be fine,’ Chelsea assured her. ‘I have stayed here before and I know my aunt and uncle were often called out at night. You go and do your work.’
But as Ellie walked swiftly up the road to the hospital, she couldn’t help thinking of the young woman alone in the big house, and wonder just what she was thinking, not to mention what Andy was going to make of it all…
She arrived to find Andrea, a senior nurse who had specialist anaesthetic training, already in Theatre.
‘I’ll need you to assist,’ Andy said, as Ellie walked in. ‘There’s gear set out in the ante-room, and Tony will help you scrub.’
Ellie took a deep breath. It wasn’t that she hadn’t assisted in operations before. It was part of their medical training, and they’d done a lot in Africa, but surgery had always made her feel anxious, as if she had no business having her hands in someone else’s body. It was impersonal, yet at the same time deeply moving.
Shaking away the thoughts, she changed, scrubbed her hands and arms and held them up for Tony to slide on the gloves. He tied an extra apron around her waist, and she was ready.
‘Will you enlarge the wound you made earlier?’ she asked Andy as she took her place beside him.
A quick headshake.
‘It was big enough, but I must have missed something.’
The tightness of his voice told her how stressed he was—stressed because he felt he’d somehow failed the boy.
‘There was nothing obvious,’ she reminded him, ‘and you didn’t want to interfere with his bowel by poking around under it.’
She paused then added, in a deep, terrifying voice, ‘Never touch the bowel.’
Andy laughed. Her mimicry of a lecturer they’d had in third year had always been good, and the words took him back to when, as students, they and their friends had used the words in more earthy ways.
It broke his tension and he opened the wound, holding it for her to clamp so he had a clear view.
‘Think about the barb,’ he muttered, and although she knew he was talking to himself, she understood what he was getting at. The barb could have pierced a muscle, tendon or even the bowel, and infection had developed in the second site.
But there was nothing obvious. Lecturer or not, he was going to have to touch the bowel.
He gently lifted the nearest coil of the large intestine, checking all around it for damage.
Nothing.
They irrigated the wound again, and closed it up, then all stood frowning at the monitor, which had no good news for them.
‘Hang on,’ Ellie said. ‘Didn’t someone say he was fixing a barbed-wire fence? Imagine what happened. The fence strainers broke, the loose wire would have flicked back, one barb would have pierced his skin. How far apart are the barbs on barbed wire?
‘Roughly a hand span.’ It was Andy who answered, catching on quickly to Ellie’s train of thought.
So some things hadn’t changed…
‘That means the next barb would be here,’ he said, measuring across the boy’s abdomen with his hand.
They all peered at the spot but there was no sign of damage to the skin, or any indication of infection.
‘Imagine him with clothes on,’ Ellie said. ‘Jeans, most likely, and low slung how the kids wear them these days. That barb would have hit the double layer of the pocket, possibly even a stud, so the next barb would be here…’ She used her hand to measure the distance, brushing Andy’s hand then glancing up, meeting his eyes above his mask—a flash of something as sudden and powerful as lightning flashing between them. ‘If the wire wrapped around him.’
They found the wound beneath their patient’s left hip, a tiny pinprick of a mark, surrounded by swollen, angry redness.
While Tony went for the portable X-ray machine, Ellie and Andy propped the boy on his side, careful not to touch each other after whatever it was that had flashed between them earlier.
‘From the size of it, it’s just an infection rather than another foreign object,’ Ellie said, and Andy nodded, although she could tell he was furious with himself for not checking more carefully earlier.
She opened her mouth to say, ‘You weren’t to know,’ but Andrea beat her to it.
Not that Andy would have found any comfort in the assurance. He prided himself on his physical examination of all patients, although earlier this morning the pinprick of a mark could have been all but invisible.
The X-ray showed no foreign matter in the wound, but Andy opened it up anyway. Clearing out the infection already there would lead to a quicker recovery for the boy.
‘Do you still hate it?’ Andy asked Ellie as they left the hospital an hour later. It was only when she didn’t reply that he looked around to find she’d halted, twenty or so paces behind him, and was gazing up at the night sky.
‘Still gets to you, huh?’ he teased as he walked back to join her, resting his hand on the small of her back as he had so often in the past. Often just a touch in passing, often a prelude—but he wouldn’t go there.
She smiled at him.
‘I just cannot believe how many stars there are. I know they are there, in the city and we just don’t see them for the other lights, but out here…’
She waved her arms around as if to encompass the beauty she couldn’t put into words.
‘And all yours,’ Andy said, wondering if she remembered his promise to give her the moon and the stars…
And looking at her, her clear skin luminous in the starlight, her golden-brown hair framing a face he’d always thought perfection, he wanted to take her in his arms again, take her back to that time, make her really his once more.
‘Did you ask me something?’
Her question broke the moment, although he knew the moment he’d felt had never been possible.
Thought back to his question.
‘Oh, I just wondered if you still hated surgery?’
She’d started forward but now paused again, turned back to him.
‘I’ve never really hated it so much as felt very uncomfortable. It seems so intrusive to be fumbling around inside someone else’s body.’
Ellie sighed, and shook her head as if to chase the thoughts away.
‘And speaking of bodies, I really need to talk to you about something that came up today. Shall we get a pizza and sit in the park to eat it?’
‘You’ve
