The Right Treatment Read Free Page B

Grinding her teeth like she was chewing a huge piece of gum. While pretty used to seeing her high, Fiona had never seen Aoife as bad as this before. She really didn’t know how Aoife always managed to make it home safely if this was the way she behaved. She left her in the middle of a stag party, flirting and dancing wildly, and went to dance with the others. Anything but watch the spectacle.
    .
    When Aoife hadn’t re-joined the group a while later, Fiona went in search of her. That’s when she spotted her in the middle of the floor shaking her body, shimmying up and down against a man’s body as he kissed and mauled her. When he lifted his head, it was clear as day: Brian. Aoife had finally gone too far. Fiona froze, mesmerised. Regardless of the audience, Aoife started unbuttoning her shirt. Finally reacting, Fiona ran to stop her, intending to drag her home whether she liked it or not. Rage coursed through her veins. She would give Aoife a few home truths tomorrow, and no holding back. That was the last piece of shit she was ever going to take from her. All of a sudden everyone on the dance floor seemed to stop at once. Fiona turned her head in the direction they were all looking in. There, in a heap on the floor was Aoife, out cold, and Brian was standing looking at her, totally and utterly motionless and helpless.
    She heard her own disembodied voice screeching as she ran towards her friend:
    “Ring a fucking ambulance. Now.”
     
    * * *
     
    There were times when Matt McDaid hated his job, and those times were nearly always Friday and Saturday nights. Now he was adding Sunday to his list. He’d had to do patch-ups from drunken brawls, been vomited on, endured verbal and physical aggression, and now his pager was going again. Great, just as he had managed to grab some shuteye. The clock told him he’d been in bed precisely twenty-eight minutes. These forty-eight hour shifts were a bloody killer, all he ever seemed to catch were catnaps. He was one happy man that his senior house officer position was coming to an end on Friday—next time round, he would be the elite, a consultant doctor, on the wards instead of Accident and Emergency. Much more civilized. He wondered how the transition would go; perhaps he might have been better looking for a job in another hospital, where they wouldn’t remember him as the obliging sucker who always made himself available in an emergency. Barely containing his bad temper, he snatched the phone in the tiny room that served as doctor’s sleeping quarters, and called the nurses’ station.
    “Dr. McDaid, we have a possible OD in cubicle one, MDMA we think.”
    “Where’s Dr. Brown? It’s her turn. I only just got to bed.”
    “She’s dealing with a cardiac arrest.”
    Fuck it, Matt thought as he dragged on his scrubs. Another stomach pumping and hours of watching to see if it was too late. Bloody idiots! God graced them with life and health and stupid fools pumped all this crap in, destroying the wonderful gift they had been given. It made him mad as hell every time. Real first world problems. And nine times out of ten they came back. When he volunteered with Medicines Sans Frontiers in Africa, at least then he was making a difference, helping people who became sick due to circumstance and who were grateful for that help.
    Here, he pumped a youngster out, only to find them back in a few months later because they had repeated the same thing over again. Too much money and too little appreciation for living. And far too much soft-soaping with psycho-babble mumbo-jumbo. He firmly believed anyone who ended up in a hospital for mucking about with drugs should be forced into a boot camp and taught discipline and self-control. And not be draining the valuable medical resources time after time.
    He rushed to cubicle one to see a woman lying unconscious, oxygen mask on her face and shirt open, with electrodes taped on at the ready. More machinery was hooked to her arm and hand and