Hot Docs On Call: One Night To Forever?. Kate Hardy

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       CHAPTER TWO

      DOMINIC PICKED UP the patient card and went to check on the new patient before she went down to X-ray.

      He was a trauma surgeon and so he found himself working in Accident and Emergency a lot and often pitched in.

      ‘Hey,’ he said as he went into the cubicle where the little girl had been placed. ‘Penelope, I’m Dominic.’

      ‘Penny,’ she confidently corrected him. ‘And you’re new here.’

      ‘I’ve been here for nearly six months now.’

      ‘Penny hasn’t been an inpatient for ages,’ Julia said. ‘We’ve had a good run.’

      ‘Well, that’s good to hear.’

      The little girl’s medical notes were so extensive he could be there till midnight if he read them, but Dominic had caught up on the vitals and Julia was very well versed in her daughter’s health.

      Penelope Craig had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, or HLHS, a rare congenital defect. She had had surgery as a baby and all her life she had been either an inpatient or outpatient at Paddington’s. She had presented a few times with infections and that was the concern now.

      Examining Penny, Dominic saw that just from the minor exertion of sitting forward she became breathless and the slight blue tinge to her lips darkened.

      And of course, as Victoria would have well known, it wasn’t just a chest X-ray that was required.

      Dominic took some bloods as a baseline. Penny would require a nurse escort if she went out of the department for her X-ray. But it wasn’t to keep staff levels up that had Dominic call for a portable chest X-ray—he was concerned enough that she was really rather unwell.

      And so he paged the on-call cardiologist and asked him to come down and see Penny here rather than waiting until she was on the ward.

      It was a locum that he spoke to.

      Again.

      With the prospect of Paddington’s closing down, a lot of the regular staff had gone elsewhere and it was proving difficult to attract new staff when no one really knew if the hospital would even be here next year.

      Having spoken to the locum, Dominic went back into cubicle four to inform patient and parent of the new plan.

      ‘Look what Penny just found,’ Julia said as Penny lay there holding up an earring.

      Dominic didn’t need to be told whose it was; he had already noticed that Victoria had been wearing earrings this evening when usually she did not.

      He noticed rather too many details about Victoria.

      And even her earrings had intrigued him. They were large diamonds, and during their discussions he had been trying very hard not to picture Victoria dressed up to go out.

      ‘It’s Victoria’s earring,’ Penny said to Karen as she came in.

      ‘There it is.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve just had a call from Victoria to ask me to look out for it. You’ve saved me a job. Good girl, Penny. I’ll put it in the safe. Oh, and, Dominic, there’s a phone call for you.’

      ‘Take a message, please.’

      ‘It’s your father,’ Karen said. ‘And he says that it’s important.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      Deliberately Dominic left his mobile phone in his locker at the start of each shift. He did not want his private life intruding on work.

      Yet it was about to.

      This call was, in fact, three days overdue.

      Yes, there was a reason he hadn’t been sunny on that day.

      The receiver had been left lying on the bench and Dominic hesitated. He let out the tense breath that he was holding on to. He had had months to prepare for this moment and had examined it from many angles, but even as he picked up the receiver, still he hadn’t worked out what he would say.

      ‘Hello.’ His voice was as abrupt as it had been with Victoria.

      ‘Dominic...’ William MacBride cleared his throat before speaking on. ‘I’m just calling to let you know that as of an hour ago you’re an uncle.’

      And still, even with the baby three days overdue, Dominic did not know what to say.

      ‘Dominic?’ William prompted.

      ‘Are they well?’

      ‘They’re both doing fine.’

      Dominic knew that he should ask what Lorna and Jamie had had and whether or not he had a niece or nephew.

      He looked out to the busy Emergency Department, and given it was a children’s hospital, of course there were children everywhere. There was Penny, being wheeled over to rhesus for her portable X-ray and in the background there was the sound of babies crying.

      Dominic fought daily to save these precious little lives and so, naturally, he should be relieved to hear that mother and baby were well and doing fine.

      And somewhere he was.

      Yet СКАЧАТЬ