Bride by Accident. Marion Lennox

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      ‘We’re going to have to do this on our own,’ Devlin told her. ‘Just clear a path, Helen, and cross every finger and every toe. And then some.’

      He shouldn’t ask her for help.

      He didn’t have a choice.

      Dev lifted the little girl carefully, so carefully, inching his way backwards out of the bus. Every move had to be measured so the woman—Emma—could keep up with him. Her hand was holding the ballpoint steady so air could enter Suzy’s lungs. She looked so battered he’d been afraid she’d faint, but that battering wasn’t affecting her hand. It was rock steady.

      Could she keep it up?

      Maybe they should stay, he thought. Maybe they should try and stabilise the airway.

      To operate in these confines, to remove the ballpoint and try and replace it here…

      They couldn’t.

      It was a huge risk to move Suzy, but it was a risk they had to take. He was forced to depend on this woman he didn’t know. This woman who should be a patient herself.

      She must be a doctor. She had to be. To perform a trach-eostomy in these conditions, with such a result—it was an operation that was little short of miraculous.

      But where had she come from? She wasn’t a local. Yet tourists didn’t tend to travel alone, not when they were six or seven months pregnant.

      Now was not the time to ask questions, he decided as he kept inching out. He had Suzy cradled in his arms and Emma was with him every inch of the way.

      Just as long as she held up.

      He glanced at her face and it was sheet-white. She had the baby to consider, he told himself savagely. She’d been almost unconscious when he’d found her. She should be in hospital herself.

      If she were in hospital, Suzy would be dead.

      He needed her. Suzy needed her.

      He kept inching out backwards.

      Emma kept following.

      They emerged to a scene that made Emma blink.

      The children were gone—all of them. The bus driver, the truck driver, the injured teacher—they were gone, too. They must have been ferried away from the scene at some time while the bus had been in the process of being stabilised. There were two steel cables running from the bus’s chassis to the trees on the opposite side of the road.

      Since those cables had been attached, they’d been safe.

      What else?

      Kyle was still there. His tiny, blanket-covered body lay to one side and there was a fireman sitting beside the stretcher. Just sitting. As if he’d sit however long it took. No matter that there was nothing to do. The man’s stance said that he was simply here to guard. To begin the grieving for the loss of a tiny life.

      Once again Emma felt tears welling behind her eyes.

      ‘Not yet,’ the man beside her said, and she blinked.

      He knew what she was thinking?

      ‘I’m fine,’ she muttered, and he smiled, albeit a shaky one.

      ‘I know you are. You’re great.’

      There was a stretcher waiting, with Helen hovering. They lay laid Suzy down with care. The morphine had taken hold now and she was drifting in a haze of near-sleep.

      ‘I’ll take over now,’ Devlin said, moving to take over her grip on the ballpoint, but Emma shook her head.

      ‘I know how it should feel,’ she told him. ‘I have it right where it should be. I’m hanging on until we get to a proper theatre with proper equipment. And a surgeon. Tell me there’s a surgeon at Karington.’

      ‘That would be me,’ he said gravely.

      That would be him.

      Her eyes met his. A surgeon. She had a surgeon right here. The relief was so great it made her dizzy all over again.

      ‘Well, hooray,’ she managed. ‘So what are we waiting for? Let’s find you a theatre and a scalpel and something to replace this blasted pen. But you’re not removing me from it except by scalpel.’

      And twenty minutes later she was finally, finally able to step away.

      Not only was Dev O’Halloran a surgeon, he was a surgeon with real skill. Inserting a tracheostomy tube into a wound that was massively swollen, where the cut was jagged and rough, where there was too much bleeding already and where the patient was a child with a trachea half the size of an adult’s…It was a nightmare piece of surgery that Emma couldn’t imagine doing. But, then, she couldn’t have imagined using a ballpoint casing and a pencil sharpener to perform similar surgery. It seemed that on this day anything was possible.

      Devlin’s surgery worked. Finally, finally the tube was in place. Emma’s ballpoint casing was just an empty piece of plastic abandoned on the tray, and she was free to step back from the table.

      They’d used a local anaesthetic. Anything else would have been too risky with the breathing so fragile. But Suzy was so shocked and so groggy with the morphine that she didn’t register as Emma stepped back.

      ‘Give the lady a chair,’ Devlin growled, and one of the nurses pushed a chair under her legs.

      Emma sat.

      Her legs felt funny, she thought.

      Dev was still working, closing the wound, doing running repairs to the ravages of the little girl’s face.

      Preparing her for the trip to Brisbane where a skilled plastic surgeon could take over.

      She needed to get out of there, Emma decided. Dev had skilled nurses to help him. He no longer needed her.

      The smells of the theatre were making her feel ill. She was accustomed to them. They shouldn’t…

      ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and pushed herself to her feet.

      ‘Go with her, David,’ Devlin said urgently to one of the nurses.

      ‘I’ll be fine,’ she muttered.

      But she wasn’t.

      No matter. She made her jelly legs move.

      Ten minutes later, after as nasty a little interlude in the bathroom as she could imagine, she emerged a new woman. Or almost a new woman. She’d washed her face, splashing water over and over until she felt that she was almost back to reality.

      What was she about—almost passing out in Theatre?

      It was hardly surprising, she told herself. Students did it all the time, and even more experienced theatre staff did it more often than they liked to admit. The trick was to hold it back until you were no longer needed.

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