. So I reached for a scalpel and cut the chest drain stitch, pulled out the drain, and then put my finger in through the hole.

Closing my eyes, praying, I swept my finger around the inside of the chest cavity.

The room disappeared. Just me, the patient, and a growing tide of primal anger. Yet again, I was alone and nobody was coming to help. Lost in a crowd, the people who should be there to back me up nowhere to be seen. All of them too busy. Too fucking busy.

Blood gushed from Deniz’s chest and her rhythm began to normalize on the monitor. I yelled again for help. The A&E reg and a trauma nurse ran in, pulling on new gloves. “What’s happening?” the registrar asked, bewildered.

“The patient tensioned. I had to do a finger thoracostomy.”

“Why?”

“The drain wasn’t draining. It had slipped and kinked.”

He started work on her. “I think that was a little premature—” he began.

“She’s stable because I had to stick my finger into her chest,” I interrupted. “Your stitches weren’t tight enough.”

There was a weighted silence. I realized my fists were balled, as if I was preparing to punch the man. He was a decent enough guy, this one. Chris. I’d done one of my F2 rotations under him down in Epsom.

He looked around at me for a fleeting second, and I held eye contact. Another thing Yanika had taught me. “You did the right thing,” he said after a beat. “Good work.”

He wasn’t happy, but he was a good enough physician to climb down. Plenty weren’t.

“I’ve got it from here,” he said, turning back to Deniz. “Can you show the police officer out and get Joel and Faisel in here.”

I wheeled around. The officer, unbelievably, was still there, by the door.

“What?” There was no forethought, no consciousness. It just burst out of me. “I told you to leave. Why the hell are you still here?”

The policeman stared at me, shocked at first, then angry.

“Get out!” I shouted. I couldn’t stop myself. “Get out! Now!”

“Carrie!” Chris hissed. “Stop.”

“I’ll be reporting this behavior,” the police officer said, moving toward the door. “To your superiors.”

“And so will I, to yours,” I said. I felt dangerously good.

“Plenty of eyewitnesses, too,” the policeman noted, leaving.

That’s when Johan became more than just a good-looking man on the sidelines. He was standing just outside the door as I took off my apron and gloves.

“We had no business being here,” he told the policeman. “The doctor clearly asked you to leave, twice, and you ignored her.”

The officer shook his head, red-faced, smiling condescendingly as he walked away from all of us.

Chris called to me from Deniz’s bedside. “Carrie. What’s got into you?”

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. My hands were shaking.

“She had every right to be angry,” Johan said. “The policeman was being an asshole. She shouted for help and nobody came, this woman seemed to be dying, and she saved her life, all on her own. I think anyone would need a moment after that.”

Chris nodded briefly, gave me another searching look, and then got back to work.

I looked straight at Johan. An artwork of a man will always be either vacant or untrustworthy, Mum had told me. Never be so stupid as to be seduced by someone like that.

I called in Joel and Faisel from Resus 2 and then went down the corridor, followed by Johan, to find the police officer. He was scribbling angrily in his notebook.

“Follow me, please,” I said, directing him out of resus. This time he shifted without comment. Sweat was beading between his eyebrows and for a moment I felt sorry for him. A manual chest clearance is a brutal procedure to witness, especially when followed by a verbal ambush.

Once through the doors he stalked off, arms held slightly out from his sides to display the batons on his belt.

“Are you OK?”

I turned to see that the beautiful man hadn’t left. There was a slight smile on his face. “You were quite something in there,” he added.

“I’m fine. Thank you. And apologies. I’m not sure what I…”

He shrugged, as if it were nothing that I’d just yelled at a police officer while blood dripped from my hands. “The guy was an asshole. And you were under a lot of stress.”

“We’re trained for that, though. I don’t know what happened.”

He watched me until I looked away, bringing myself back to the present moment, to reality. I was at work in a busy trauma center. It was January; darkness had already fallen outside. There would be snow tonight, they’d said. I would need to get up even earlier tomorrow and I had several hours’ study tonight. And now the possibility of a disciplinary.