‘Have we paged the surgeons?’ Penny asked.
‘Done,’ Jasmine said.
‘Blood bank?’
‘I’ve let them know.’
Penny gave no response, but with reason as the blast of a siren told them the ambulance was here. As the paramedics raced the patient in, Jasmine didn’t blame Penny a bit for the curse she let out when she asked where the hell the surgeons were.
The patient, though conscious, was beyond pale. His pulse was thin and thready and Jasmine set to work, with Greg cutting his leathers off.
‘Can you tell me your name?’ Penny asked as she examined him.
‘Reece.’
‘And do you know where you are?’
He answered the questions when prompted but kept closing his eyes and drifting off. Jasmine could only just palpate his blood pressure manually and Penny wasted no time in drawing blood for an urgent cross-match and telling the porters to run it up.
‘And I mean run!’ he warned. ‘Let’s put the O-neg up.’
Penny was possibly up there with the most horrible doctors Jasmine had worked with. She was abrupt to the point of rudeness, gave no thanks, only barked demands, except …
She was brilliant.
‘If they can’t be bothered to get down here,’ Penny shouted as Jasmine tried to locate the surgeons again, ‘tell them that I’ll meet them up in Theatre.’
The patient had had a spinal and chest X-ray, and despite the O-negative blood being squeezed in, his blood pressure was still barely discernible. It was clear he needed Theatre and Penny wanted him taken straight up.
Jed was dealing with the latest admission, and Jasmine quickly prepared Reece for theatre, loading his clothes into a bag and itemising his valuables—rings, wallet … But as she opened up the wallet Jasmine hesitated. There were loads of hundred-dollar notes—at best guess the wallet contained a few thousand dollars.
‘Can someone check this with me?’ Jasmine asked.
‘I’ll check it with you later,’ Greg called. ‘Just put it in the safe.’
‘Can we just check it now?’ Jasmine pushed, except Greg wasn’t listening, so she popped her head around the curtain to where Vanessa and Lisa were assisting Jed. ‘Can someone check this, please? He’s got a large amount of cash.’
‘Just pop it in the safe,’ Lisa called. ‘I’ll count it when things have calmed down.’
‘We’re supposed to check it before we put it in the safe.’ Jasmine’s voice was shrill. ‘We’re not supposed to sign—’
‘Here.’ It was Penny who stepped in. ‘Give it to me, Nurse. I’ll put it in the safe.’ She walked over and took the wallet, signed the piece of paper and threw the contents into the safe. Jasmine realised that she was sweating and she could feel Jed’s eyes on her.
‘Right,’ Penny said. ‘We need to get him up or he’s going to bleed out.’ She picked up the phone and told Theatre the same as Jasmine prepared the trolley for an emergency transfer, but her hands were shaking and her heart was thumping as she knew she’d made a bit of a scene.
‘All okay, Jasmine?’ Lisa checked as Jasmine walked past to get a space blanket to put over Reece on the way up to Theatre.
‘We’re just about to move him,’ Jasmine said, and as Jed briefly looked up she felt the question in his brief gaze, knew she wasn’t fooling anyone that everything was okay, least of all Jed.
‘Reece.’ Jasmine tried to explain things as best she could as she covered him with the space blanket. He was irritable now and struggling to remain conscious, and he wanted to wait till his wife got there before he went up. ‘We’re going to have to move you to Theatre now. Miss Masters will explain things.’
Which Penny did.
She was efficient, brusque but also terribly kind. ‘I know you want to wait for your wife—I completely understand, but you’re too sick,’ she explained gently but firmly. ‘I will talk to your wife myself as soon as she gets here. Is there anything you want me to say to her?’ She glanced at Jasmine and Greg and at the anaesthetist who had just arrived. ‘Could you all excuse us a moment?’
As Jasmine stepped outside to give Penny and Reece some privacy, there was a strange sting of tears in her eyes. It wasn’t that she had seen a different side to her sister, rather she had seen a side to Penny that she had long forgotten.
Sitting on the stairs, hearing her parents argue, had terrified four-year-old Jasmine. It had been Penny who would take her back to bed, Penny who would sit beside her and tell her not to worry, that she would take care of things, that even if things did get bad, that even if Dad did what he was threatening and left, they would be fine.
‘But what if we’re not?’ Jasmine would argue. ‘What if we never see him?’
‘Then we’ll deal with it.’
And in their own ways and albeit not perfectly they had.
And as she ran up to Theatre with her sister, and Penny told her to head back down, that she wanted to speak with surgeons, Jasmine knew that she hadn’t just come back for the support of her family, neither had she taken the job here for the reasons she had so determinedly given.
She wanted to be close to Penny again.
‘I’LL COME OVER after work.’
Jed was coming out of X-Ray as Jasmine walked back from Theatre and they found themselves walking together towards Emergency.
‘It’s fine.’ Jasmine shook her head. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend. Ruby said that she could—’
‘But you’re upset tonight.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be fine by Saturday.’ She couldn’t keep the brittle edge from her voice. Yes, she was happy keeping things light, but sometimes, on days like today, it was hard.
‘I’m not expecting to be entertained,’ Jed said. ‘What happened back there?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Jasmine? Why did you get all upset over the safe? You know we can’t just drop everything—the guy was bleeding out.’
‘Just leave it.’
But Jed wouldn’t.
It was a very long shift. Vanessa was on a half-day and Jasmine really wished that she herself was—she could feel Jed watching her, especially much later when Lisa came over and asked her to check the cash.
‘Four thousand six hundred dollars. Agreed?’ Lisa checked.
‘Agreed,’ Jasmine said, and because Penny had first signed for it, she had to be there too.
‘I just rang ICU,’ Penny said. ‘He’s doing much better. His wife told me that he was on his way to put down a deposit on a car—that’s why he had so much cash on him.’ She added her signature to the valuables book.
‘Oh, the irony of it,’ Lisa sighed, because in a car his injuries would have been so much less. ‘Now, I know this is a lot of money and that it has to be checked,’ Lisa continued, ‘but it’s not always possible to just drop everything. It’s better to put it in the safe.’
‘That’s