It was an exercise in self-control. A tightrope to balance on between the need to follow rules and gather information and the desire to act. To help someone in trouble. To save a life perhaps...
This wasn’t a real life situation, however, which made it impossible to gather any clues about what was to come from a radio conversation or updated pager messages. All they had was a minimal briefing sheet that had given them the GPS coordinates for the scene and that they would be assessing a thirty-five-year-old woman with abdominal pain.
Their tasks were listed as well and they had to assess the scene, examine and treat the patient, define a working diagnosis and means of transport if necessary, within a time limit of eleven minutes.
This was all about following rules. Waiting in their vehicle until it was their turn to enter what looked like a very ordinary village house to face their first scenario of this emergency response competition.
‘Doesn’t look like much.’ Luke sounded disappointed. ‘You sure we’re in the right place?’
‘Sì. Assolutamente.’ Matteo pointed through the windscreen. ‘That car parked over there is a competitor. It’s got the numbers. And a light on the roof, like ours. And the flags are...’
‘Scottish,’ Luke murmured.
The tension of having to wait had just got a whole lot easier as Matteo felt himself being pulled back into the unexpected delight of meeting Georgia Bennett last night. What a stroke of luck it had been that her partner for this competition was an old friend of Luke’s. He didn’t even have to make an effort to get an introduction to a woman who would have caught his eye no matter how big a crowd she was in.
There was a glow of energy about Georgia that made him think of adventure. Fun. In combination with that tumble of dark blonde curly hair and those hazel-brown eyes that had rather fascinating flecks of gold, she was irresistible. Given their passion for a shared career, that easy conversation over a drink or two had been a bonus. And by the end of the evening, when they’d split up to study the lists of scenarios that had been handed out to the waiting teams, Matteo had been left with the conviction that the attraction he’d discovered was mutual.
Whether they would have the chance to explore that attraction any further was an enticing possibility but Matteo wasn’t going to allow it to distract him for any longer than a delicious minute or two. He had, in fact, dismissed it from his mind completely well before their start time of eight-fifteen a.m.
Until he saw the two women emerge from the house, that was. Until Georgia spotted them waiting in their vehicle and raised her hand to wave at him.
Until she smiled...
‘Be nice to have an idea of what we’re heading into,’ Luke said. ‘They weren’t giving away any clues, were they?’
‘And neither should they,’ Matteo said sternly. ‘That would be dishonest.’
‘Not exactly.’ Luke’s tone was thoughtful. ‘Dishonesty is when you fail to tell the truth. Breaking the rules of the competition to give someone else an advantage would be dishonourable rather than dishonest.’
‘Hmm...’ Matteo absorbed the correction. ‘They are both unacceptable.’
Dishonesty was at the top of his list of despicable human traits. Right up there with cruelty and violence, particularly when children were involved.
‘Too right they are,’ Luke agreed.
Thrusting his arms through the straps of his pack of gear, Matteo had another moment of distraction.
Had he been a little too honest with Georgia during that conversation last night? He’d probably talked about his family with rather too much enthusiasm, hadn’t he? If he had wanted to encourage any attraction on her part, he should have stuck to talking about the more exciting exploits of his career as a helicopter paramedic instead of how close he was to his mother and his sisters. Good grief, he’d had to blink tears from his eyes when he’d told her about how much of a thrill it had been to welcome his latest nephew into the world recently.
Weirdly, that slightly cringe-making moment of distraction became an advantage a very short time later, when the two men found themselves in a confusing scenario of a party going on in the house. If the memory of holding that newborn baby hadn’t been still there in the back of his mind, would he have been so quick to run up the stairs when they’d heard there was a pregnant girl having stomach pains? And maybe he wouldn’t have put quite the same amount of passion into resuscitating a baby who wasn’t breathing if he hadn’t been imagining that it could have been his sister as the terrified young mother.
In any case, there had been nods of satisfaction from the judges and both he and Luke felt far more confident when they arrived at their second scenario, which clearly had nothing to do with childbirth. Their patient was a middle-aged man who was curled up on a bed and groaning loudly as they entered the room. He was also holding a plastic bucket.
‘He’s been sick.’ The woman who’d met them at the door had explained that she was his wife. ‘He got this terrible back pain all of a sudden and then he started vomiting.’
‘Could you get some baselines, please, Matt?’ Luke was taking the lead on this scenario. ‘I’ll see what I can find out with the history.’ He crouched down beside the bed.
‘Show me where this pain is.’
The man put his hand on his side, under his ribs but then moved it towards his abdomen and into his groin.
‘Is it the first time you’ve experienced it?’
‘Yes.’
‘How bad is it? On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst you can imagine?’
‘Ten...’ He groaned again. ‘And I feel sick...’
‘We’ll give you something to help with that in just a minute.’
Matteo held a tympanic thermometer close to their patient’s ear.
‘Temperature’s normal,’ the nearest judge informed him as he continued taking baseline recordings. ‘He’s tachycardic at one-twenty, respirations are twenty-four and his blood pressure is one-thirty over ninety.’
Matteo caught Luke’s glance. With a normal temperature, infection was less likely to be a cause of this pain so a diagnosis like appendicitis or diverticulitis could be ruled out for the moment. What was needed now was pain relief. He collected everything he needed to insert an IV line and put a tourniquet on the man’s arm.
‘The IV line is in.’ The judge nodded.
‘Have you had any trouble urinating?’ Luke asked now. ‘Is it painful or have you noticed anything different?’
‘It hurts,’ the man replied. ‘And it’s very dark.’
Luke glanced at Matteo, who nodded. The diagnosis and their management now appeared simple.
‘We think you might have a kidney stone,’ Luke said. ‘And it’s blocking your ureter and causing this pain. We’ll give you something for the pain and then we’ll take you to hospital. Are you allergic to anything that you know of?’
‘No.’
Matteo was already going through the motions of drawing up the morphine.
‘What dosage are you administering?’ one of the judges asked.
‘We’ll start with five milligrams,’ Luke replied. ‘We can top that up if the pain scale isn’t reduced to less than five.’
The judge nodded. ‘The drug has been administered.’
Matteo began tidying up and Luke was checking their briefing sheet that gave a list of available hospitals and means of transport. They needed to choose