The Doctor's Lost-and-Found Bride Read Free Page B

bright and breezy, as if nothing was wrong—although he’d noticed that her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, and she was using his formal title rather than his first name. OK; he’d take the lead from her. Bright, breezy and surface-friendly it was—even though he felt like punching something. He forced himself to unclench the fists in his pockets. ‘Good morning, Dr Petrelli.’
    ‘We’ve just had a shout,’ she told him. ‘RTC, elderly female passenger, ETA six minutes.’
    ‘Any details?’
    ‘Query fracture and internal injuries. They’ve put a line in and she’s on a spinal board.’
    Max met the ambulance crew at the door and quickly went through the handover, and the team swung into action to treat Mrs Jennings. Clearly they were used to working together and, whatever the problems between himself and Marina, she obviously took her job seriously, and she hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said that she could push the personal stuff into the background and put her patient first. Max quickly discovered that over the last four years Marina had become a fine doctor, confident and capable, and whenever he was about to give her some instructions he found she was already doing it, having second-guessed him.
    As they assessed their patient for hypovolaemic shock—Max wasn’t happy with her blood pressure or the capillary refill—they both noted the pattern of bruising across her abdomen, the lap-belt imprint. On examination, Mrs Jennings’ abdomen was tender. Not good.
    ‘I’m not happy with this,’ Max said quietly to Marina.
    ‘I’d need to see the X-ray to confirm it, but my guess is that the impact fractured her pelvis,’ Marina said, equally quietly.
    He nodded. ‘There may be some splenic involvement as well, or even damage to other organs. We need a CT scan and an X-ray to see what’s going on.’
    ‘Agreed. Let’s get her stabilised first,’ Marina said.
    Quietly, Max asked Stella, their senior nurse, to bleep the orthopaedic-surgery team and put Theatre on standby, and then he turned back to the patient. ‘Mrs Jennings, I’m going to put a mask over your face,’ he said, ‘to give you some oxygen, which will help you to breathe more easily.And I’m going to give you something to help with the pain, so it makes things a bit more comfortable for you while we take a look at your injuries. If you’re worried about anything, just lift your hand and we’ll take the mask off for a few moments so you can talk to us, OK?’
    Mrs Jennings whispered her consent. Max fitted the oxygen mask over her face and gave her analgesia through the IV line that the paramedics had put in, while Marina inserted a second IV line and set up a drip. Marina took blood samples for rapid cross-matching, all the while talking to Mrs Jennings, reassuring her and assessing her. Max was impressed by Marina’s calm, kind manner. Although they were faced with a potentially life-threatening emergency—compound pelvic fractures, especially if there were abdominal injuries as well, were associated with a mortality rate of more than fifty per cent—Marina made sure that Mrs Jennings didn’t realise how worried they all were. She behaved as if this was a completely everyday occurrence, and nothing more worrying than a dislocated elbow, which meant that their patient relaxed rather than panicking—and in turn that made their investigations just that touch easier.
    If it wasn’t for the personal stuff between them, working with her would have been a dream.
    As it was, it was a living nightmare. Her voice echoed through his head: Let’s go and meet Daddy.
    Daddy. Daddy.
    It should’ve been him.
    He shook himself. This wasn’t the time or the place. And there was nothing he could do to change the situation, so it was pointless ripping himself apart over it. He forced himself to stay in professional mode, and reviewed theX-rays with Marina against the lightbox. ‘Classic open-book fracture,’ he