the official line, isn’t it?’
So she hadn’t meant it. Not personally. ‘Yeah,’ he said, trying to ignore the sinking disappointment in the pit of his stomach. Why should it matter what she thought of him?
Though it did.
‘It stopped the discussion. That’s the main thing. Where’s Sammy?’ she asked the scrub nurse, wanting to know where her senior house officer was.
‘Held up.’
‘I’ll assist,’ Charlie said as Sophie started to scrub up. ‘I was planning to observe all the surgeons anyway, so I may as well kill two birds with one stone.’
‘Observe?’ Sophie asked coolly.
‘I need to know my team’s capabilities. Where your strengths are, how you do things, where we can learn from each other.’
‘So, despite what you said to me, you are planning new-broom stuff.’
‘No.’ He kept his temper under wraps. Just. Hadn’t they agreed on a truce last week? And he’d thought they’d been getting on all right, before they’d seen the Jacksons. Obviously he’d been wrong. ‘But I believe in keeping my team motivated. To do that, I need to know where you are now and where you want to be. And it’s my job to get you the extra experience you need to move your career onwards.’
As soon as Sophie had opened Katrina’s abdomen and suctioned out the blood, she groaned. ‘Her spleen’s split completely in two. Gluing isn’t an option.’ She nodded at the screen where Katrina’s spleen was visible.
‘Agreed. It’s going to have to come out,’ Charlie said.
‘Her BP’s dropping,’ the anaesthetist said.
‘OK. I want four units of O-negative on standby, please. In the meantime, we need to filter and reuse her blood,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m doing an open operation, not laparoscopic,’ she added to Charlie. ‘Do I need to explain my decisions to you?’
‘Later. Just do it,’ Charlie said.
Sophie increased the size of her incision so she could perform the operation. To her relief, there were no further complications and the rest of the operation was textbook—grasping the splenic pedicle between the fingers of one hand, ligating the splenic artery, splenic vein and short gastric arteries, then removing the spleen, while trying not to damage the tail of the pancreas or the splenic flexure of the colon.
‘Would you like to close?’ she asked Charlie.
‘As I’m assisting?’
‘As your suturing is neater than mine,’ she corrected.
Was that the ghost of a smile in her eyes? Or her idea of an olive branch? Whatever. He nodded and stitched the wound.
‘How is she?’ Derek asked, as soon as Sophie came out of Theatre.
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