Bad Case of Loving 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.