because, after a weekend of emotional upheaval, she wanted to get her mind focussed back on the job. Especially as this would be the first week of full-time surgery, the patient first up this morning a young girl Alex had seen last week. Jamie Hutchins was a six-year-old with a previously undiagnosed atrial septal defect, or, in medical shorthand, an ASD, and Alex had scheduled a staff briefing for eight with the operation to start at nine. And because she wanted to be at the briefing, wanted to learn all she could about the work Alex did, here she was heading for work before seven.
And beating Alex, she found when she checked in at the special care unit and learned both patients had enjoyed a peaceful night. But she wasn’t the first on duty. As she pushed open the door that led to the suite of open-plan ‘offices’ she and the doctors used, she saw the light was on, and though her heart skipped an anticipatory beat it was Maggie, not Alex, already at a desk.
‘You want a coffee?’ Maggie used the question as a greeting. She looked and sounded tired, which puzzled Annie, given the status of their patients.
Annie said yes to coffee and watched Maggie as she poured, seeing tiredness in her actions as well.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked, and Maggie gave a weary smile.
‘When Alex offered me the job up here, I thought it would be a good chance to catch up with my sister, who shifted up here when she married, and get to know her family a bit better. So I asked if I could stay with them until I found somewhere to live.’
‘Not a good idea?’ Annie sugared her coffee and stirred it.
‘A terrible idea,’ Maggie told her. ‘She’s got a spaced-out family—I mean in ages, although Pete, the eldest, is definitely spaced out in other ways. Pete’s fifteen and we go down through an eleven-year-old I swear has ADD and twins going through the delightful Terrible Twos.’
‘Not much peace and quiet?’
‘None!’
‘Do you have to stay?’
Maggie shook her head.
‘Not really. I think I’m probably as disruptive for them as they are for me. But finding somewhere else isn’t all that easy. I don’t know the city at all, and have no idea of where to start looking. Somewhere near the hospital, I suppose.’
Annie thought of the house she and her father shared. It had been converted before they’d bought it, so there was a self-contained suite for him downstairs with three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. More than enough room for an extra person.
Yet she felt reluctant to make the offer, and knew the reluctance was tied up with Alex and the relationship they didn’t yet have, and might never have, and really, when she thought about it, should never have.
Then she remembered the size of the hearts Alex operated on, and the skill he required from his anaesthetist.
Would an exhausted anaesthetist exhibit the same skill?
How could she not offer?
‘We’ve plenty of room at our place and it’s just down the road—you can walk to and from work. You don’t have to stay for the whole year, but at least it would be handy while you looked around. You can pop down and check the place out during your break between ops and meet my father, and if you like it, I can drive you to your sister’s after work and bring you and your gear back home.’
Maggie stared at her.
‘You don’t know me,’ she pointed out, and Annie grinned at her.
‘I know you’re an excellent anaesthetist and this unit needs one of those, so anything I can do to make your job easier, it’s yours.’
Maggie got up from where she’d been slumped behind a desk and came across to give Annie a big hug.
‘It needn’t be for the whole year,’ she assured Annie. ‘Just until I get my bearings in Sydney and find somewhere for myself.’
‘Whatever suits you,’ Annie said, though a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her she’d have a boarder for a year. Where else would Maggie find so ideal a situation?
Maggie was chattering on, so obviously delighted by this change in fortune Annie had to feel happy for her.
‘You don’t need to drive me. I’ve got my own car. I’ll check out your place at lunchtime then go back to my sister’s for tonight to say goodbye to them all, pack my stuff into the car and bring it all over tomorrow.’
‘Bring what all over where tomorrow?’
Annie turned at the sound of Alex’s voice. Inside, her stomach turned as well, a happy little flip-type somersault.
She smiled at him—a unit co-ordinator greeting the main man smile—and saw a bit more warmth in the smile he gave her back. Although the warmth faded, and the smile grew forced as Maggie happily explained the situation.
‘Maggie’s coming to live with you?’ Alex asked, when Maggie had left the suite to check her new patient.
He sounded hurt, and puzzled, and Annie understood both reactions.
‘It might only be temporary,’ she said, then remembered why she’d offered.
‘Personally, it might not be ideal,’ she said, standing up so she could look Alex in the eye, ‘but professionally—do you really want a sleep-deprived, twitchy anaesthetist working with you on a child? What else could I do but offer?’
His smile improved, though it was still a wry effort.
‘I wish I’d been here. I could have offered to have her at my place. With Phil there already, it wouldn’t have mattered and we’d still have had some privacy from work colleagues at your place.’
He brightened considerably.
‘We could still do that! I’ll offer to have her at my place. She’ll be with Jamie. I’ll go now.’
He touched Annie on the shoulder and breezed away, obviously delighted with his own brilliance.
But his face was glum again when Annie saw him at the briefing, and he looked far from happy as he explained Jamie’s problem, where a hole in the wall between the heart’s two upper chambers, the atria, hadn’t closed, so blood shunted between the two chambers.
‘It causes increased pressure in the right atrium and ventricle, and too much blood flowing into the lungs. Usually the patient suffers few symptoms—a bit of breathlessness and fatigue from time to time. In Jamie’s case these didn’t become obvious until she started at Little Athletics. Echocardiography has confirmed the hole is there, and her cardiologist has done a cardiac catheterisation as well to determine just where the hole is.’
Alex pointed to his diagram on the whiteboard.
‘New technology is being tried for holes in the centre of the atrial wall, and holes are being successfully closed using transcatheter management—inserting wires through a catheter. But Jamie’s hole is higher up and the new technique doesn’t work, hence the need for an operation.’
‘If she’s
