Abi was aware that Freya was grinning and trying to suppress laughter but her cellphone rang before she could comment.
Freya glanced at the screen and apologised to them. ‘It’s Mila. I’m sorry but I have to take this. We have to finalise the plans for the function this weekend. Damien, would you mind giving Abi a quick tour of the clinic? I was going to do it but I’ll catch up with you at morning tea instead.’
Abi hesitated as a slight sense of panic crept up on her. ‘I don’t mind waiting,’ she said. It seemed a better option than going with Damien, who clearly wasn’t impressed by her and who was putting her on edge. She didn’t need to be stressed. Not on her first day. But Freya had already turned away to answer her phone, leaving Abi and Damien standing in silence, staring at each other.
‘Looks like you’re stuck with me.’ The prospect didn’t seem to bother him. ‘Come on, it’ll give us a chance to get acquainted. To see if we’ll be able to work well together.’
Not an overly pleasing prospect. Abi was feeling increasingly nervous about the decision she’d made to take the Hollywood Hills job. Perhaps it had been a mistake not to have had a face-to-face interview and checked out not only the facilities but her new colleagues too.
She needed to calm down, employ some of the coping strategies she’d been working on.
She took a deep breath and fought for composure. She needed to present a professional, controlled demeanour. It wouldn’t do to fall to pieces in front of her new boss in the first five minutes of her first day.
‘How much of the clinic did you see when you had your interview?’ Damien asked her.
‘This is the first time I’ve been here. My interview was conducted over the phone, that’s why you read my résumé and why we haven’t met.’
‘I see. I’ve been on leave, I assumed this was all finalised while I was away. Didn’t you want to see where you’d be working?’
‘I know the clinic’s reputation. That was enough for me.’ In reality it was the closeted, safe and secure environment that she was most attracted to. She wasn’t ready for a large public hospital. She didn’t want to fight for funding or waste hours in meetings. She wasn’t ready to deal with emergencies and chaos and shift work. She needed regular patterns and habits. She needed regular sleep too if she was to get her life back on track. Well-mannered, exclusive and polite was what she wanted and she hoped that this job would be a peaceful environment compared to public-hospital and defence-force work.
Damien showed her to her new office, which had light oak furniture, leather chairs and large picture windows with one-way blinds that looked out over Los Angeles. His office was beside hers and they shared a secretary who managed their appointment diary and theatre bookings. Damien introduced her to Jennifer and Abi expected that he would palm her off onto the secretary, but he surprised her by continuing her tour himself. Abi wasn’t sure what to make of that. Was he being polite or was he going to use this as an opportunity to cross-examine her further about her experience?
Let him interrogate her, she decided. She’d answer any question he put to her.
He showed her through the rehabilitation area, which included a gym and hydrotherapy pools used by the physical therapists on staff, before taking her into the operating theatres. The facility was amazing. Absolutely no expense had been spared and Abi couldn’t help but be impressed.
‘Different from what you are used to?’ Damien asked as he pushed open the swing door that led into an operating suite.
‘We have state-of-the art equipment in the defence forces but those facilities don’t extend past the medical necessities. The army certainly doesn’t waste money on modern art and marble floors.’
‘The Hills patients have high expectations,’ he said with a light shrug of his designer-clad shoulders, ‘not only of our expertise but of the service. They’re LA’s wealthy and they are used to having every whim catered for, and they have the same expectations when they walk through our doors as when they walk into a hotel or restaurant. They expect to be well looked after.’
Abi didn’t care about the patients’ expectations. The demands these patients would put on her would be nothing compared to what she’d put upon herself. In the army people got what they got, they had no expectations, the most important things were to keep them alive and maintain their function, but her expectations of her own skills was high. She knew she’d be able to handle the patients here. Operating on a millionaire would have to be less stressful than operating under fire. What she was interested in was a job that wasn’t dangerous. She wanted peaceful. She needed peaceful. She knew she was going to get demanding but she was confident that she could cope. Stress presented in different ways and the pressure that she expected to encounter here, in civilised luxury, would be entirely different from the high stress in Afghanistan.
She was interested in a low-stress environment and one factor in keeping her stress levels down was knowing that the people she worked with were capable. It was time to ask Damien some questions of her own. ‘How long have you worked here?’
‘Two years.’ He didn’t volunteer anything further as he led the way out of the theatre suites. ‘Our definitive observation unit is through there and the patient suites are around this way.’
They were six feet along the corridor when there was a crackle over the ceiling intercom.
‘Code blue, room five. Repeat, code blue, room five.’
Damien took off. One minute he was next to her, the next he was gone, his long legs eating up the metres of the corridor and leaving Abi staring after him.
ABI LOOKED AT his retreating figure before she came to her senses and followed in his wake as the voice continued through the loudspeaker. ‘Code blue, room five.’
Damien sprinted past the next two rooms before he shouldered open a door and Abi followed him into what was possibly the largest private hospital room she had ever seen. In the centre of the wall in front of them was an oversized hospital bed. A nurse was kneeling on the bed, delivering cardiac compressions to a young woman wearing pale pink silk pyjamas.
‘She’s in cardiac arrest. Unresponsive, not breathing, no pulse,’ she told them as she continued with the compressions. She was doing a good job, delivering regular hard, deep compressions. The patient’s shirt had been opened at the front and Abi was astounded at how underweight the woman was. She was so thin Abi could see each and every rib.
‘Ellen, this is Dr Thompson,’ Damien said, as he reached behind the bed and pushed on the wall. A small door that was set flush into the panelling popped open and he pulled a defibrillator from the alcove. And that was it by way of introductions. There was no time for anything more as he quickly tore open the packets and Ellen sat back, stopping CPR, as Damien applied the adhesive electrodes to the patient’s chest wall.
Abi watched as he connected the wires, flicked the machine on and pressed the ‘analyse’ button. The patient’s heart rhythm appeared on the screen. She could see the disorganised pattern of ventricular fibrillation indicating that the brain was sending chaotic impulses to the heart that the heart couldn’t interpret. This meant the heart couldn’t fire a proper beat and it lost its rhythm and was unable to pump blood. The brain would be starved of oxygen, causing the