Emergency Doctor and Cinderella. Melanie Milburne

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СКАЧАТЬ was for the sake of the patient. ‘Mrs Forster has been taken for a CT scan. This is Hamish, and his mother, Karen Young. Hamish here has had a persistent discharge from his right nostril for about a week, but this morning the discharge was blood-stained. We were about to have a look inside, weren’t we, Hamish? You don’t mind if Dr Taylor watches, do you? I bet she’s never seen a braver young man around here.’

      The young boy of about three stared wide-eyed but trustingly at Eamon, who picked up a nasal speculum and bright light. Erin was privately a little impressed at how biddable the child became under Eamon’s care. She’d had a child with a foreign object up its nose only a month ago, and the floor above had heard its screams when she had tried to retrieve it. In the end she had handed the case over to the ear, nose and throat surgeon who had removed a plastic bead under general anaesthesia.

      ‘There,’ Eamon said as he showed the child and his mother the bright blue bead he had found. ‘You were a champion, Hamish. I’ve seen kids twice your age who would have screamed the place down.’

      ‘Weally?’ Hamish asked, still a little bug-eyed.

      ‘You betcha,’ Eamon said, and then he turned and winked at the young mother. ‘You can take him home now, Mrs Young. He’s good to go. Just put the ointment Nurse will get for you up his nostril three times a day, and massage it in a bit, until you’ve finished the whole tube.’

      Once the young mother and her son had left, Eamon turned to Erin. ‘I’d like a word with you if you are free, Dr Taylor.’

      Erin gave him a wary look. ‘I have a patient who should be back from X-ray by now.’

      ‘That would be Mr Aston next door?’ he asked.

      She flattened her mouth at his expression. ‘I thought the plan was to have some sort of continuity of care around here,’ she said, keeping her voice down in case the patient had returned. ‘If I go off for a lengthy discussion with you, who’s going to follow up Mr Aston?’

      ‘Meet me in my office once you have finished assessing him,’ he said, pushing the curtains aside. ‘Unless, of course, anything urgent comes in.’

      Erin blew out a breath once he moved past. It would be just her luck that today would be one of those quiet days, leaving her with no excuse to avoid another confrontation with him.

      Mr Aston was being wheeled back to the examination bay when Erin returned, after responding to an HMO’s phone call about another patient who had been admitted the day before.

      Mr Aston’s urine sample was positive for blood and his X-ray almost certainly showed a stone at the end of the right ureter. Erin ordered a rapid-sequence urinarytract CT, which confirmed the finding, and she explained the results to the patient and his wife. ‘You have renal colic, Mr Aston, which basically means you have a kidney stone. Very often stones pass spontaneously, but occasionally they don’t.’

      ‘What happens then?’ Mrs Aston asked.

      ‘If the stone doesn’t pass, it may have to be removed under anaesthesia. We’d get a urologist to see you to do a cystoscopy—put a camera up the front passage into the bladder—and use a wire basket to grab the stone and pull it out.’

      ‘Oh dear, it sounds horribly painful,’ Mrs Aston said, grasping her husband’s hand again.

      ‘He’ll be fine, Mrs Aston,’ Erin said. ‘The ENT specialist is one of the best in the city.’

      

      Once she had left the patient’s bay, Erin looked at the clock and thought longingly of a cup of tea and a sandwich, even one from the hospital cafeteria. But over an hour had passed since Eamon Chapman had asked her to meet him in his office, so rather than delay the inevitable any further she trudged through the department to where his office was located. She gave the door a quick knock, secretly wishing he had been called away, but she heard his deep voice commanding her to come in.

      He was sitting behind his desk but rose to his feet as she came in. ‘Have you had lunch?’ he asked.

      ‘No,’ Erin said, wondering if he could read her mind or hear her stomach in this instance. ‘But it can wait.’

      ‘No need to. Why don’t we head on down to the cafeteria and grab a sandwich now?’ he asked.

      She looked at him as if he had gone mad. ‘I take it your plans to improve this hospital from top to bottom haven’t quite made it to the cafeteria?’ she said dryly.

      He gave her a rueful smile. ‘That bad, huh?’

      She felt her lips twitch, but forced them back into line. ‘Keep away from the salami and the chicken. We lost three staff members to a tandoori wrap three weeks ago.’

      His dark brows lifted. ‘“Lost” as in…?’

      ‘Lost as in sick for a week with a reportable disease,’ she said. ‘A couple of us had to do double shifts to cover them.’

      His lips twitched this time, making his eyes crinkle up at the corners. ‘There’s a café on the other side of the car park,’ he said. ‘Does that have any black marks against it I should know about?’

      ‘They do a mean salad sandwich with mung beans and alfalfa sprouts,’ she said. ‘And their coffee’s passable.’

      He picked up his mobile from the desk and clipped it to his belt. ‘Let’s give it a try. I’ll just let Jan at reception know we’ll be within paging distance.’

      A few minutes later, sitting opposite Eamon Chapman in the café across from the hospital, Erin wondered how long it had been since she’d shared a meal with a man, even a colleague. She hadn’t dated since medical school, and even then it had been an unmitigated disaster. In the end she’d decided she wasn’t cut out for the couples’ scene. Most of the men she knew were complicated creatures with too much baggage—not that she could talk, given the veritable road-train she had brought with her from Adelaide. But this was hardly a date, she reminded herself. She was pretty certain Eamon Chapman had other things on his mind besides chatting her up. From what she could read from his expression, she was in for a dressing down if anything.

      ‘So,’ he said, leaning back in his chair to study her pensive features. ‘How long have you been at Sydney Met?’

      Erin was aware of his steady gaze on her as she toyed with the thick froth of her latte with a teaspoon. ‘Five years,’ she said, meeting his eyes for a brief moment. ‘I spent a year in the States before that.’

      ‘Travelling or working?’

      ‘A bit of both,’ she said.

      ‘Did you grow up in Sydney?’

      Erin’s teaspoon gave a tiny clatter as she placed it back on the saucer. ‘No. I grew up in South Australia. I moved to Sydney when I was a teenager.’

      He took a sip of his cappuccino; her gaze was suddenly mesmerised by the tiny trace of chocolate that clung to his top lip before his tongue swept over his mouth to clear it. She swallowed a little restriction in her throat and quickly dropped her gaze, picking up her teaspoon again and stirring her latte with fierce concentration.

      ‘So, do you have family here or back over there?’ he asked.

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