style="font-size:15px;"> “I assure you that I’ve seen this condition several times, Dr. Xenakis.”
He didn’t simply watch her now, and his frowning stare could mean lots of things—but none of them were good. Most likely his frown meant he was questioning her diagnosis.
Shoving his hand roughly to the back of his neck, he rubbed like it was on fire. “Would you come with me to brief our anesthesiologist, Dr. Nikolaides?”
No.
Her body shrieked the word along every nerve ending, and she knew she’d gone pale by the funny looks she was receiving. So much for trying to remain calm and appear as though there was no liquid panic rushing through her veins.
She nodded—an act of will—and once that domino fell, others followed.
Everything was fine. She should be happy they had an anesthesiologist. Relief was the only acceptable emotion right now. Forget the rest.
“I’d like Cailey to stay with them,” she managed to say, and waited for Ares to fetch her soon-to-be sister-in-law, giving her a moment to reassure her patient again and project the confidence she would surely start to feel any second now.
Cailey brought the lab results with her, and Erianthe peeked at three numbers before giving a couple of quick instructions, then following Ares.
Just another room. Just another doctor. Everything was normal. This walk didn’t lead to a gas chamber. Just to a conference with another colleague.
Having never come to the clinic before, there was nothing for her to do but follow Ares to the anesthesiologist’s office.
At the end of a short corridor, he opened a door and held it for her.
Polite. Common courtesy. Normal.
She stepped in.
Tension in her shoulders spread to her chest as she scanned the unlit room. No desk. No people. Two bunk beds.
Not an office.
This must be the on-call room for the doctors. Her thought train derailed there. Rounding on him, she reached for the doorknob, her body registering her unease before she thought of a rational response.
“Erianthe?”
“There’s no anesthesiologist,” she blurted out.
He stood in her way, and that was enough to make her draw back from the door and her only escape route.
“I’ve never done an appendectomy on a pregnant woman. You want me to go with your diagnosis—I get it. She’s in a lot of pain, and her appendix could rupture before we get her to Athens. But—”
“Where is the anesthesiologist?” she interrupted, cutting her hand through the air to make him focus, because knowing he wasn’t about to attack her didn’t make being alone with him feel any less dangerous.
“Not here. They called him in already. He’s on his way. Before he gets here, tell me exactly how many of these surgeries you’ve been involved in. I’ve performed emergency appendectomies, but none where the appendix wasn’t in the lower right quadrant. We don’t have a CT scan to work from, so we don’t have a lot of options, but if your diagnosis is incorrect, this is unnecessary surgery. It puts her and the baby at risk. And the weight of that call is on me.”
There it was—the elephant in the room, its neon hide impossible to ignore. Words flew out of her. “Do you really think that I, of all people, would put a baby in needless danger?”
The color drained from his cheeks, confirming that her words had struck right where she’d intended. He stepped back from her, opening up a space that had suddenly become tight and toxic.
“No.” It took him several seconds to make that one-word answer, and in this small room she couldn’t help but look at him, watch him, try to read him—not that she’d done so well in reading him when she’d been young and foolish enough to trust him.
THE SATISFACTION OF seeing Ares blanch came and went in a single sluggish heartbeat. Fighting about the past wouldn’t do anything to help this situation, and Jacinda and her baby deserved one hundred percent of their focus and attention. Now wasn’t the time to talk about their own child.
Erianthe tried again. “I’ve assisted before in this type of surgery twice. I’ve observed another couple times. I’m not a surgeon, but I perform C-sections and I’ve done surgery rotations. If we had any other option, then I’d say send her off the island, but you saw the level of her white cell count. It’s possible the damned thing has already ruptured. It has to come out as soon as possible. We cannot wait.”
He held out his hand for the results and she handed them over. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to look at him, but there was nowhere else to look in order to divine what he was thinking.
Resignation was clearly written in the grim set of his lips, the furrow of his brow. “Tell me where the appendix tends to get shoved. Is the surgery usually performed with an ultrasound to guide?”
She shook her head, then waved a hand. “Imaging is used, but not usually ultrasound. I think we could do that, though, if you wanted to get a look at it.”
He nodded. “Have you ever assisted in this surgery without the patient being pregnant? Can you tell me what differences occur between the two surgeries?”
He was going to do it. Thank goodness. “I can tell you what I know, but it’s been years since I saw a run-of-the-mill appendectomy.”
“When?”
“My first year in residency.”
“How are you with an ultrasound?”
That she could give him confidence with. “Excellent.”
“That’s your other job—assisting and maneuvering the wand so we can get and keep a visual on the appendix until I understand what I need to do.”
“I can do that.”
“I’m trusting you,” he said—which shouldn’t have made cold shoot through her, but did.
She couldn’t bring herself to say anything, to pretend the sentiment was reciprocated. It wasn’t—except probably medically. Whatever might have been said or done between them, she didn’t trust him personally. She was just taking the only available exit from a burning building right now, and that was what made her stomach pitch and roll like a dinghy on the front edge of a tsunami.
“The anesthesiologist—do we know if he’s put under a pregnant woman before? It’s not as deep a sleep. And there are frequent issues with reflux, so we need a good proton pump inhibitor.”
He opened the door and stepped out, one curt hand motion beckoning her to follow after him.
Inside thirty minutes they had Jacinda in the surgical
