her he would be there to help no matter what. She stared at his chest, half tempted to reach out and touch it, to see if his heart was doing the same.
When their gazes connected again he was all business. He steered her over to a gurney that was being locked into place by a couple of rescue workers.
“Right! Cailey, this is Artemis Pepolo. I’ve known this feisty teen since she was born.”
The dark-haired girl nodded a fraction, the rest of her body contracted tightly in pain.
“Artemis has just been rescued after a pretty uncomfortable night under a beam—but you hung in there, didn’t you, my love?”
Artemis’s breathing was coming in sharp, staccato bursts and her lips were rapidly draining of color. She tried to smile for Theo but cried out in pain. Her arm lay at an odd angle and one touch to the side of her throat revealed a rapid heart-rate.
“Pneumothorax?” Cailey asked in a low voice.
Theo gave an affirmative nod, his gloved hands running along the girl’s ribcage as he spoke. “Good. Yes. Traumatic pneumothorax, in this case. The beams of her house shifted when they were getting her out and broke a couple of ribs. No time to get her X-rayed before we relieve the tension. Can you snap on a pair of gloves, get some oxygen into her and clean her up for a quick chest tube?”
Cailey clenched her eyes tight, forcing herself to picture the chart she’d made for herself on how to go through the procedure. Images always worked better for her than words. Miraculously it came to her in a flood of recognition.
And then, as one, they flew through the treatment as if they’d worked together for years.
After snapping on a pair of gloves from a nearby box, Cailey swiftly pulled an oxygen mask round the girl’s head and placed it over her mouth, ensuring the tube was releasing a steady flow. She then took a pair of scissors from a supplies trolley, cut open the girl’s top, applied monitors, checked her stats and covered her with a protective sheet, leaving a mid-sized square of her ribcage just below her heart exposed. She swabbed it with a hygiene solution as Theo explained the protocol he was going to follow.
“I’m using point-five percent numbing agent to numb the second intercostal space and then a shot of adrenaline-epinephrine before we insert a pigtail catheter, yes?”
“Not a chest tube?” she asked.
The doctor she’d worked under during her stint in the London trauma unit had been old school. Very old school. She wouldn’t say it had been entirely his fault she’d had her...blip...but he most certainly hadn’t helped.
Theo put the tube over a tiny metal rod. “Most hospitals are using the pigtail catheter now. Far less painful for the patient.”
She looked for the sneer, listened for the patronizing tone, and heard neither. Just a doctor explaining the steps he was going to take. But better. A doctor saying his patient’s comfort was of paramount importance to him.
And then it was back to business. Cailey gave the region around the fourth and fifth intercostal space of the girl’s ribcage a final swipe of cleansing solution and then stood back as Theo expertly inserted the needle into the pleural space, his fingertip holding just above the gauge for a second. Their eyes connected as he smiled.
“Ha. Got it. I can feel the air releasing.” He turned to his patient and gave her a gentle smile. “Hang in there, love. We’re almost there.” He attached a syringe to the needle. “I’ll just do a quick aspiration to make sure we get all that extra trapped air out.”
Once he was satisfied, he expertly went about inserting the thin wire and tube as if he had done it a thousand times. Within seconds the tube was in, the wire was pulled out and Cailey had attached the tube to a chest drainage system.
“Right, Artie. We’ll just leave you here to rest up for a bit and then see about moving you somewhere a bit more peaceful where we can check out that arm, all right?”
He pulled off his gloves, smiled at Cailey and tipped his head toward the main trauma area. “Ready for the next one?”
She was impressed. For a man who professed to be a humble country doctor, he knew his stuff.
“Did you study trauma medicine?” She couldn’t help but ask the question after pulling the curtains round Artemis and watching Theo give notes to the nurse who, he’d explained, was in charge of moving patients out of the trauma area.
He nodded. “I thought if I was going to be running this place on my own sometimes I’d better be prepared.”
“You’re here alone ?”
“Well, not alone, alone. There are interns who come in from Athens to have a spell, but they usually get bored with island life eventually and want to get back to the mainland. And the lads come back on and off at certain times of the year in a sort of unofficial rotation; they’re just not here at the moment.”
She nodded. He must mean Chris, Deakin and Ares—the other Mopaxeni malakas he’d set up the clinic with. She wasn’t so sure malakas was the right word for them anymore. Miracle workers, more like. This place was a far cry from the crumbling old clinic she’d gone to as a girl. And Theo was completely different from the elitist snob she’d been expecting.
“Right.” He rubbed his hands together as if preparing for a fantastic adventure. “How are you with broken bones?”
* * *
Broken bones. Fractures. Lacerations. Internal bruising. Heart palpations. A massive blood clot... The list went on.
And no matter what he threw at her Cailey stayed bright, attentive and, much to his surprise, willing to learn. There were holes in her knowledge—as to be expected for someone whose specialty wasn’t trauma—but she seemed capable of everything short of reading his mind, and even that was sometimes questionable.
Whatever he needed—a particular gauge of needle, a certain type of suture thread, the correct scalpel—she already had it ready before he could ask for it.
As he opened the curtain for their next patient he stopped. Ah. Marina Serkos. They’d gone to school together until his father had deemed the local primary unfit for purpose and shipped him off to boarding school.
“Looks like someone’s due soon.”
This was his one bugbear. The baby checks. He knew he should be happy for others. Share in the joy of a new innocent life being brought into the world. But all he could think each time he saw a pregnant patient was, Good luck. You’ll need it.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement for “happy families”. But happy families hadn’t been the remit in the Nikolaides household. Appearances were everything. No one outside the family knew he wasn’t his father’s success story. Nor did they know he was adopted. And no one—not even his sister—would ever know his silent vow never to bring a child into this world.
Pawns. That was what he and his sister had been. Pawns in a game that hadn’t seemed to have any rules.
“Theo?” Cailey had helped Marina up onto the exam table and was wheeling a sonogram machine into place. “Do you want to do the exam?”
Both
