Nursing The Doctor Read online

  “Busy at work?” Her brother’s question distracted Lily from her runaway thoughts. Kaleb was a fireman in downtown Vancouver, and because of the situations he encountered at work, he fully appreciated just how crazy a shift in the ER could be.

  “We had an MVA and a knifing.” She described the two dramatic episodes, thinking how companionable it was to have a brother who worked at a job similar to her own. One of the things she’d missed the most when she broke up with Richard was the conversations they’d had about medicine.

  They chatted for a short while, and then Kaleb yawned and got to his feet. “I’ve gotta be up at five, so I’d better get to bed if I’m gonna get any sleep at all. I put a load of Zoe’s clothes in the dryer, I’ll go down and get them out before I head up to bed. Night, sis.”

  “Sleep well.” Lily fingered a few more moments over her tea, enjoying the simple pleasure of being totally alone.

  Her mind ranged over the grocery list she had to make in the morning, the appointment Gram had with the doctor, the skirt she’d seen in a boutique window and wanted to try on.

  She thought of the two kids who’d survived the car crash and of her own dear little niece asleep upstairs. She thought of her brother, of the problems he’d had with his marriage and the responsibilities he shouldered so willingly: his daughter, Gram, this old house where something was always going wrong with the plumbing or the wiring or the drains.

  Kaleb was a steady, responsible man, she thought proudly. Once again her mind touched on Greg Brulotte.

  She couldn’t help but compare the two men. They were close in age; Kaleb was thirty-six, and she knew from the hospital grapevine that Greg was thirty-four. They’d both chosen stressful jobs that involved a lot of responsibility and they were both tall, athletic men, handsome and physically strong. But there the similarities ended.

  Kaleb devoted his off-duty time to his daughter, to Gram, to keeping this old house in good condition. His idea of a great time was to play a game of handball with one of the men from his station and then go for a beer at the neighborhood pub.

  Greg? Well, if he played handball, it would be with some stunning woman, and after the game they’d probably flit off to visit Vancouver’s hottest nightspots.

  Lily recalled what Greg had said about his grandfather, that the old man had had a slight stroke, that he lived alone in Greenwood, where his grandson made a monumental sacrifice and visited him every six months or so.

  Dr. Greg Brulotte definitely wasn’t a family man like Kaleb Sullivan, that was certain. And Greg Brulotte and Lily Sullivan, she reminded herself firmly, had different values, different life-styles. They might as well be from different planets, she concluded, and on that note, she rinsed her cup in the sink and turned out lights, checking that the doors were locked before she made her way up the winding staircase.

  She peeked in first at Hannah, who was lying flat on her back, her tall, thin frame barely making a mound under the quilts she’d patch-worked many years before. She was snoring peacefully, the soft night light casting a gentle glow over her still handsome features. In sleep there was no sign of the devastating disease that slowly and cruelly stole her very essence away from those who loved her.

  Lily closed the door and opened the one to Zoe’s bedroom. Here, too, there was a nightlight. Zoe was curled on her right side with her thumb plugged in her mouth and her favorite stuffed rabbit cuddled close under her chin. Lily

  gently covered her, her heart overflowing with love for the little girl.

  Family was everything; that was the one thing she was absolutely certain of.

  Greg Brulotte might have his Whistler cabin, his fast-lane existence, his stream of bed partners, but that couldn’t compare to the feel of this tiny child’s arms looped securely around her neck.

  Susie wrapped her arms tightly around Greg’s neck and lifted her face for another kiss.

  Her lips were cold, and the fur on her hood tickled his forehead. He’d already kissed her more times than he really wanted to, and he pecked at her lips quickly and then reached up to gently pry her arms loose, not an easy feat. She had a death grip on him, and it was amazing how strong a slim five-foot-five woman could be.

  “Will you miss me, Greggie?” She giggled and held on tighter, and he dredged up a smile and nodded, then firmly and steadily peeled her off him.

  Greggie, for God’s sake. She’d been hugging him tighter than a tensor bandage since they got here Saturday morning. It was now early Sunday, and she was making him nuts. Sure, she was cute, redheaded, put together exactly right, but he was beginning to think there was a serious kink in her wiring; she gave the term needy a whole new dimension.

  He’d fallen asleep the night before to the sound of her voice asking, for the twentieth time, whether sex had been all right for him, whether he thought her hips were too big, or her breasts too small, or her thighs needed work...none of which had ever occurred to him. But the third degree had led up to her wondering whether or not Ben would give her a deal on some corrective surgery.

  Corrective surgery, hell. She oughta sign up for in-depth psychiatric assessment, in Greg’s opinion.

  “See you back at the cabin for dinner, Greggie,” she cooed.

  He felt his tolerance level slip another few notches. Susie had seemed like a fun choice for a companion when he’d planned this trip. She was a new tech in Ultrasound, and he’d met her a couple of weeks ago. They’d dated only once before he invited her along for this ski weekend, which he now realized had been a big mistake.

  Having her cling to him when he kissed her on that first date had seemed sexy and arousing. If he’d taken her out more than once, it might have dawned on him that she was not the ideal choice for two days and three nights in a small log cabin. Thank God she had to get back to the city to work on Monday; at least he’d have the rest of the week in peace.

  Thank God, too, that she and Marion, Ben’s date, had decided not to join the men on this early-morning expedition. The men had signed on with a company that specialized in extreme skiing, taking those who dared to a remote mountaintop from which they’d ski down to a designated location where the pilot would pick them up late in the afternoon.

  It was imperative that those who tackled the dangerous slopes were expert skiers, and fortunately, at least in Greg’s opinion, neither of the women was.

  He sidestepped Susie, grabbed his gear and hurried after Ben, who was already climbing into the helicopter.

  A few moments later, they were airborne. Greg felt a thrill of intense excitement as the pilot circled over the resort area and then turned into the sun and followed an invisible path hundreds of feet above the snow-topped peaks.

  It was a spectacular day, the sky a clear denim blue, the sun sending shards of white light glancing off the miles of snowy mountaintops below. The pilot dipped the ’copter and indicated the spot near the bottom of the mountain, marked by a red X, where he would pick them up that afternoon. Greg gave him a thumbs-up signal.

  The pilot had supplied them each with a two-way radio unit just as a precaution. Greg’s was tucked in his backpack along with his lunch.

  Fifteen minutes later the ’copter was landing on a hard-packed snow surface on the peak of a rugged mountain. They were well above the tree line. Below them stretched deep powder, bright sun and long, treacherous slopes, a skilled skier’s dream.

  They unloaded their gear and the ’copter lifted off. As the sound of its rotor faded, a deep and peaceful silence seemed to settle all around them.

  Greg took a deep lungful of the cold, clear air as he strapped his helmet on and then donned his wraparound sunglasses. Even in a few moments, the glare from the snow and sun had made his unprotected eyes water.

  “Helps you understand the thrill of mountain climbing, doesn’t it, Ben?”

  His friend nodded, adjusting the chin-strap on his own headgear. “Maybe we oughta give that a go one of these days.” It was one of the few outdoor activities they hadn’t tried.

  “I’m game. Just not Everest to start with, huh?”

  Ben laughed, and they companionably shouldered their backpacks and strapped on their skis. When at last they were ready, they agreed on an approximate route.

  Ben pushed off first, with Greg was only a few seconds behind. He gave a hefty shove with his poles, and in a millisecond he was flying. The slope was steep, demanding every ounce of his skill.

  The cold air whipped against his face, bringing tears to his eyes even behind his sunglasses. Recklessly, he picked up even more speed, and the edges of the whiteness surrounding him began to blur. His arms and legs worked in unison, the instinctive, near-automatic response of the natural athlete, poles and skis extensions of his being.

  An unholy ecstasy seized him. He was young, he was free, he was strong. His body was a finely tuned tool, and the snowy world around him was his to conquer.

  Ahead was a dip and then a sharp rise, and he negotiated both with ease.

  He laughed aloud. It seemed the whiteness of snow penetrated his very soul and cleansed it of all shadows. Unheeding, he veered left where Ben had gone right, up and over a mogul.

  He shot up an icy incline...and in the space of a heartbeat the earth was no longer there. A ravine dropped away as if a giant’s ax had taken one gigantic sweep of rock and snow, cutting it free. Greg struggled frantically, reaching for solidity with poles and skis and desperate will. Failing... failing...

  Falling. He was falling, and he opened his mouth to scream, but fear had stolen his voice. He seemed to drop forever before his body finally impacted on something solid, and he bounced and tumbled, waiting for pain, but there was none, and time seemed to stretch endlessly as he rolled.

  At last he was motionless, lying on his back. He stared
up and saw the blueness of sky far above him, and for a fraction of a second he marveled that the day could still be there.

  And then the pain struck like a thunderbolt and there was only blessed, infinite darkness.

  Greg slowly became aware of his surroundings, although he couldn’t seem to tell how long the darkness had lasted. He knew only that he was cold, an icy, bone-deep chill that somehow penetrated the very core of his being. There was a voice somewhere far away, but when he struggled up through the thick layers of darkness toward it, pain exploded with vicious intensity, pain that consumed his entire body in an agony such as he had never known, and the shock sent him plummeting back down, down and down into blessed oblivion.

  Timelessness.

  And then the voice again, urgent. “...hear me, buddy? It’s Ben. Please answer me, Greg. Talk to me. Listen up, listen hard. I know you can hear me, you’re a tough son of a bitch, just don’t let go, okay? Promise me you’ll bloody well hold on until I can get us out of this. I’m gonna get us out of this.”

  Greg struggled to open his eyes, to reassure Ben that he was awake, that he believed him, but it seemed to require enormous effort.

  Ben’s voice threaded through his consciousness like a mantra. “Greg, hold on, okay, pal? I’m doing what I can. You’re gonna be fine. The ’copter’s on its way. You’ve got a compound fracture on this leg, I’m using my belt as a tourniquet. Thank God for elastic belts, huh? Try to stop the bleeding, Greg. Try to stop the bleeding. Damn, damn, trust you to get marooned with a plastics man. What the hell does a plastics man know about emergency splints, for God’s sake?”

  Ben’s voice was almost unrecognizable, high and fast and urgent.

  Afraid.

  He’d never known Ben to be afraid before.

  He must be pretty bad if Ben was freaking out.

  The unnatural monologue continued. “And I can use that ski pole as a splint on your arm. Bloody good splint it is, too, if you ask me. I’ll wrap these suckers with my sweater, like this, immobilize the limbs... Done. Yup. That’ll hold ’em. Now, gonna just tuck my ski jacket around here.”

  He’d also probably fractured his vertebrae, Greg deduced with cool objectivity. That was why there wasn’t any pain. He was paralyzed.

  “You’re gonna be fine, you’re in good hands here,” Ben was saying.

  Greg tried to draw breath to ask Ben to detail the damage he’d suffered, but when he breathed in, a sudden agony exploded in his chest and then spread to leg and arm and gut, agony so intense that some distant, observing part of him was astounded and interested.

  So this is what seriously injured people feel in my ER. This is what makes them scream.

  The shock of the pain made the world shift, but a sense of profound relief was there as well, just for an instant.

  I can feel. Maybe my spinal cord is intact after all. He tried to raise his thumb to tell Ben he could feel, but the message didn’t get through to his extremities.

  The effort had an effect, however. In his right arm, Greg felt the sharp edge of bone grate against bone with a sickening sensation that was worse than ordinary pain, and now a scream gurgled in his throat.

  Blackness again. Endless. Timeless.

  Then, between one heartbeat and the next, he was again fully conscious. The agony in every part of his body was intense, but the need to orient himself was even stronger than the pain.

  He was nauseous, rocking gently from side to side, suspended in midair by what looked like thin ropes.

  Strapped to a stretcher, an analytical, interested voice, his own but not his own, told him. He realized with total clarity that a rescue team must be lifting him out of the ravine.

  Light dazzled him and everything whirled. He gagged and felt bile rise in his throat. There was intense blueness as the sky came closer. Hands steadied the stretcher and a number of figures bent over him.

  “Respiration’s thirty-six, shallow. BP eighty over forty. Pulse 130, color ashen. Let’s get oxygen started, twelve liters a minute...”

  The rapid-fire assessment reassured Greg. Someone knew what they were doing. But as the non-re-breather oxygen mask settled on his face, he could hear someone making a noise he recognized from the ER, the wild animal sound of a person in extreme distress.

  Over the noise a strange voice was speaking to him, and Greg wondered where Ben was.

  “My name’s Ron, I’m with air rescue. We’re taking good care of you, we’ll have you at St. Joe’s in no time. I know you’re in pain, Greg, I’m just establishing an IV site so we can get some fluids into you. You’ve had a shot of morphine, so if you start feeling disoriented and fuzzy, that’s what’s doing it, but it’ll help you manage the pain. We’re going to load you into the ’copter now. Let’s just check this cardiac monitor before we go. Your friend did a great job on these emergency splints, but we’re putting our own on. All done there, Mac? Good. Let’s move him.”

  Didn’t they know he was a doctor? Greg tried to answer, to give exact instructions as to what should be done, but once again the intensity of the pain didn’t allow for speech. With utter amazement, he realized that the sound he’d heard was coming from his own throat, that familiar primeval moaning howl he’d heard so many times before. Even as it escaped him, some detached medical part of his brain again celebrated the fact that he could feel his body.

  Feeling is better than not feeling. Feeling means my spinal cord is probably intact. Please, God, let my spinal cord be intact....

  They’d fitted him with a hard collar. At least they were taking all the necessary precautions.

  In spite of the morphine, the torment grew unbearable, and again he relinquished consciousness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At three-thirty on Sunday afternoon, Lily was in the downstairs bathroom helping Zoe off the toilet when the phone rang. She grumbled under her breath and hollered, “Can you get that, Gram?”

  Fortunately Hannah was having a fairly good day, and Lily heard her pick up the receiver and say a hello.

  “No, I’m sorry, she’s not interested in any blood,” Hannah said next in an aggrieved tone. “I really don’t think you people should be making obscene phone calls like this.” Then, sounding puzzled, she added, “Now why did I call you, anyway?”

  “Yoicks.” Lily hastily swiped Zoe’s tiny bottom and pulled up her training panties. “Auntie has to go to the phone. You flush and then wash your hands, okay, missy?”

  “Yoicks,” Zoe parroted. “Flush, wash, flush, wash,” she sing-songed, turning the cold tap on full and sending spray cascading up the wall.

  Well, the walls needed washing anyway, Lily told herself as she sprinted across the kitchen, taking the receiver an instant before Hannah banged it down.

  “Lily Sullivan here.”

  “Ms. Sullivan, sorry to disturb you, especially on a Sunday. It’s the blood bank calling. I have you on our emergency donor list, and I wondered if there’s any possibility you might be able to come down immediately and donate blood? We’ve had an urgent request for AB negative and we don’t have enough in stock.”

  Lily glanced at the clock. Kaleb would be home in a few minutes and she’d planned to go out for a run after a hectic day spent caring for her two charges.

  Donating blood was the last thing she felt like doing, but she also knew that if she refused, images of some poor soul bleeding out because of her selfishness would haunt her. Twice before she’d been called in when the blood bank supplies ran low on her rare type.

  “Sure, I guess I can come down.” She sighed, trying to figure out how best to juggle her schedule. “I’ll be there within an hour.”

  “Thank you so much, Ms. Sullivan. We’ll be expecting you.” There was palpable relief in the woman’s voice.

  Shortly afterward, Lily lay on a cot at the blood bank center, feeling the familiar deep ache in her arm from the needle the nurse had just inserted in the brachial vein at the bend of her elbow. The agitator rocked back and forth, and the small plastic container slowly filled with dark liquid.