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FOUR DAYS LATER, outside Ellie’s office at the maternity ward at Lighthouse Bay Hospital, a frog croaked. It was very close outside her window. She shuddered as she assembled the emergency locum-doctor’s welcome pack. Head down, she concentrated on continuing the task and pretended not to see the tremor in her fingers as she gathered the papers. She was a professional in charge of a hospital, for goodness’ sake. Her ears strained for a repeat of the dreaded noise and hoped like heck she wouldn’t hear it. She strained...but thankfully silence ensued.
‘Concentrate on the task,’ she muttered. She included a local map, which after the first day they wouldn’t need because the town was so small, but it covered everywhere they could eat.
A list of the hours they were required to man the tiny doctor’s clinic—just two in total on the other side of the hospital on each day of the week they were here. Then, in a month, hand over to the other local doctor who had threatened to leave if he didn’t get holidays.
She couldn’t blame him or his wife—they deserved a life! It was getting busier. Dr Rodgers, an elderly bachelor, had done the call-outs before he’d become ill. She hummed loudly to drown out the sound of the little voice that suggested she should have a life too, and of course to drown out the frogs. Ellie concentrated as she printed out the remuneration package.
The idea that any low-risk woman who went into labour would have to be transferred to the large hospital an hour away from her family just because no locum doctor could come was wrong. Especially when she’d had all her antenatal care with Ellie over the last few months. So the locum doctors were a necessary evil. It wasn’t an onerous workload for them, in fact, because the midwives did all the maternity work, and the main hospital was run as a triage station with a nurse practitioner, as they did in the Outback, so actually the locums only covered the hospital for emergencies and recovering inpatient needs.
Ellie dreamed of the day their maternity unit was fully self-sufficient. She quite happily played with the idea that she could devote her whole life to the project, get a nurse manager and finally step away from general nursing.
She could employ more midwives like her friend and neighbour Trina, who lived in one of the cliff houses. The young widowed midwife from the perfect marriage who preferred night duty so she didn’t lie awake at night alone in her bed.
She was the complete opposite to Ellie, who’d had the marriage from hell that hadn’t turned out to be a marriage at all.
Then there was Faith who did the evening shifts, the young mum who lived with her aunt and her three-year-old son. Faith was their eternal optimist. She hadn’t found a man to practise heartbreak on yet. Just had an unfortunate one-night stand with a charismatic drifter. Ellie sighed. Three diverse women with a mutual dream. Lighthouse Bay Mothers and Babies. A gentle place for families to discover birth with midwives.
Back to the real world. For the moment they needed the championship of at least one GP/OB.
Most new mums stayed between one and three nights and, as they always had, women post-caesarean birth transferred back from the base hospital to recover. So a ward round in maternity and the general part of the hospital each morning by the VMO was asked to keep the doors open.
The tense set of her shoulders gradually relaxed as she distracted herself with the chore she’d previously completed six times since old Dr Rodgers had had his stroke.
The first two locums had been young and bored, patently here for the surf, and had both tried to make advances towards Ellie, as if she were part of the locum package. She’d had no problem freezing them both back into line but now the agency took on board her preferences for mature medical practitioners.
Most replacements had been well into retirement age since then, though there had also been some disadvantages with their advanced age. The semi-bald doctor definitely had been grumpy, which had been a bit of a disappointment, because Dr Rodgers had always had a kind word for everyone.
The next had been terrified that a woman would give birth and he’d have to do something about it because he hadn’t been near a baby’s delivery for twenty years. Ellie hadn’t been able to promise one wouldn’t happen so he’d declined to come back.
Lighthouse Bay was a service for low-risk pregnant women so Ellie couldn’t see what the concern was. Birth was a perfectly normal, natural event and the women weren’t sick. But there would always be those occasional precipitous and out-of-the-ordinary labours that seemed to happen more since Ellie had arrived. She’d proven well equal to the task of catching impatient babies but a decent back-up made sense. So, obstetric confidence was a second factor she requested now from the locums.
The next three locums had been either difficult to contact when she’d needed them or had driven her mad by sitting and talking all day so she hadn’t been able to get anything done, so she hadn’t asked them back. But the last locum had finally proved a golden one.
Dr Southwell, the elderly widower and retired GP with his obstetric diploma and years of gentle experience, had been a real card.
The postnatal women had loved him, as had every other marriageable woman above forty in town.
Especially Myra, Ellie’s other neighbour, a retired chef who donated two hours a day to the hospital café between morning tea and lunch, and used to run a patisserie in Double Bay in Sydney. Myra and Old Dr Southwell had often been found laughing together.
Ellie had thought the hospital had struck the jackpot when he’d enquired about a more permanent position and had stayed full-time for an extra month when the last local GP had asked for an extended holiday. Ellie had really appreciated the break from trying to understand each new doctor’s little pet hates.
Not that Dr Southwell seemed to have any foible Ellie had had to grow accustomed to at all. Except his love of surfing. She sighed.
They’d already sent one woman away in the last two days because she’d come to the hospital having gone into early labour. Ellie had had to say they had no locum coverage and she should drive to the base hospital.
Croak... There it was again. A long-drawn-out, guttural echo promising buckets of slime... She sucked in air through her nose and forced herself to breathe the constricted air out. She had to fight the resistance because her lungs seemed to have shrunk back onto her ribcage.
Croak... And then the cruk-cruk of the mate. She glanced at the clock and estimated she had an hour at least before the new doctor arrived so she reached over, turned on the CD player and allowed her favourite country singer to protect her from the noise as he belted out a southern ballad that drowned out the neighbours. Thankfully, today, her only maternity patient had brought her the latest CD from the large town an hour away where she’d gone for her repeat Caesarean birth.
It was only rarely, after prolonged rain, that the frogs gave her such a hard time. They’d had a week of downpours. Of course frogs were about. They’d stop soon. The rain had probably washed away the solution of salt water she’d sprayed around the outside of the ward window, so she’d do it again this afternoon.
One of the bonuses of her tiny croft cottage on top of the cliff was that, up there, the salt-laden spray from waves crashing against the rocks below drove the amphibians away.
She knew it was ridiculous to have a phobia about frogs, but she had suffered with it since she was little.
