Twin Surprise For The Italian Doc. Alison Roberts

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the more exciting exploits of his career as a helicopter paramedic instead of how close he was to his mother and his sisters. Good grief, he’d had to blink tears from his eyes when he’d told her about how much of a thrill it had been to welcome his latest nephew into the world recently.

      Weirdly, that slightly cringe-making moment of distraction became an advantage a very short time later, when the two men found themselves in a confusing scenario of a party going on in the house. If the memory of holding that newborn baby hadn’t been still there in the back of his mind, would he have been so quick to run up the stairs when they’d heard there was a pregnant girl having stomach pains? And maybe he wouldn’t have put quite the same amount of passion into resuscitating a baby who wasn’t breathing if he hadn’t been imagining that it could have been his sister as the terrified young mother.

      In any case, there had been nods of satisfaction from the judges and both he and Luke felt far more confident when they arrived at their second scenario, which clearly had nothing to do with childbirth. Their patient was a middle-aged man who was curled up on a bed and groaning loudly as they entered the room. He was also holding a plastic bucket.

      ‘He’s been sick.’ The woman who’d met them at the door had explained that she was his wife. ‘He got this terrible back pain all of a sudden and then he started vomiting.’

      ‘Could you get some baselines, please, Matt?’ Luke was taking the lead on this scenario. ‘I’ll see what I can find out with the history.’ He crouched down beside the bed.

      ‘Show me where this pain is.’

      The man put his hand on his side, under his ribs but then moved it towards his abdomen and into his groin.

      ‘Is it the first time you’ve experienced it?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘How bad is it? On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst you can imagine?’

      ‘Ten...’ He groaned again. ‘And I feel sick...’

      ‘We’ll give you something to help with that in just a minute.’

      Matteo held a tympanic thermometer close to their patient’s ear.

      ‘Temperature’s normal,’ the nearest judge informed him as he continued taking baseline recordings. ‘He’s tachycardic at one-twenty, respirations are twenty-four and his blood pressure is one-thirty over ninety.’

      Matteo caught Luke’s glance. With a normal temperature, infection was less likely to be a cause of this pain so a diagnosis like appendicitis or diverticulitis could be ruled out for the moment. What was needed now was pain relief. He collected everything he needed to insert an IV line and put a tourniquet on the man’s arm.

      ‘The IV line is in.’ The judge nodded.

      ‘Have you had any trouble urinating?’ Luke asked now. ‘Is it painful or have you noticed anything different?’

      ‘It hurts,’ the man replied. ‘And it’s very dark.’

      Luke glanced at Matteo, who nodded. The diagnosis and their management now appeared simple.

      ‘We think you might have a kidney stone,’ Luke said. ‘And it’s blocking your ureter and causing this pain. We’ll give you something for the pain and then we’ll take you to hospital. Are you allergic to anything that you know of?’

      ‘No.’

      Matteo was already going through the motions of drawing up the morphine.

      ‘What dosage are you administering?’ one of the judges asked.

      ‘We’ll start with five milligrams,’ Luke replied. ‘We can top that up if the pain scale isn’t reduced to less than five.’

      The judge nodded. ‘The drug has been administered.’

      Matteo began tidying up and Luke was checking their briefing sheet that gave a list of available hospitals and means of transport. They needed to choose the most appropriate option, which ranged from leaving the patient where he was, transport by helicopter or ambulance to the nearest general hospital, a higher-level hospital or a specialised centre.

      Matteo dropped the packages of IV gear back into his pack and turned to pick up the blood-pressure cuff.

      To his horror, he could see that their patient now seemed to be having trouble breathing and he was clutching at his chest.

      ‘Luke...’ The word was a warning. He reached out to take the man’s pulse. ‘Do you have chest pain, sir?’

      Their patient didn’t respond. His head fell back against the pillow and he was gasping for breath.

      Luke was still processing this unexpected twist in their scenario.

      ‘Do we see any skin changes?’

      ‘You see redness appearing,’ a judge said. ‘And hives.’

      Nothing more than a glance between Luke and Matteo was needed.

      ‘Anaphylaxis to morphine,’ Matteo agreed quietly. ‘I’ll get a bag of fluids up. And we need some adrenaline, stat.’

      They both worked swiftly to counter a potentially fatal situation, administering drugs, getting their patient on oxygen and a cardiac monitor. Within a couple of minutes the judges were nodding with satisfaction and declared the scenario complete. They just wanted to ask some questions.

      ‘What is your hospital of choice for this patient?’

      ‘Hospital A,’ Luke told them. ‘They have an internal medicine department and an intensive care unit and they are the closest.’

      ‘And what is the most important information to pass on about your patient?’

      ‘That he has a previously undiscovered allergy to morphine. We will write it on his notes and make sure the information is received by everyone we speak to. We will also advise the patient that it would be a good idea to wear a Medic-Alert bracelet from now on.’

      ‘That was good.’ Matteo slapped Luke on the back as they left the house. ‘I might not have thought of recommending the bracelet.’

      ‘I was too slow to spot the change in our patient’s condition. Well done, you.’

      Matteo grinned at his friend. ‘We make a good team.’

      ‘We’ve got a break now, haven’t we? About an hour?’

      ‘We should use it to do the driving test.’

      ‘Okay.’ Matteo was looking forward to this test. He might work on helicopters now but his early years as a paramedic had been on the road and he loved the challenge of driving fast and doing it well.

      A gravelled area beside the river that ran through this village had been cordoned off for this part of the competition and a line of orange road cones marked the course. They could see an ambulance completing the test as they arrived, clouds of dust billowing as it snaked around the cones at high speed and then came to a sudden halt СКАЧАТЬ