let me call an ambulance. It was all I could do to persuade him to come and see you and he only did that because you’re right next door.’
Behind Jenny, Emma could see that children were being helped out of the van. A boy who might be about six or seven. A smaller girl. The driver was opening the back hatch which looked to be full of luggage and items like a pram and cot. Max was unclipping a baby seat. Emma’s mouth went a little dry. Maybe this was going to be harder to cope with than she’d thought.
James looked towards where his grandchildren were being ushered towards him. He turned his head to look in the other direction, presumably to the ‘west wing’ that housed his general practice clinic. His duty lay in both directions, with the professional one clearly more urgent than the personal.
And, suddenly, Emma knew exactly how she could help everyone here, including herself. Years of honing her skills to be able to work to the best of her ability in unfamiliar places made it automatic to take charge but, as a bonus, it felt as if her protective walls were suddenly strengthening themselves around her and keeping her in her safe space. She walked towards the anxious woman.
‘I’m Dr Moretti,’ she told her. ‘I can help you.’
Only a couple of minutes later, Emma was opening the door to the clinic with one of the keys on the ring James had given her.
‘There’s a twelve-lead ECG machine in the treatment room,’ he’d told her. ‘If it looks like an infarct, call an ambulance and then let me know.’
‘I can handle it,’ Emma had promised.
Jenny and her husband, Terry, followed her into what was clearly a waiting room.
‘How’s the pain level, Terry? On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst you could imagine?’
‘Seven,’ Terry told her. ‘It’s like a knife in my chest. It’s hard to breathe, even.’
‘Let’s get you lying down so I can have a good look at you.’ Emma walked ahead, opening one door and then another. There was a small kitchen, a storeroom, a consulting room and…yes…what looked like a treatment room, well set up for minor procedures or more extensive assessments. She recognised the machine for taking a twelve-lead ECG, spotted an oxygen cylinder in the corner of the room and was relieved to see a defibrillator on another trolley. If Terry was having a heart attack and in any danger of an imminent cardiac arrest she had the means to deal with it. She also knew that one of the keys on the ring she was holding was to open a drug cabinet that James had told her was well stocked.
On first impressions, Terry didn’t look like a man who was in the middle of having a heart attack. His colour was good, he wasn’t sweating and he seemed to be clutching the side of his chest rather than a more classic sign of pressing his hand to the centre. He’d also told her that he wasn’t feeling sick in any way but Emma wasn’t about to make assumptions. She helped her patient climb onto the bed and lifted the back so he wasn’t lying completely flat.
‘Let’s get that coat and jumper off and unbutton your shirt, Terry.’ Emma opened the drawer on the ECG trolley and took out electrodes. ‘So you’ve been getting angina for a while?’
‘Just a bit. And only when I’m doing too much.’
‘He’s taken up jogging,’ his wife told Emma. ‘I told him he’s going to kill himself but he’s determined to lose the weight.’
‘And you were jogging when the chest pain came on?’
‘No…’ Terry lifted his arm out of the way as Emma stuck the final electrodes on the left side of his chest. ‘I was getting the damned turkey out of the freezer in the barn.’
‘It was far too big to go in the freezer in the house.’ Jenny nodded. ‘And it takes days and days to thaw.’
‘It was like carrying a giant, slippery rock,’ Terry complained. ‘And then I started to drop it and almost tripped over something at the same time and it went flying.’ He gave a huff of something like laughter that turned into a groan. ‘So to speak… Anyway, it was when I bent down and picked the turkey up that the pain came on. By the time I got it into the laundry tub, I could hardly stand up.’
‘Does anything make it worse?’ Emma asked, still smiling at Terry’s attempt at humour. ‘Like taking a deep breath?’
Terry tried to breathe in and groaned. ‘Yep…that really hurts.’
‘And you used your angina spray?’
‘Didn’t do a thing.’
‘Okay.’ Emma was becoming more confident that she wasn’t dealing with a critical cardiac event. ‘Keep really still for me for a few seconds, Terry. I’m going to do the ECG.’
With the sheet of graph paper in her hand a short time later, Emma smiled at the anxious couple in front of her.
‘Good news,’ she told them. ‘This all looks absolutely normal. There’s no sign of your pain being due to angina and certainly no indication that you’re having a heart attack.’
‘Oh…’ Jenny started to cry. ‘I was so worried.’
‘What is it, then?’ Terry asked.
Emma handed Jenny the box of tissues. ‘I suspect you pulled a muscle between your ribs while you were wrestling with that frozen turkey,’ she told him. She put her hand on the left side of his chest. ‘Tell me if this hurts…’
Jenny stayed by the head of the bed, watched the thorough examination her husband was receiving and listened to the advice about cold and heat packs and using anti-inflammatory medication.
‘Are you sure it’s not a heart attack?’ she asked.
‘Quite sure.’ Emma smiled. ‘But you did the right thing in getting it checked out. I’m going to take your blood pressure while you’re here too, Terry.’
‘Imagine if it had been a heart attack.’ Jenny reached for another tissue. ‘Right before Christmas. I know it’s terrible at any time of year but there’s something about Christmas, isn’t there?’
‘Mmm…’ Emma stuck the earpieces of a stethoscope into place as a hint for Jenny to stop talking. She didn’t need a reminder of how much worse it was to have a tragedy at Christmas time. She placed the disc of the stethoscope over the artery in Terry’s elbow as she pumped up the blood pressure cuff.
Jenny hadn’t taken the hint. ‘It’s like the poor Cunninghams. Ruined Christmas forever for those poor boys. They used to call it “the Cunninghams’ Christmas Curse” in these parts.’
Emma knew she shouldn’t encourage gossip but it wasn’t as if she’d asked a question aloud. Her startled glance had been enough to prompt Jenny to continue.
‘Their poor mother,’ she said sadly. ‘Fought off the cancer for such a long time and all she wanted was one last Christmas with her little boys but they didn’t even get the decorations up.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And they’ve never been put up again, from what I heard.
