Nursing The Doctor (9 page)

“Oh, yeah. I’d like more kids, for one thing. What about you, sis?”

“I don’t think I ever will.” She thought again of what Gram had said. Staying single was less complicated, that was certain. It was also lonely and disheartening at times, but she’d learned to cope.

Part of the reason she and Frannie were such good friends was because they were alike in that way. Frannie, too, had been wounded and wasn’t about to give her heart easily. Lily had never known her to go out with anyone more than two or three times.

Glancing at her brother’s happy face, she wondered if she ought to warn him that he could get hurt if he fell for Frannie.

But they were both adults, she reminded herself. The past didn’t have to dictate the future, did it? And one date did not a wedding make, either. She’d do well to keep her mouth shut.

“You could just find yourself a lover or two, you wouldn’t have to marry them.” Kaleb’s grin indicated that he was teasing, but Lily had often given the idea serious consideration.

She’d enjoyed her physical relationship with Richard. She missed having someone hold her in the night. Against her will, her thoughts went to Greg, his body a mass of casts and dressings. His social life, too, was going to be severely limited for an extended time.

His injuries had been life threatening. Would he ever recover fully? As a nurse, she knew it had a great deal to do with his mental state, how hard he was willing to work at rehabilitation, how determined he was to regain his health.

She wanted the best for him, she wanted him to make a miraculous recovery. He was fortunate, because he had lots of friends who’d be there to help along the way, and of course the entire medical staff at St. Joe’s turned the place upside down for one of their own.

She thought of the bond between herself and Kaleb and Gram, and wondered about Greg’s family. He’d told her he’d grown up with his grandparents, that his grandmother was dead and his grandfather had had a stroke. That’s probably why there weren’t relatives around him when she’d been there.

And as for the women he’d dated, his doctors had probably restricted visitors, she concluded. In another day or so there were bound to be dozens of ladies hovering around his bed, all eager to fulfill his slightest whim.

She certainly didn’t have to be concerned about any lack of visitors for Greg Brulotte, Lily chided herself. And once again she was spending far too much of her time thinking about him. She had a couple of days of holiday left. She ought to figure out how best to enjoy them.

Kaleb was on night shift tomorrow, so she’d do something totally frivolous before he left for work, like have a manicure, a pedicure, a facial, some surefire way to make herself feel pampered. And for the rest of her time off?

Nothing spectacular came to mind, and she concluded that she wasn’t really good at holidays.

The truth was, it would be a relief to get back to work on Monday morning.

CHAPTER SEVEN

By Monday afternoon Lily was both comfortable with and impressed by Dr. Joanne Duncan, the senior physician who’d taken over Greg’s position in the ER. She’d seen Dr. Duncan around St. Joe’s, but she’d never worked with her before.

Dr. Duncan was attractive, somewhere in her early forties and had a curly head of premature white hair. The way she was dealing with the young girl she and Lily were presently treating, and the way she’d efficiently narrowed down the list of possible reasons for Maria’s symptoms illustrated her patience and compassion as well as her medical acumen.

Her voice was soft and gentle, and she laid a comforting hand on the girl’s arm as she spoke.

“We’ve tested the blood sample I drew from you earlier, Maria, and it definitely indicates a pregnancy.”

“But I can’t be pregnant. My boyfriend and I never even did it,” the fourteen-year-old wailed.

“I mean, we never, you know, he never really put it in me, so I can’t be, right? You guys don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. Your fancy tests are all garbage. Besides, what’s that got to do with this pain in my shoulder?”

She glared at Lily and Dr. Duncan with coal-dark eyes that were both defiant and terrified.

“Maria, I absolutely believe you when you say you and your friend didn’t have vaginal intercourse, but he probably ejaculated near the entrance to your vagina, right?”

Maria flushed. Eyes downcast, she mumbled, “Maybe. Sometimes.”

“Sperm are determined little creatures, and they’ve managed to swim up through the secretions in your vagina and impregnate one of your eggs. Now the reason you’re having such severe pain in that shoulder is because you have what we call an ectopic pregnancy, and shoulder pain sometimes goes along with that condition. That means that the fertilized ovum has implanted itself outside of the uterine cavity, which is here.”

Dr. Duncan had taken the time to dig up an illustrated chart of the female reproductive system and was using it to illustrate her words. “Yours is in the fallopian tube, Maria, right about here, and that’s what’s causing the hemorrhaging. What we have to do is get it out of there, and in order to do that we have to operate. And I’m so sorry, dear, but we must have your parents’ consent for that.”

“But my dad’ll kill me if he finds out,” the girl cried, bursting into tears. “Both of them will. My mom, too.”

Joanne Duncan shook her head in emphatic denial. “No, they won’t. I’ll speak to them if you like. They’ll naturally be upset at first, but they love you, Maria. They want the best for you, and that means an operation as soon as possible. Now please, dear, give us your parents’ phone number. This procedure needs to be done right away.”

Together, they soothed Maria as best they could, and in a few more moments, Lily was hurrying to the phone with the number Maria had reluctantly supplied.

“Her mother’ll be here in half an hour,” Lily informed Dr. Duncan a few moments later. “Her husband’s at work. He’ll come down when he’s off shift.”

“Good. We’ve got her blood cross-matched for possible transfusion, and the OR knows she’s coming up soon.”

Just then there was a flurry of activity at the triage desk, and Lily and Dr. Duncan hurried over. A short man with a protruding belly, middle-aged and obviously in severe pain, had just vomited all over the desk. His skin had a distinct yellow tinge, and he moaned and clutched at his midsection as Lily and another nurse helped him into an examination cubicle.

The clerk hadn’t had a chance to fill in the information form, so Lily asked questions as Dr. Duncan palpated the man’s abdomen and the other nurse drew the blood Duncan had ordered for testing.

“Victor Nefstead,” the man groaned in response to Lily’s question, and as she wrote the name, something clicked in her memory. “You were in here before, weren’t you, Mr. Nefstead? Several weeks ago.”

Lily had been working afternoons, and Nefstead had come in near the end of her shift complaining of extreme abdominal pain.

“Your home address?”

“I’m between places,” he mumbled.

Lily wrote down “No fixed address” and went on asking questions, filling in the gasped responses, but something about that earlier visit was making her uneasy.

She remembered that the ER had been crazy that evening. There’d been a gas explosion in a downtown flophouse and there were gurneys everywhere, with people in varying degrees of distress.

Nefstead had had to wait for some time. Lily had finally given him a shot of Demerol for his pain.

She was pretty certain that Nefstead had left before a doctor could examine him, but that wasn’t what was bothering her.

She remembered now that after giving Nefstead the shot, she’d accidentally stuck herself with the needle she’d used on him. Needle sticks happened all too frequently to nurses and technically should be reported, but the ER was so busy that night Lily had forgotten the incident by the time her shift was finally over.

And when she got home, there’d been total pandemonium because that was the night Gram had started the fire in the kitchen.

“We’re going to admit you, Mr. Nefstead, so that we can pin down what’s making you sick,” Dr. Duncan announced as she completed her examination.

“The hell you say. I ain’t gonna be in no hospital.”

“Mr. Nefstead, your symptoms are severe, and the only way we can determine what’s wrong with any certainty is to have you admitted. Now I know it’s not anyone’s idea of a good time, but neither is this pain you’re experiencing, right?”

Dr. Duncan was very persuasive, and Nefstead seemed to give in. The doctor administered pain medication, and then she was called away to treat a child who’d fallen out of a tree.

Maria’s mother arrived, and Lily explained the dangers of ectopic pregnancy to the angry, hysterical woman. Maria’s mother was first generation Portuguese, and getting her to understand what was happening wasn’t easy. At last she signed the consent, Maria was whisked upstairs to the OR and Lily popped into Nefstead’s cubicle to see how he was doing.

He was gone. One of the other nurses remembered seeing him slipping out of the door of the ER. Once again he’d left without a thorough workup or diagnosis.

It was slow for the rest of Lily’s shift, which was probably a good thing, she concluded, because her mind wasn’t entirely on her work.

She’d just realized, with a terrible sinking feeling in her gut, that she’d donated blood after the needle stick, blithely filling out the consent forms, forgetting about the accident.

Nefstead was sick. His symptoms troubled her. She intended to watch the computer closely for the results of the blood tests Dr. Duncan had ordered.

Patricia Zanick was coming on shift as Lily was leaving. “You heard how Doc Brulotte is doing, Lily? Mary said a bunch of you were up to see him the other day.”

“I haven’t seen him since then,” Lily said. “He was in a lot of pain that day.”

“I was just talking to a friend who works up on ortho. She says he sure isn’t the easiest patient they’ve ever had. He hollers at the staff, and when his mother and brothers came to see him last night he called a code and ordered security to have them removed.”

“Wow. He’s really being difficult. I wonder why he wouldn’t want his relatives visiting?”

“There must be pretty bad feelings between them for him to call security,” Patricia commented. “The staff up there figure he’s a spoiled, self-centered egotist. I told my friend he’s not really like that, but apparently they’re counting the days until he gets transferred to rehab.”

“He’s making it awfully hard on himself.” Lily knew that the nursing staff would give Greg good care whatever his attitude, but it was simply human nature to do extra for the patients who appreciated your efforts.

The nurses could, if Greg made their lives too difficult, decide to teach him a lesson. He was, after all, totally dependent on their assistance.

Lily was out the doors of the ER and heading for her car when she impulsively turned and reentered the hospital, quickly making her way along the twisting corridors that led to the elevators that would take her up to orthopedics.

It wouldn’t hurt to drop in say hi, she rationalized. After all, they’d worked closely together for months in the ER. It wasn’t fair to abandon him when he most needed support.

He was lying with his head turned the other way, and he didn’t immediately sense that she was there. There was a bouquet of flowers in a vase on his bedside table, and dozens of cards were stacked in a neat pile beside them.

The other patient, an elderly man, had visitors grouped around his bed, talking and laughing, but Greg was alone.

His leg was still in traction, but Lily noted that the cast on his arm was no longer the heavy plaster he’d had the other day. A lighter, Lucite cast had taken its place.

“Hi, Greg. How’s it going?”

He turned his head. Some of the swelling had gone down, although his face still looked as if he’d been in a barroom brawl. She noted that his beard was heavier than it had been the other day. It made him look brooding, and the scowl he aimed her way didn’t lighten the atmosphere at all. He didn’t respond to her greeting.

She was immediately sorry she’d come, although she made a real effort to sound cheerful.

“I’ve just finished downstairs. I thought I’d come by for a moment and see how you’re doing.”

“How the hell do you think I’m doing,” he growled. “I can’t reach that bloody glass to get myself a drink of water, and the nursing staff are either all deaf and blind or my call light is disconnected, because I’ve been trying it now for one deuce of a long time.”