‘Hello, Mrs Fry. I’m one of the doctors here. What have you been doing to yourself?’ Even as he approached the elderly lady his eyes were beginning their primary survey, noting how pale and shaky she was and wondering how much of that was normal for her.
‘I fell coming in from the hens,’ she quavered, peering up at him from under the bulk of a pressure bandage wound tightly around her head. ‘Hit my head and broke both my eggs.’
‘No, dear, it wasn’t your legs you broke; it was your wrists,’ Sonja corrected in the annoyingly bright tone some people adopted with children and the elderly.
Con threw her a quelling glare and turned back to the little woman who seemed far from confused to him, despite her age and the recent trauma.
‘Eggs,’ the woman repeated stubbornly, fixing her pale blue gaze on Con. ‘I’d been out to the hens and was bringing the eggs back into the house when I missed the step.’
‘Ouch!’ Con said sympathetically, as he took a peep under the bandage and saw the size of the gash on her forehead. He wouldn’t disturb it too much until it was time to stitch it, not while the newly formed clots were slowing the bleeding to a sluggish seep. ‘There was one step you should have missed. Are you in a lot of pain?’
‘I’m eighty-two, doctor. At my age I’m always in pain. Everything’s wearing out.’
‘What about your hands? Can you move your fingers for me?’ he asked, as he pressed on a nail bed of each hand to check that her circulation wasn’t being compromised by the broken bones.
‘I can, but I don’t want to because they hurt,’ she said with a stubborn glint in her eyes.
Con grinned at her. ‘If I give you something to take the pain away, will you move them for me?’
‘I might,’ she conceded. ‘But when can I go home? The ambulance people wouldn’t let me clean the broken eggs off the step. It’ll be a terrible job to do if it dries on. And they shut my dogs Floss and Nell in the kitchen. They’ll be needing to go out to do their business.’
‘You won’t be able to go home for a little while, Mrs Fry,’ he said gently, delaying the moment he’d probably have to tell her that she was going to have to be admitted. With two broken wrists most people would need help to take care of themselves, let alone an eighty-two-year-old with chickens and two dogs to take care of. ‘First, we need to take some pictures. Then we can sort out your hands and fix the cut on your head.’
‘But how soon can I go home?’ she demanded, clearly determined to get an answer. ‘I haven’t even given the dogs their breakfast, yet.’
‘Have you had anything to eat this morning?’ he sidestepped, not wanting to upset her with the bad news until he knew exactly what they were dealing with.
He quickly scrawled his signature on the paperwork for an MRI of her head to rule out any injury to her brain and X-rays of both wrists to find out exactly how many breaks there were in there. Depending on what each revealed, the poor woman might even have to go to Theatre for Orthopaedics to patch her up.
‘Haven’t eaten anything yet. That’s why I was out getting the eggs. I was going to boil one and have it with some toast—I still make all my own bread,’ she added with a spark of pride, ‘and my own marmalade, too.’
Con’s stomach gave a sudden noisy growl and he chuckled. ‘You can’t imagine just how delicious that all sounds at this time of the morning,’ he said, even as his thoughts automatically flew to Callie and the way she always insisted on setting a place at the table for him before she came out to work. There would be no breakfast for him any time soon—not until she turned up to start her shift. They were far too short-staffed during this early-morning rush of patients for him to feel comfortable taking off just because it was past the end of his own shift. As long as the department manager didn’t spot him…
‘Dr Lowell! Your shift ended two hours ago,’ said a stern voice behind him as he was making for the nearest phone, and he turned with a rueful grin to meet the unsmiling eyes of Selina Drew.
She wasn’t a big woman by anybody’s standards but there was absolutely no question about who ruled St Mark’s A and E department.
‘I know, Selina, but—’
‘But nothing! There’s no point thinking you can soft-soap me,’ she continued firmly. ‘You had a tough shift last night and you know as well as I do that you won’t be able to do your job properly when you come on shift again if you don’t get a proper rest.’
She was right, but under the circumstances…
‘I wasn’t just staying on for the fun of it,’ he said, uncomfortably aware that there was definitely a defensive sound to his voice. And he was tired…oh, so tired. Sometimes it felt as if the weariness had penetrated right to the marrow of his bones. ‘Callie hasn’t arrived yet, and I was just…’ He shrugged.
‘You were just keeping busy while you waited for her to turn up?’ she suggested kindly, obviously understanding far more of his situation that he’d realised. ‘Well, Con, as of this moment, you’re officially off the clock. I’ve just been informed by the office that your wife’s reported off sick today. Now, get yourself home and take care of each other.’
She started to turn away from him then changed her mind.
‘How is Callie really doing, Con?’ she asked, and with this lion-hearted woman he knew that the question came out of genuine concern rather than any other reason. ‘It’s just that…well, she seemed to be coping reasonably well since she came back to work, right until the last few days.’
Con blinked, puzzled. ‘What do you mean? What’s been happening the last few days? I didn’t know she’d been having problems. She hasn’t said anything to me.’
‘Not problems, exactly.’ She pulled a face, looking as if she now regretted saying anything. ‘It’s almost as though…as though she’s had something weighing on her mind. You know how it is when you’re trying to make a decision about something?’
‘Did she give you any idea what it was about?’ he asked.
It didn’t feel quite right to be pumping Selina for information, but if there was something that Callie was worrying about—something that was actually affecting the way she did her job—then it was something he needed to know about. They’d spent the last three years going through hell and high water together as they’d tried to start a family the hard way, and he couldn’t believe that there was anything they couldn’t talk about any more.
‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ she admitted, then paused a second as though worried about encroaching on private territory. ‘Con, I didn’t know if perhaps the two of you were trying to make a decision about calling a halt…if you’d decided that she’d been through enough?’
He closed his eyes and sighed, pressing his head back against the wall, knowing that if he didn’t consciously keep his knees locked he would probably slide right down into a heap on the floor.
When he was busy, he could almost forget, but as soon as the memories surfaced, the devastation was enough to cut him off at the knees. He could only guess how much worse it was for Callie. The first two pregnancies hadn’t even progressed far enough to show, and she’d broken her heart over each of them. The third one—third time lucky, they’d told each other as the weeks had gone past—had been more than halfway to term when the routine ultrasound had failed to pick up a heartbeat and they’d learned that the baby had died before they’d even held him.
‘I tried to talk about it the other day,’ he murmured, feeling the warmth of her concern as she stood silently beside him. ‘Because we just can’t go on in…in limbo like this, but she said she just wasn’t ready yet. You know this one was just such a shock…’
He couldn’t go on.