training putting IV lines into people with dodgy veins. Kind of like anesthetics, only nobody had ever sued me.
“I don’t suppose you’ve stolen some Ringer’s Lactate and a giving set, too?” I asked Matthew.
He shook his head. “Sorry. No IV fluids at all. We’re actively discouraged from stealing expensive stuff.”
Oh, yeah, that would be me lecturing them about the cost of stock.
Now I had my hands free I checked Heidi over quickly. She was conscious, and looking panicked, so I nodded reassuringly. Pulse was fast and thready, but that could just be the fear and pain, not the blood loss.
I checked her arm where Matthew’s hands were clamped so tightly over my poor green shirt that his knuckles were white. The shirt was soaked through completely and blood was seeping down her arm. Figure a cup in the shirt, another cup on the mattress, and one on the floor. She was going to be running out of blood volume soon.
“How long?” I asked Matthew.
“Four minutes,” he said.
Damn, we had another five or so to wait for an ambulance.
I grabbed the cleanest looking housemate and got him to hold Heidi’s legs up with his hands. Heidi was breathing fast now; hypovolemic shock was a bitch.
We waited. I’d learnt something about detachment during my miserable ER rotation, and there was a certain comfort in finding that it was still there, just waiting for someone to bleed all over me.
I looked at Matthew’s face. He was completely focused on Heidi, and it took me a moment to realise he was counting her respirations. I felt for her pulse in her wrist, and it was there still. Good, she hadn’t lost so much blood pressure that her peripheral pulses were gone.
There were sirens outside. Sirens were good. Then two burly looking men in the St. John’s green uniform were kneeling down beside Heidi.
“I’m a doctor,” I said. “There’s tendon and artery damage, vitals are off. I put an IV catheter in for you.”
They took over, giving Heidi oxygen and doing something about fluid volume replacement immediately, then moving her onto their portable gurney.
“I suppose you want me to ride with her, don’t you?” I said, knowing it was inevitable. No paramedic was going to turn down the chance to shift legal responsibility to a doctor if they could.
When they lifted Heidi’s gurney up, I stood, my knees creaking, and tossed my keys to Matthew. He looked a bit shell-shocked, standing there shirtless, blood liberally smeared over him. Not quite what I had in mind for a date.
He nodded and clutched the keys in his hand, and I followed the paramedics out into the London night.
Chapter Thirteen
Somehow, once I’d found Andrew’s old Morris, I wished that I’d mentioned that I hadn’t driven for several months, and that the last time I’d touched a manual car was when I’d sat my driver’s test. Good thing he didn’t have a fancy car.
As I unlocked it, the streetlight showed the rust eating the door away, and I felt better. I could probably drive it into a fence, and it wouldn’t matter.
I discovered I didn’t actually know the direct route to the hospital from my house, and was obliged to follow the bus route to get there. Hopefully it wasn’t too far out of the way.
Once there, I smiled to myself and pulled into the multi-storey car park attached to the hospital and into one of the bays reserved for doctors. So this was what intellectual privilege felt like. I could get used to a guaranteed parking bay. Hell, I could get used to a car.
I pushed my backpack out of sight behind the passenger seat, just to discourage anyone from stealing my laptop, and locked the car up. Casualty wasn’t that hard to find, and I had my med student ID with me, ready for the next day, so the sour-looking nurse on the Triage desk buzzed me through the security doors without even checking my name. More privilege. Personally, I wouldn’t have let anyone who had quite as much blood on their arms and trousers as I did into Casualty without a good explanation, but maybe it was a slow night.
Or not. I stepped into a maelstrom and found myself pressed against a wall as I avoided being flattened by an X-ray tech pushing a trolley. I could tell they were an X-ray tech by the radiation monitoring tag on their uniform and the way they fluoresced ever so slightly. And the demented way they pushed the trolley.
A nurse glared at me and said, “Who the fuck are you?”
I held up my med student badge. “I’m looking for Dr. Maynard.”
The nurse stared at me for a moment, and I could almost hear the cogs whirring in his head. “Oh,” he said. “In the staff room.” He pointed at a raised glass-walled room in the centre of Casualty.
“Thanks.” I dodged the orderly wheeling an oxygen cylinder down the corridor, skirted the banked up row of patient-laden trolleys, stepped up into the nurse’s station and pushed the staff room door open.
My head had built a picture of a soulless room with a coffee-ring-stained table and plastic chairs, but the staff room was obviously an administrative area, with long benches covered in stacks of X-rays and pathology printouts, lined with monitors and keyboards, lit by the fluorescent light of the X-ray screens.
Andrew was seated at one of the monitors, feet up on the desk beside the keyboard, wearing hospital scrubs instead of the blood-soaked jeans and T-shirt I’d last seen him in. He looked up and smiled at me as I walked in.
“Blake,” he said. “Thanks for coming to get me. Heidi’s going to be fine; she’s gone up to surgery already. Let’s get out of here before they have some kind of crisis and we wind up working.”
He picked up a blue hospital plastic bag full of clothes and led me out of Casualty, chatting to me innocuously about his experiences as a medical student, and I figured that he was right; no one would pay any attention to me turning up to collect him caked in blood.
In the corridor outside Casualty, I said, “Is Heidi really going to be all right? It looked like she’d lost a lot of blood.”
Andrew nodded and smiled sideways at me as we pushed our way through a gaggle of relatives who were blocking the hallway.
“She’s had a bag of Ringer’s Lactate and a couple of units of blood, just to make sure she’s up to surgery, then they emptied her stomach of pizza and beer and shipped her off to OR to have the tendons repaired. She didn’t need to have an MTP or anything. I’ve spoken to her mum on the phone, and she’s on her way down here. Want some food? I was planning on a decent meal, but I think I’m too hungry to wait for that.”
I was hungry, and still kind of wired from the accident.
“Sure,” I said, and we headed for the cafeteria.
It was late enough that only one of the kiosks were still open, the obligatory junk food outlet, and I yawned and stretched and ordered the same as Andrew; the breakfast special.
The dining area was mostly empty now, well after most people’s meal break, and I ate my plate of bacon, eggs and beans in a rush before I looked closely at the other people lingering over their meals.
“Why are most of the people here homeless?” I asked Andrew.
He bit into his toast and looked around the room. “Food’s cheap,” he said. “Security leaves them alone until it’s lock-up time.”
I looked at the grime-caked man swathed in innumerable layers of clothing at the next table who was eating packets of sugar, and then at the sign over the drinking fountain. ‘This fountain is not a sink’. The sign had puzzled me on my first day here, but it kind of made sense that people would need to be told that now.
Andrew smiled at me wryly.
I handed him the keys in the car park and said, “You drive.
You don’t want to know what I did to your clutch driving here.”
There was something about how Andrew looked at me as he took the keys that made my stomach lurch. “Security cameras,” he said, and he unlocked the car and got in, then leaned across and unlocked my door from inside.
I slid down in my seat and put my feet on his dashboard, and Andrew leaned across and kissed me.
“You okay?” he asked, and he touched my face gently.
