Seize The Day. Sharon Kendrick

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СКАЧАТЬ away. A simple fact—the ship was without a captain!

      ‘Afternoon, Sister!’ called a couple of the men. ‘Good to have you back!’

      She smiled her response, and went round to each patient in turn, perching on the side of the bed for a brief chat, and writing down in her notebook anything which she should mention to the doctor.

      A wave of horror, quickly suppressed, washed over her as she realised that she was going to have to take every single problem to that man. As she patted Mr Walters’s hand and assured him that his fractured neck of femur was healing splendidly, before moving on to the next bed, she vowed that at no time would she let any of the patients or other staff know how much she disliked him. That would be extremely unprofessional, and might even undermine his authority. A clash of personalities was one thing. . .

      Unless, of course, she thought with a grim kind of longing, unless he proved utterly useless as a doctor—then she would be perfectly in her rights to register a formal complaint about him.

      When she eventually reached Mrs Jessop’s bed she was surprised to see her sitting up in bed knitting, her hair looking smart and newly set, and a brand new fluffy pink bed-jacket covering her thin shoulders.

      ‘Why, Mrs Jessop!’ exclaimed Jenny in surprise. ‘You look absolutely wonderful—and you’re knitting! I didn’t know you could knit!’

      ‘Hello, Sister,’ said the old lady fondly. ‘Lovely to see you—and you’re looking bonny yourself.’

      ‘Tell me what’s happened to you. Have you suddenly learned to knit?’

      Mrs Jessop looked bashful. ‘Aw, no, Sister! Years ago, when we lived in Scotland, I used to turn out matinée jackets for every baby in the village. I’d kind of got lazy over the years, sitting in my chair and watching the box. That nice new doctor’s taken me in hand, like.’

      Jenny felt her facial muscles freeze. ‘Oh?’

      Mrs Jessop sighed happily. ‘Oh, yes. Brought an occupational therapist round to see me, he did.’

      ‘But we haven’t got an occupational therapist!’

      ‘Oh, yes, we have, Sister—now! Dr Trentham saw to that! Kicked up a terrible fuss, he did, according to the nurses. Said—what was it he said? Oh, yes—that it was “counter-productive” not to have one, that people got better more quickly with expert guidance. Said that, even if the hospital told him it couldn’t afford one, he knew a girl who would come in an afternoon a week and do it for nothing! Going to start in a few weeks’ time, she is—but she came round to see us all and then got me all this knitting wool. Lovely girl, she is, ever so athletic—used to play tennis at Wimbledon when she was a lassie! Imagine that, Sister!’

      ‘Imagine!’ echoed Jenny faintly, trying to force some enthusiasm into her voice. She put the bag of oranges into the old lady’s fruit bowl, and, brushing aside her effusive thanks, made her way back up the ward, trying to quell the unreasonable feeling of irritation which was growing inside her.

      It all made sense, she knew that. Hadn’t she thought that they should have an OT for years? Hadn’t she politely spoken to Dr Marlow time after time, requesting one? But the kindly, and somewhat elderly doctor had not been in the least dynamic. He had gone into committee meetings and put his case so mildly that none of the board of governors—operating under such tight financial strain already—could believe his arguments that an OT was imperative.

      So why did it irk her so much that Leo Trentham had achieved in less than two weeks what she had been coveting for years? She should be glad for the ward’s sake. And yet she felt as though her position as leader was being usurped. What else had he changed while she had been away?

      She called one of the student nurses over to her, a happy hard-worker called Daisy Galloway, who was on secondment from Denbury’s sister hospital—the large St Martin’s. Jenny liked her very much.

      ‘Hello, Sister,’ grinned the girl. ‘You look great! Did you have a good time?’

      ‘I certainly did!’ Until I became acquainted with our new surgeon, she thought. ‘Will you do the two o’clock drug-round with me?’

      ‘Yes, Sister.’

      They unlocked the trolley from the wall, then unlocked the first section, then the section within which contained the Schedule ‘B’ drugs. Jenny flinched a little when she saw how disordered the latter drugs appeared—bottles dumped haphazardly into the small space, not into the neat alphabetical lines which she favoured. She wondered who was responsible, but she suppressed a small click of disapproval, not wanting to seem overly critical of her staff. There might have been a perfectly good reason for such oversight—an emergency taking place during the drug-round, for example—when all the bottles might have had to be put back quickly and locked, so that the staff could run to the aid of a patient.

      With experienced fingers she swiftly realigned the bottles, then glanced up at the student nurse.

      ‘Do you know why hospitals are so obsessed with neatness and order, Nurse Galloway?’

      Nurse Galloway cleared her throat. ‘Er—I think so, Sister.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Er—it’s because hospitals are run a bit like the military.’

      Jenny laughed. ‘And why do you say that?’

      Daisy looked less shy. ‘My dad used to be in the marines, and he told me.’

      Jenny nodded. ‘Well, you’re right! Like the services, we tend to have lots of rules, but there are reasons for those rules—we don’t devise them just because we want to make more work for the students, or to be awkward.’

      ‘Yes, Sister?’ asked Daisy interestedly. She loved Sister Hughes—even though she was a ward sister, you felt you could ask her anything.

      ‘Well, if I shouted for you to get me something urgently—a drug, for example, and we always kept our drugs in alphabetical order, you’d be able to find it immediately, wouldn’t you?’

      ‘Yes, Sister.’

      ‘Alternatively, if a patient was having a cardiac arrest and I wanted the defibrillator, it would be of no use to us if the last person to use it had left it lying at the bottom of their ward instead of returning it to the corridor between Rose and Daffodil, now, would it?’

      ‘No, it certainly wouldn’t, Sister!’

      ‘There is “a place for everything, and everything in its place”, to quote the old saying, because the most orderly way of doing things is also the most efficient, and we need hospitals to be efficient. Not, of course,’ here she paused and smiled at the junior nurse, ‘that we must ever forget that we are dealing with people first and foremost, and therefore if a patient was depressed or worried about something then I’d expect you to find the time to sit down and talk to them. I wouldn’t bite your head off just because you’d missed a bit of ward-cleaning!’

      ‘No, Sister,’ said Daisy Galloway, and she tipped two ampicillin capsules into the top of the bottle and showed them to Jenny.

      ‘And why don’t we tip the tablets on to the palm of our hand,’ queried Jenny, ‘which would СКАЧАТЬ