PATIENT CARE (Medical Romance) (Doctor Series) Read online

  PATIENT CARE

  BOBBY HUTCHINSON

  FREE BONUS

  If you love romance and would like a free novella, the first in a hot “BOOKS FOR THE BEACH” series, go to http://www.bobbyhutchinson.ca and grab your copy of WHAT HAPPENS IN TORTOLA. Enjoy—and let me know your thoughts and comments at [email protected]. Love to hear from you!

  One more tiny little favor—if you enjoy PATIENT CARE, would you be generous and kind enough to leave me a review on Amazon? I’d be pathetically grateful.

  Copyright by Bobby Hutchinson

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express and written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table Of Contents

  PATIENT CARE

  FREE BONUS

  Copyright by Bobby Hutchinson

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  FREE BONUS

  About the Author

  Try some other books by Bobby Hutchinson:

  Copyright 2013 by Bobby Hutchinson

  Chapter 1

  Trauma surgeon James Burke methodically soaped and scrubbed his knuckles, wrists and forearms. He was preparing to operate on the man with the perforated appendix, who had just come up from St. Joseph’s ER. It was 7 a.m., Monday, and in addition to the emergency surgery, he had a full day of elective procedures. Others might view this as stressful, but it gave James a sense of well-being.

  The door behind him opened, and he glanced up to see the nurse from the desk hurrying in. He could tell from her apprehensive expression that he was about to be bumped from an operating room for the fourth time in as many days, and his temper flared before she’d uttered a word.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Burke,” she began, “but Dr. Seeley has to handle a ruptured aortic aneurysm. He’ll need to use Room Two. And I don’t have another room available until the pneumothorax in Four is closed. I checked, and Doc Rundle said she’ll be about another forty minutes.”

  “Forty minutes, hell,” Burke snarled. “You know as well as I do Rundle won’t finish for at least another hour.” He glared at the plump nurse and threw the scrub brush into the sink with such force that it bounced twice. “My guy’s appendix is becoming septic. It has to be done now.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, but he did have an elective gallbladder scheduled before lunch, and this would delay it. “I’m sick and bloody tired of having every surgery put back. Can’t you manage things better?”

  She lifted her chin and gave him a level look. The red blotches on her cheeks and neck testified to her controlled anger. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but you’re aware how many operating rooms we have. I can’t just manufacture more. You can sort this out with Doc Seeley. He’ll be here in a minute.” She marched out to her desk, her back stiff.

  James turned off the water in disgust. There was no point in even broaching the matter with Seeley. He knew that both the other doctor and the anesthesiologist assigned to run the OR for the day would agree that the aorta surgery took precedence over the appendectomy. James knew it, too. It was just that the constant disruption in his OR schedule was making him crazy.

  Cursing under his breath, James dried his hands and stalked off down the hall. He shoved open the door to the doctors’ lounge, still seething with frustration.

  David Chow, one of the senior surgical residents who had scrubbed with James a few days earlier, was slumped on the sagging couch, chewing on a slab of pizza. He took in James’s disgruntled face and the green scrubs he wore, swallowed and cleared his throat. “Bumped again, huh? Bummer.”

  Chow had earned the sharp side of James’s tongue the day he’d assisted on the torn gullet. The big, sloppy man was as casual about surgery as he was about his appearance, an attitude that James abhorred and wouldn’t tolerate in his OR.

  James prided himself, though, on not holding grudges. What happened in the OR stayed there—if, of course, he could ever get into one to do his damn job in the first place.

  Chow took a swig from a can of soda and burped. Then he picked up a newspaper and waved it at James. “Did ya see this? The docs in interior B.C. are threatening to go on strike unless the government loosens up the purse strings and starts allotting more funding for rural health care.”

  James read the article, titled THE RURAL DOCTOR IS IN TROUBLE. He tossed the paper down.

  “I sympathize with them, but right here in Vancouver things aren’t that much better,” he grumbled. “This shortage of operating rooms has reached crisis proportions. The doctors in the ER are complaining they’re overworked, short-staffed because two highly qualified ER physicians left for the U.S. last month. The nurses say there aren’t enough beds and they haven’t had a raise in years. My elective surgical patients bitch at me because of the long waits.” He’d discussed the situation with St. Joe’s chief operating officer, Melissa Clayton. She’d brought it to the attention of the ministry, but nothing had changed.

  “Well, maybe we oughta try a little job action.” Chow reached for another slice of pizza. “No percentage in gripin’ unless it leads to action, right?” he queried, talking around a mouthful of salami and spilling tomato sauce down the front of his rumpled T-shirt.

  James stared at the younger man with grudging respect. Chow was absolutely correct. Why hadn’t he thought of it himself? It was past time to take affirmative action. James was a board member of the Canadian Medical Association. Maybe the doctors needed to call a meeting and get tough.

  He’d get his secretary on it that very afternoon.

  Melissa Clayton had canceled a late-afternoon meeting with the medical advisory committee in order to do something she hated and usually avoided at all costs—shopping for clothes.

  The expedition hadn’t been her idea. Arlene O’Connor, her personal assistant and trusted friend, had looked at Melissa that morning and rolled her eyes. “It’s eighty-seven degrees outside, Vancouver’s in the middle of the hottest August on record, and I swear that’s a wool dress you’re wearing.”

  “I don’t think so.” Melissa couldn’t admit even to Arlene that she wouldn’t know wool unless a sheep had it on. “It’s got short sleeves.” It was also prickly and hot; she had to admit that.

  “Short sleeves or not, you’ve gone long past the glowing stage to plain old sweat. That’s wool, Boss.”

  Arlene, seven months and nine days pregnant with her first baby, managed to look impeccable in something blue, loose and so fashionable it gave Melissa a headache.

  Or maybe it was the heat that was causing her headache. The air-conditioning in her office at St. Joe’s had been on the fritz for four days now. It only worked when the repair people came to check it. The moment they left, it thumbed its nose and died again.

  The air-conditioning in this fashionable department store, however, was working way too well. It must be under forty degrees, Melissa thought as she shivered her way out of a dress that even she could see made her look like a thirty- six-year-old hooker. It was the only item she’d chosen herself.

  “How’s that little navy skirt and jacket fitting, Ms. Clayton?” a male voice queried.

  “Melissa. Please call me Melissa.”
/>   Wearing her black bra and yellow flowered bikinis, she snatched the navy skirt and jacket off their padded hanger as if the personal shopper Arlene had hired was about to burst into the store’s luxurious dressing room and chastise her for not wearing coordinated underwear.

  “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment today and Lamaze classes tomorrow, which means I can’t come and supervise you,” Arlene had said. “And there’s no way you can be trusted to buy clothes on your own, you’re style challenged. So I’m lining you up with a professional wardrobe consultant from Holt Renfrew.”

  Why had it never entered Melissa’s head that a man could be a wardrobe consultant? It just showed that she, who prided herself on being an equal-opportunities advocate, still had massive blind spots about who did what work-wise. Wrestling herself into the blue skirt and top, Melissa could only cringe at what a horrifying revelation that was, particularly when six short months earlier, she had been hired to do a job that in the entire history of St. Joseph’s Medical Center had traditionally been male.

  “I’ll have this on in a minute, Barry,” she called, as she tried to figure out the complex order of snaps and buttons that kept the top closed.

  “No rush, take your time.”

  She fumbled with fastenings and blew impatiently at the annoying strands of wavy red hair that had slipped out of the clip at the back of her head. At last she stepped out of the change room.

  “So what do you think?” She frowned at herself in the three-way mirror. The outfit didn’t look too bad. At least the skirt was longer than the dress had been, and not half as tight.

  Barry put a finger on her shoulder and turned her around, surveying her from all angles. Melissa found it amazing that he could do so and not make her feel at all self- conscious. He seemed to view both her tall body and her flamboyant coloring as a palette from which to create what he called “a stellar look.” The process was as impersonal as her reviewing a budget or determining policy for a department at the hospital.

  “Looks tres chic, but how does it feel?” he said after a moment’s scrutiny. “Is it comfortable, cool, something you could put on in the morning, sit through three meetings in and then, with a change of accessories—pearls, say, a pair of stilettos—wear to go out to dinner?”

  Tall himself, skeletal, dark skinned and elegant, without being intimidating in the least, he reached out and tweaked the shoulder of the jacket into place.

  Clearly, Arlene had described Melissa’s workdays to him. Barry had assumed the going-out-to-dinner part all on his own. Melissa didn’t correct him. Why admit that dinner was almost always something out of a carton she picked up on the drive home and ate while she scanned reports or jotted notes? The last time she’d been out to dinner was New Year’s Eve, a blind date, a nephew of her mother’s friend Gladys Perkins.

  Even now Melissa shuddered at the memory. Maurice was probably a nice enough man, but he was four inches shorter than she was, he’d talked nonstop about mutual funds and he’d had his pants pulled up so high that his equipment had stood out in bold outline.

  “So what do you think?” Barry was waiting, the soul of patience.

  She shoved Maurice’s less-than-impressive equipment out of her mind and tried to see herself objectively. “I think I like it.” She frowned at her reflection, doubt mirrored in her eyes. “Is this skirt too short?” As the first female chief operating officer, the last thing she wanted to project was sexuality.

  “Absolutely not. Just above your knee is very tasteful. Although, with your legs you could certainly wear a micro-mini if you chose.” Barry stood back and surveyed her from top to bottom, head tipped to the side. “That shade of navy is wonderful with your titian hair, and it complements those hazel eyes perfectly.”

  “Titian? Hazel?” Melissa giggled. “It’s okay, Barry. You don’t have to be diplomatic here. You can just say red and brown. And even I know that any dark color tones down these freckles. I’ve had them all since I was a kid. I’m not sensitive anymore.”

  “But you have fabulous skin and hair,” he countered with a wide smile. “And don’t you know that freckles are in this year? So should we add this ensemble to the affirmatives or the negatives?” He gestured at the outfits she’d already hesitantly agreed to, and the others that they’d mutually rejected.

  “I’d say this goes with the affirmatives. If you agree?” How she could be so confident in her work and so totally uncertain about a dumb thing like clothes was something she’d never figured out.

  “Absolutely. Good choice, Melissa.”

  Back in the change room, she wearily shucked off the suit and tossed it to him over the door. Then she slipped into a shirtwaist-style dress in green paisley patterned cotton, the next item he’d suggested. Who would have imagined that trying on clothes could be so exhausting?

  But by the time she exited the store an hour-and-a-half later, she had four fat garment bags laden with what her mother called “outfits” and Barry referred to as “ensembles.” The bags held color-coordinated dresses and blouses and skirts and suits and lightweight jackets, any of which she could snatch off a hanger and put on without agonizing over whether they were suitable.

  So what if her credit card was now close to its upper limit? For the first time in her life, she actually had a wardrobe she felt good about. She staggered through the steamy evening heat to her jaunty little sports car and dumped her purchases on the tan leather seat. They were worth every cent.

  She’d told herself the same thing about the car, and she’d been right. She’d bought it from a radiologist at the hospital who was moving to Trinidad, and she loved it. She turned on the air-conditioning and waited impatiently for it to cool the interior, but she was halfway home before that happened. What was it about her and air-conditioning?

  She was thankful that her apartment was cool and welcoming. The cleaning service had been in that morning, and the cluttered rooms she’d abandoned as she’d raced out the door to work were now in pristine order. Melissa dumped the garment bags on her bed and was staring into her shiny clean, but nearly empty, refrigerator when the phone rang. Wishing she’d stopped to pick up Chinese, she lifted the receiver and said an absent hello.

  “Lissa?”

  It was her mother, but Betsy Clayton’s normally strong, decisive voice was so faint and quivery that it was barely recognizable.

  Chapter 2

  “Mom? Mom, what’s wrong?”

  Melissa was alarmed. “You sound terrible.”

  She usually had lunch with Betsy on Sunday afternoon, but her mother had called yesterday morning and canceled, claiming that she hadn’t slept well the night before and needed to have a little nap.

  Melissa had been relieved that Betsy hadn’t suggested she come by later in the day; she’d had a stack of reports to read by Monday morning. Now she felt a stab of guilt for not at least calling last night and checking on her mother.

  “I’m sick, Lissa.” Betsy drew a shuddering breath. “I’ve had this awful pain in my stomach all weekend, and I kept thinking it would go away. But it’s gotten worse instead of better. Now I’m really sick to my stomach. And dizzy. I’m real dizzy.”

  “Mom, lie down and stay there. Don’t take anything. I’ll be right over.” Melissa hung up the phone and grabbed her keys and handbag. Her mother prided herself on never being ill, and the odd time she was, she wouldn’t admit to anything more severe than a touch of flu or an annoying little cold, even when she sounded as if she had pneumonia. For Betsy to call and say she was sick could only mean that her mother was desperate.

  Even exceeding the speed limit, the trip to the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby took twenty-five frantic minutes. Melissa screeched into the driveway of the tiny bungalow where she’d grown up, abandoned the car and raced to the door, which was locked as usual; Betsy worried about intruders.

  Melissa swore under her breath as she unearthed her key, and then wrinkled her nose as she stepped inside. The house was like an oven; she’d tried re
peatedly to put air-conditioning in for Betsy, but her stubborn mother would have none of it.

  “That’s how people get sick,” Betsy insisted. “Breathing secondhand air.”

  Once the woman had an idea in her head, there was no changing it.

  “Mom, it’s me,” Melissa called. There was no answer. Filled with apprehension, she hurried through the living room and into Betsy’s small bedroom off the hallway.

  Her mother was slumped across the bed, her long, thin frame curled into a tight ball. That she was lying on top of her cream-colored heirloom bedspread was another disturbing indication of extreme distress. Melissa had never seen Betsy so much as sit on the treasured bedcover.

  Melissa crouched beside Betsy and put a hand on her forehead. Her mother had a fever.

  “Mom, can you talk? Tell me exactly what’s happened, exactly where you hurt.”

  Betsy made an effort to sit up, but the pain was obviously too intense and she slumped down again. Her face, normally either wreathed in smiles or screwed into a frown of disapproval, was contorted with pain and pasty white. She was perspiring heavily, which was understandable in the heat, but she was also shivering so hard her teeth were chattering.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she gasped. “I’ve been constipated for a while. I took some of those laxatives Gladys brought over. If my bowels would just move, I’m sure I’d feel better.”

  Melissa knew that wasn’t the solution. Constipation was a symptom. She’d begun her career as a nurse, working in the ER for some years before going back to school to get her master’s in health administration. Talking in a soothing tone now despite her alarm, she asked questions as she felt her mother’s abdomen and again assessed her temperature.

  It was immediately obvious that Betsy needed medical attention—and fast. The problem would be getting her to agree. Along with her dread of intruders, Betsy had what amounted to a paranoid fear of doctors and hospitals.