at David Ledbetter. He was tall and blond with a dimple in his chin, and she found herself wondering for the millionth time what her own son would look like before she ruthlessly quashed it.
‘OK, then. Time for a tour. Go round to the change rooms.’ Beth pointed to the door through which they’d entered. ‘Put on a set of greens, a pair of bootees and a cap and then knock on my door.’ She pointed to the door on the other side of her office that led into the theatres.
The four of them stood there, looking nervous. ‘Now,’ she prompted.
The students darted from her office and Beth relaxed. For a moment she wished she could be one of those NUMs that she heard the students talk about with affection. The ones who smiled a lot and befriended their students. But she was a little too reserved for that. Her background had taught her to be wary. Detached. So a reticence to get too close or involved was almost second nature to her.
Although Gabe hadn’t had any problems getting past her reserve.
And it was difficult to be chummy when she had to ride them over their sterile technique and lecture them on the necessity of the endless cleaning required to keep the ultra-clean environment of the operating theatres as pristine as possible.
Her job required that she be a perfectionist—patients’ lives depended on it. It was up to her to set standards and see they were maintained. And in the operating theatres, the standards had to be highest of all. Sterility and safety were paramount and the buck stopped with her. There was no place in her theatres for sloppy standards. And everyone who worked in the OT knew it.
Beth had struggled for years over how to bridge the gap between the person she had to be and the less reserved, more outgoing one she’d like to be. And in the end she’d given up. The people who mattered, who had known her for a long time, knew the real Beth beneath the guarded exterior. And she was fine with that.
There was a knock at the door and Beth opened it, stepping onto the sticky antiseptic mat which removed any dirt that had dared to venture into her office and stick to the bottom of her clogs. She gave a brisk nod of acknowledgement.
‘This is the main theatre corridor,’ Beth said, looking up and down, launching straight into it.
‘Down this side are a couple of offices, the staffroom, change rooms and storeroom. On the other side…’ she pointed to the swing doors of Theatre Five opposite ‘…are the ten theatres.’
She strode down the corridor. ‘The theatres are not to be entered from these doors we see here but rather through the anaesthetic antechamber.’
Beth walked through an open doorway into Theatre Eight’s antechamber. ‘The patient is put under anaesthetic and intubated in here.’ Beth indicated the monitoring equipment and stocked trolleys. To the left a double swing door separated the operating suite from the anaesthetic area.
She walked through the antechamber and under another open doorway. ‘This is the room where the surgeons and scrub nurses scrub up.’ The room housed a line of four sinks and it too had a closed swing door to the left which led into the theatre.
‘This door,’ Beth said, walking past the sinks to the far side of the scrub room, ‘leads to the equipment corridor.’ She pushed the single swing door open and indicated for the students to precede her. ‘Basic supplies are kept here. It’s also where the trays of instruments are sterilised prior to each procedure.’ Beth stopped at a large steriliser fixed to the wall, its door open.
‘At the end of the procedure, after all the instruments have been accounted for, the instrument trays come back out here and are passed through this window,’ Beth pointed to the small double-hung opening behind the students.
‘You lift the window, place the tray on the bench and shut it again. This puts the instruments in the hands of the nurses who run the dirty corridor beyond the window. This is the area where the instruments are cleaned, the trays reset and then sent to the central sterilising department.’
Beth drew breath and looked at the students, who all looked like their heads were about to explode with information overload. She saw the lost look on David’s face and her heart went out to him.
‘It’s OK,’ she said, taking pity on them. ‘It’s a lot to take in now but you’ll soon get the hang of it.’
It didn’t seem to help. None of them looked convinced so she kept them moving back out to the main corridor.
‘There are ten operating suites. Two are usually kept free for emergency operations. Today that’s Theatres Eight and Ten. This afternoon in the other suites we have three general surgery lists, two orthopeadic lists, an ENT list, one Caesar list and one gynae. Tomorrow you can go in and observe cases.’
Beth noticed the lights ablaze in the tenth suite as she approached. ‘This is not acceptable,’ she muttered as she strode towards it. ‘I try to run these theatres as efficiently as possible. These big theatre lights are hellishly expensive to run,’ she lectured. ‘Lights must always be out if the suite is not in use.’
Beth entered the anaesthetic area, making a mental note to talk to Tom, the head theatre orderly, about it. It was the orderly’s job to do end-of-day cleaning and that involved turning the lights off.
She veered to the left and shoved the double swing doors open with a shoulder, the students following close behind.
Gabe looked up at the interruption to his concentration. He’d been engrossed in a particularly tricky vessel dissection and was annoyed at the intrusion. Especially as it was thoughts of the woman in front of him that had made it difficult for him to get into it in the first place.
‘Oh.’ Beth stopped abruptly.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
‘I’m sorry, Dr Fallon, I didn’t realise you were in here.’
Gabe gritted his teeth at her formality. Despite agreeing to the necessity for it, he longed to hear her say ‘Gabe’ again, like she had that night. ‘That’s quite all right, Sister Rogers. I was just working on the Fisher case.’
Beth nodded. ‘I’m showing some student nurses around. They’ll be with us three days a week for the next six months.’
‘Ah,’ Gabe said, loosening a little. He never missed an opportunity to teach. ‘They might be here when we separate the twins.’
‘The Fisher twins?’ Joy, one of the students, asked.
Gabe smiled at her. ‘Yes. Come over here. I’ll show you the scans.’
Beth stood back a little while Gabe explained the unusual anatomy and answered the students’ eager questions. A little too eager, Beth thought. If the girls batted their eyelashes any more they were bound to fall out. Not that she could blame them. The combination of his well-modulated voice with his touch-of-class accent was hard to resist. He should have been working for a phone-sex hotline. His voice stroked all the right places.
‘How often are you practising?’ David asked.
‘I try to do a little each day,’ Gabe said. ‘But we’re having our first multi-disciplinary practice here on Saturday.’
He looked at Beth and she gave a brisk nod. Not something she was looking forward
