needed to get back into the work saddle again if those lines were blurring.
He rubbed his jaw. ‘Those two are like a hurricane. Are they always like that?’
‘Always.’ A more serious expression played around her mouth. ‘But don’t be deceived—they really know their stuff and the clinic runs like clockwork. Vicki’s children are adults and living in Melbourne now so I think she’s missing mothering and she’s making up for it with us.’ Her eyes danced, softening the indignant look that streaked across her face. ‘Although I’ve never had a cake made for me.’
He answered without thinking. ‘You can have as much as you like. I really don’t eat cakes.’
‘First no coffee and now no cake?’ She tilted her head enquiringly, a glint of interrogation in her eyes. ‘Next you’ll be telling me you don’t drink.’
He smiled, falling back into old habits in an attempt to deflect her. ‘I do drink but only top-shelf wine on special occasions.’ He didn’t really want to talk about why he’d given up cakes and cream. ‘So how about you show me around the clinic and the emergency department of the hospital and then I can get started.’
Work. After all, that was why he was here. He itched to throw himself into a busy day because working seemed a heck of a lot safer than talking about himself or ogling a colleague’s décolletage.
‘Can I run something past you?’ Kirby caught Nick between patients.
‘Sure. What’s up?’ His eyes darkened to the colour of moss as he swung around on the office chair, his gaze fixed firmly on her.
A gaze so intense that her skin tingled. Get over yourself. You asked the man a question and he’s giving you his undivided attention, just as a colleague should. She gripped Melinda Nikoloski’s history and focussed on the facts. ‘I’ve got a thirty-five-year-old woman with general fatigue, enlarged glands, persistent cough, raspy voice and episodes of shortness of breath.’
‘On bare facts alone it sounds like summer flu.’ His mouth tweaked up on the left in a thoughtful smile. ‘But you wouldn’t be running it past me if you thought it was flu.’
She slid into the chair next to his desk, grateful for his intuition. Grateful that he was here. Leaping into this job a year before most people started a GP rotation had stretched her, but she’d been desperate to leave Melbourne, desperate to distance herself from everything that reminded her of what she’d lost, and Port had been desperate enough to accept her. ‘The previous doctor saw her a month ago, made a diagnosis of flu and prescribed bronchodilators for the shortness of breath.’
He tapped his silver pen on a notepad. ‘So how is she now?’
‘Not much better.’ Kirby chewed her bottom lip in thought. ‘She could be anaemic, like many women in their mid-thirties are, so on Friday I ordered a routine full blood examination and those results should be back shortly, but even so, I have a nagging feeling about it. Totally non-scientific, I know, but nagging none the less.’
Understanding lined his face. ‘Listening to your gut feeling is an important part of being a good doctor. Out here you don’t have access to the full weight of diagnostic tests that you get in a large hospital.’
He sat forward, his hands flat on the spun cotton of his summer trousers which so casually covered what she imagined to be solid, muscular thighs. ‘A persistent cough and shortness of breath can too easily be attributed to asthma. As we’ve got an X-ray machine, let’s do a chest X-ray. It’s a simple test and hopefully we can rule out a lung mass.’
‘But she’s not a smoker and has no other risk factors.’
He shrugged. ‘There are other masses that can be found in the chest. But that said, it’s important to remember that non-smoking females are dying from lung cancer because it’s being missed in the early stages of the disease. Granted, the air down here is cleaner than other places but you don’t know what she’s been exposed to.’ He tugged on the hair just behind his ear, his voice rising slightly. ‘Hell, we don’t know half of what we’re exposed to in the air or in our food.’
His heartfelt reaction surprised her. He sounded more like an environmentalist than a doctor. But, then again, he did grow organic vegetables and he didn’t drink coffee. Two things she knew he hadn’t done two years ago because Virginia had basically told her everything about this citified man who’d loved the good things in life. ‘OK, I’ll organise a chest X-ray. Thanks.’
‘No problem, it’s what I’m here for.’ He spun back on his chair, his attention returning to the article he’d been reading when she’d walked into the room.
Familiar disappointment slugged her and she tried to shrug it off because there was no reason to feel like this. Nick had done his job well. Very well. He’s the mentor, you’re the student. That’s what you want and that’s what you’re getting.
She continued to remind herself of that against the strange hollow feeling in her gut as she walked back to her consulting room. Glad of something to do, she picked up the phone and called Melinda, asking her to come in for a chest X-ray.
Melinda sat in the chair, her face pale with black smudges under her eyes. She rubbed her knee. ‘I think I should have got an X-ray of my knee as well as my chest. It’s been sore for the last week.’ She sighed. ‘I really hope the chest X-ray will tell you what’s wrong with me because I’m sick of feeling like this and I think I’m getting worse, not better.’
Kirby silently agreed with her patient—Melinda had the pasty pallor of someone extremely unwell. She slid the black and white film onto the light box and flicked on the light. Using her pen she outlined the image. ‘Your heart is here and it’s the normal size, and if there was any fluid on your lungs or infection that would show up as white on the film. But your lungs are pretty clear, which is why they look black.’ And you don’t have a tumour, thank goodness.
‘But I feel so awful.’ Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes. ‘I’m so grumpy, the kids and Dev are avoiding me and all I want to do is sleep but I keep going hot and cold and my joints ache.’
‘Just hot at night?’ Piece by piece she tried to match up the vague symptoms. She rechecked the X-ray but there was no lower lobe consolidation, no sign of pneumonia.
Melinda wrung her hands. ‘Sometimes during the day too.’
‘Are you still menstruating?’ Menopause was unlikely but Kirby had learned the hard way that sometimes the unexpected happened.
Her patient grimaced. ‘Oh, yes, I’m doing that too well—flooding, in fact.’
Which led Kirby back to her initial thoughts from Friday. Menstruating women were often anaemic—lacking in iron could make you feel pretty low. But not give you hot flushes. The words nagged at Kirby. Perhaps she needed to run a test for hormone levels and do blood cultures as well.
She glanced at her watch and picked up the phone to speak to Vicki. ‘The courier should have arrived with the results of your blood test and hopefully the results will say I need to prescribe you my famous orange-juice-and-parsley iron-boosting drink.
‘If that’s the case, in two weeks you’ll feel like a new woman and we can discuss your options to reduce your menstrual bleeding.’ She
