subconscious. Her ears didn’t hear it any more but the thought of no longer hearing a mish-mash of foreign tongues was depressing.
Just in this room they had Italian Ben, Russian Katya, German Helmut, Irish Siobhan, Theire, who spoke several of the local dialects, and various English, American and Australian contributions as well. And then there was Gill. He spoke with the careless drawl of a fair dinkum Aussie, but when he spoke French it was like he’d been born there.
She would really miss that. Miss how he would speak French with his parents and grandfather in her presence from time to time, or jokingly ask for an instrument in the language while he was working to crack everyone up, or casually slip into it at home because he knew how much it turned her on. He made love in French, too.
‘I have been in contact with the various facilities that our patients were transferred to.’ MedSurg always employed a local interpreter for each mission. Their services were invaluable.
‘The man with the bullet in his brain did not make it. Nor did the little boy with the traumatic amputation of his leg. The three chest traumas are still in critical conditions but holding their own. The woman with the gut full of shrapnel had to go back for more surgery. They removed an extensive amount of ischaemic large bowel and she now has a colostomy.’
There was silence in the room as they all thought about the people from the day before. Gill had operated on the little boy. The child had lost so much blood, and even as he had been operating to tie off the bleeders and stabilise his condition, he had known deep inside that the child wouldn’t make it.
The wound had been incredibly dirty, dragged through filth and mud as the boy had crawled to safety. It was always going to be a matter of whether his profoundly hypovolaemic state or a massive bacterial infection would kill him first. Gill wanted to punch the table at the unfairness of it all. What had a child of eight done to deserve that?
He looked at Harriet and could see she was affected by the news as well. He suddenly envied her turning her back on all of this. To never have to look into the eyes of another man, woman or child injured through the stupidity of war. For the first time he wondered how long he could do it for. There was always going to be another war. Could he do this for ever? He’d always thought he would but…
She gave him a sympathetic smile and he shook himself out of his reverie. Their divorce conversation had obviously got to him. He just needed a break. Two months of this kind of stuff was tough mentally. But this was what he did. This was who he was.
CHAPTER FIVE
1100 HOURS
‘GILL, can you review your abdo trauma from last night? He’s febrile and tachycardic. His drain losses are increasing as well.’
Damn it! He must have missed something. He’d spent two hours picking shrapnel out of the rebel soldier’s intestines and was confident that they’d removed it all. But as thorough as he’d been, Gill knew that the chances of missing a little hole somewhere, caused by the trajectory of the shrapnel, was always a possibility.
‘I’ll be right there,’ he said, smiling at the HDU nurse.
Harriet rolled her eyes as Megan turned a pretty shade of pink and beamed back at the sexy surgeon. Her husband. For another few weeks anyway. Man, he should be banned from smiling. She couldn’t blame Megan for feeling a little flushed, it made her go positively weak at the knees.
She watched them as they walked side by side and then disappeared into the room that housed the HDU. How was it possible to make a set of plain blue baggy scrubs sexy? She remembered how she had thought him breathtakingly gorgeous that night in London dressed to impress and later how magnificent he was undressed, but equally impressive was how he filled out a set of scrubs.
It was like the minute he donned them he became Dr Guillaume Remy, surgeon. The sense of authority that exuded from him was powerful, virile—almost sexual. The blue theatre cap tied and anchored at the back of his neck just below his hairline made him look even sexier.
If anyone were to ask her in years to come what her fondest memory was of their time together, there would be no hesitation. Seeing Gill in his scrubs and cap, laughing his deep, sexy laugh, oblivious to his innate sex appeal. Harriet felt a moment of panic as she stored away the memory. One more day of memories and that was it.
Gill took one look at his patient and knew he was going to have to reopen him. The man was burning up and muttered unintelligibly, the words both foreign and muffled by the face mask. Megan gave Gill the hand-held ultrasound and he could feel the rigidity of the man’s abdomen as the transducer glided through the gel. There was a significant amount of free fluid visible.
‘I’ll mobilise the team,’ he said to Megan.
Gill strode down the corridors, figuring everyone would have adjourned back to the dining area for another cup of artificial stimulant.
Only Harriet and Siobhan were there. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We have to reopen the soldier.’
The soldier. Harriet shook her head as she stood. He’d looked no more than sixteen and had refused to give Theire his name. What was wrong with the world? Babies fighting wars?
But that’s what they did. This was the organisation’s mission. It didn’t matter how young or old, male or female, civilian or military, goodie or baddie. If you were injured and needed surgery, the doors were always open. There were no moral or ethical judgments—it was just patch ’em up and ship ’em out.
‘I’ll alert the others,’ said Harriet.
‘Where’s Theire?’ he asked.
‘Making some more calls,’ replied Siobhan as they moved past him to go and set up the theatre.
‘I’ll get her to talk to the patient. I’ll also see Ben about evac-ing him out with the liver. See you there in five,’ Gill said.
Harriet and Siobhan located the team in all their scattered locations, which wasn’t difficult, given their close confines. There wasn’t the infrastructure for a paging system so word of mouth was how it usually worked, except when there were mass casualties arriving. Then a hand-operated siren was used by Dr Kelly Prentice, the on-site medical director, who took the call from comms. It wailed mournfully between the two buildings occupied by MedSurg, spreading its bad news like an involuntary shudder to the furthest reaches of the complex.
MedSurg had set up in an old whitewashed convent that harked back a couple of hundred years to colonial times. Kelly used this building for the medical side of the mission and across the dirt a long, rickety concrete path connected it to the old orphanage building, which was where the surgical side was housed. Gill’s territory.
The area had once been a thriving community—now it was just a few buildings in the middle of nowhere on the periphery of a war zone. The buildings had been used until the recent civil unrest as a medical facility. The nearest towns were at least one hundred kilometres in any direction, the nearest hospital at least two hundred and fifty kilometres away.
The old orphanage now used as the surgical block was a double-storey building with wide, open verandahs that wrapped around the entire building to take advantage of any breeze that might be wafting by. Two downstairs rooms had been converted to operating theatres with basic tables, anaesthetic machines, monitors and overhead lights, and smaller side rooms each housed ancient instrument sterilisers and served
