She groaned. So the boy had arrested. If the man could judge that. And he’d volunteered to resuscitate him—probably on the strength of a technique picked up from some medical TV drama.
Falling to her knees beside him, she tapped him on the shoulder. “Señor? I can take over while you make sure an ambulance is on its way. I’m a doctor.”
He withdrew to deliver cardiac compressions, didn’t even look at her. “I got that already.”
She started. His voice—a bass rasp that was just as potent as the rest of him. Concise, cultured. And American. American?
Later. Focus! “Great, so if you’ll just...” Her eyes fell on the boy’s face before the man swooped to deliver another breath and the words stopped in her throat. The boy’s mouth—it was burned!
Fighting off the wave of horror that years of handling the worst medicine had to offer hadn’t eradicated, Cassandra’s eyes darted around, summing up the situation. A boy of less than three. A pretty plastic tree a few feet away with dangling electric toy planets. They’d been glowing minutes ago. Not any more.
The boy must have bitten the electric cord to pluck one off.
Her stomach heaved again. The center of the burn encompassed both lips in a two-inch, grayish-white, depressed area: the current’s point of entry. Electrical burns were far worse than thermal ones as the current arcing through the tissues damaged everything along their path down to the bone. This one, when it healed, would look awful and result in horrible complications, from mouth contraction to tongue adhesions to bone involvement, causing everything from disfigurement to drooling to speech impairment.
But she was way ahead of herself here. No point worrying about those burns now. Keeping the boy’s circulation going and oxygen reaching his brain was the number-one priority. She’d better take over and make sure the kid got the best chance. This guy might have taken a course in resuscitation, but young children needed a totally different resuscitation protocol than adults. What would be perfect technique for an adult, or even an older child, would crush the boy’s chest with the hard, two-handed compressions, or burst his lungs with the forced ventilation. Even if he knew enough not to be too forceful, he would probably not know that the 80 compressions and the 16 breaths per minute of the usual CPR would be too few to make any difference.
“Sir...” The man withdrew from a breath and she noticed his technique for the first time. It shut her up again.
One large hand pressed down with rapid, shallow compressions. She counted them—at this rate, they’d be an optimum 120 per minute. The other hand had two fingers locating the right position on the sternum, just below the nipple line. The five-to-one ratio of compressions to breaths resulted in 25 breaths per minute, delivered with just the right force. Everything done to the letter of advanced life support protocols for a child that age.
No—not TV-trained after all. This man knew what he was doing. And then some.
Feeling redundant all of a sudden, she fell back on her heels, taking stock, her heart itching at the idea that the man was adding further injury to the mutilated tissues every time he delivered a breath into the boy’s inert lungs. Not that that could be helped.
The mother’s wailing filtered through to her from a distance. What she must be feeling—the sheer horror and despair! But, then, she hadn’t been watching her little one closely enough and she... Cassandra’s censorious thoughts stumbled, hot shame squashing them.
Look who’s being holier than thou, she thought. Safeguarding kids every minute of the day was one of life’s impossibilities. She could vouch for that. What about the right-on-his-head dive Aaron had taken out of his crib, in front of both Amanda and herself? Luckily, he had been OK. No thanks to them.
Her focus returned to the crisis. So the man was delivering first-rate CPR. Working with the presumption it would prove effective, she should assess the boy’s other injuries—other burns, any limb angulations. The generalized muscular contraction the jolt must have caused could have been violent enough to fracture bones.
The next second, coughing brought her out of her absorbed examination. The man’s coughing.
Still coughing yet not missing a beat, he looked up and she again felt as the boy must have felt the moment that devastating current had arced through his body.
“You a real doctor?” he panted.
Her mind was shut down, but her smart mouth must have been on auto. “No, I’m just a surgeon.”
He came up from the next breath with the banked fire in his eyes flaring, promising sensual retribution. Later, they said. Now he only rasped, “OK, Dr Surgeon—take over respiration.”
She swooped down for the next breath, cringing at having to bear down on the boy’s burnt lips but forcing herself to form a tight seal over his mouth. The man immediately set up a perfect rhythm of compressions with her, then went into another coughing fit.
“Good thing you’re here,” he gasped once he’d brought himself under control. “No reason to inoculate the kid with more of my resistant strains.”
OK, not just a highly trained bystander, then. That was doctor-talk.
“That is,” the man added, his voice dipping lower, “if we manage to save him.”
Cassandra’s heart lurched. “We will!” she gasped after the last breath.
“Hold that thought.” He looked up at one of the men standing above her and fired rapid Spanish at him. The bystander rushed to get his cellphone out of his jacket pocket then, following his directions, called a number and placed the phone to his ear. He shot out a string of what sounded like commands into the phone, then nodded to the man, who removed the phone and placed it back into his pocket.
Curiosity overwhelmed her. Who had he called? And how come he sounded perfectly American one moment then clearly Spanish the next? No time, and no breath left to ask. From then on they resumed their efforts in silence, snatching eloquent glances every time she raised her head from a breath. At least, she thought they were eloquent. She felt they were exchanging their gratitude for sharing the massive responsibility with each other. Admitting their strong attraction.
She could also just be hyperventilating.
But she hadn’t been when that bolt had hit her a few minutes ago. All right, so she had been hit by bolts like that before. But she hadn’t been a thirty-year-old then. Merely a stupid teenager who’d just discovered her sexuality and had gone about picking the most disastrous choice to be the focus of her infatuation...
Rushing feet announced the paramedics’ arrival, breaking into her untimely musings. How long had it taken them to make it here? And who had the man called? She’d lost track of time, felt as if she’d been fighting for the kid’s life for a day— drowning in his eyes all her life...
His curt words brought her back to the crisis. “Get a bag-valve mask, a cardiac monitor, the defibrillator, and cut his clothes!”
Yes, definitely a doctor. And he wasn’t relinquishing their victim to the paramedics’ care. Good—she wasn’t about to either. She was seeing this through.
“But it’s been over fifteen minutes, and if he’s still in arrest—” one of the paramedics started, but the man cut him short.
“I started CPR almost immediately.”
“But still...”
“Did no one report he’d been electrocuted?”
That stopped the paramedic’s arguments. In electrocution, since the heart had no underlying disease causing the arrest, resuscitation should continue for far longer than for any other cause of arrest. There was