‘Jane, we’ve got trouble!’
With an effort she turned to see their student nurse gazing at her in dismay. ‘What’s up, Kelly?’
‘We’ve got that man back in again—the one who thinks his brain’s been taken over by aliens. I’ve phoned Social Services but—’
‘They said it’s our pigeon,’ she finished for her wryly. Social Services always said psychiatric cases were their pigeon unless someone was so bad they had to be sectioned. And Harry’s delusions weren’t nearly frequent enough yet to have him compulsorily detained in a psychiatric ward. ‘Has Charlie seen him?’
‘He’s given him a tranquilliser, and he seems pretty quiet at the moment, but you know what happened last time.’
Jane did. Before the tranquilliser could take effect Harry had practically wrecked one of their ECG machines, thinking it was an alien life form. ‘OK. I’ll sit with him—’
‘RTA on the way, Jane!’ Floella suddenly called from the end of the treatment room. ‘Three casualties, and two look really serious!’
Jane bit her lip. Damn, this would have to happen right now with Mr Mackay, the consultant in charge of A and E, off on his annual break and Elliot not back from the solicitors yet.
‘Kelly—’
‘Yeah, I know.’ The student nurse sighed. ‘Make the alien a nice cup of tea, and do my best.’
‘Good girl.’ Jane nodded, but as she hurried down the treatment room a sigh of relief came from her when Elliot suddenly appeared.
‘Now, that’s what I call perfect timing,’ she said with a smile.
‘Perfect timing?’
‘We’ve an RTA on the way,’ she explained, ‘and I was just wondering how on earth we were going to cope with the casualties.’
‘Oh—Right. I see.’
She glanced up at him, her grey eyes concerned. ‘Everything OK, Elliot?’
‘Great. Fine,’ he replied, but he was anything but fine she decided as he walked quickly across to Charlie Gordon.
He looked…Not worried. Elliot never looked worried no matter how dire the situation, but he most definitely looked preoccupied. Preoccupied and tense, and still quite the handsomest man she’d ever laid eyes on.
In fact, there ought to have been a law against any man being quite so handsome, she thought ruefully. His thick blond hair, deep blue eyes and devastating smile would have been quite potent enough, but when you added a six-foot muscular frame, a pair of shoulders which looked as though they’d been purpose-built for a girl to lean her head against…
It was an unbeatable combination. The kind of combination which turned even the most sensible women into slack-jawed idiots whenever he was around. Herself included, as Jane knew only too well, but she’d always had sense enough not to show it.
Not that it would have made any difference if she had, of course, she realised. Elliot’s taste ran to tall, leggy women. Women like Gussie Granton from Paediatrics whose figure would have made a pin-up girl gnash her teeth.
Nobody would ever gnash their teeth over her figure, she thought wistfully, unless it was in complete despair. She was too short, and too fat, and a pair of ordinary grey eyes and stubbornly straight shoulder-length black hair were never going to make up for those deficiencies.
‘You have a wonderful sense of humour, Jane,’ her mother had told her encouragingly when she was growing up. ‘Men like that.’
Yeah, right, Mother. And Frank’s admiration for my sense of humour lasted only until a red-haired bimbo with the IQ of a gerbil drifted into his sights, and then he was off.
What on earth was wrong with her today? she wondered crossly as she heard the sound of an ambulance arriving, its siren blaring. All this maudlin self-pity. All right, so she was in love with Elliot Mathieson, and had been ever since he’d come to St Stephen’s two years ago, but he was never going to fall in love with her. She was simply good old Janey and it was high time she accepted that. Time she realised it was only in the movies that the plain, ordinary heroine got the handsome hero, and this wasn’t the movies—this was real life.
‘OK, what have you got for us?’ Elliot asked as the doors of the treatment room banged open and the paramedics appeared with their casualties.
‘One adult, plus a seventeen-year-old boy and fifteen-year-old girl. The youngsters suffered the worst damage. They were in the back seat and neither was wearing seat belts.’
Elliot swore under his breath. ‘Are they related in any way?’
‘The adult’s the father. He has a fractured wrist, ankle and minor lacerations.’
‘Richard, Kelly—you take the adult—’
‘But what about my alien?’ the student nurse exclaimed.
‘Oh, Lord, he’s not back in again, is he?’ Elliot groaned. ‘Has anyone given him any tranquillisers?’
‘I have,’ Charlie Gordon said, nodding.
‘Then get one of the porters to take him up to Social Services.’
‘Elliot, they’ll throw a blue fit if we dump him on them!’ Jane protested.
‘Let them,’ he replied grimly. ‘It’ll give them a chance to see that care in the community means more than simply leaving psychiatric cases to fend for themselves. Charlie, you and Flo take the boy. Jane, I’ll need your help with the girl.’
He was going to need his skill a whole lot more, she thought when she helped the paramedic wheel the girl into cubicle 2.
The teenager was a mess. Countless lacerations to her face and arms, compound fractures to the right and left tibia and fibula which would require the services of both orthopaedics and plastics, but it was her laboured, rasping breathing that was the most worrying. If she wasn’t helped—and quickly—not enough oxygen would reach her brain and she’d be in big trouble.
‘ET, Jane,’ Elliot demanded, though in fact there had been no need for him to ask. She was already holding the correct size of endotracheal tube out to him, and gently he eased it past the girl’s vocal cords and down into her trachea. ‘IV lines and BP?’
‘IV’s open and running,’ she replied, checking the drip bags containing the saline solution which was providing a temporary substitute for the blood the teenager was losing. ‘BP 60 over 40.’
Elliot frowned. Too low, much too low, and the girl’s heartbeat was showing an increasingly uneven rhythm.
Quickly he placed his stethoscope on the injured girl’s chest. There were no breath sounds on the left side. She must have been thrown against one of the front seats in the crash and her left lung had collapsed, sending blood and air seeping into her chest cavity.
‘Chest drain and scalpel?’ Jane murmured.
He nodded and swiftly made an incision into the upper right-hand side of the teenager’s chest, then carefully inserted a plastic tube directly into her chest cavity. ‘BP now?’
‘Eighty over sixty,’ Jane answered.
Better. Not great, but definitely better. The chest drain had suctioned the excess air and blood out of the girl’s chest. She was starting to stabilise at last.
‘You’ll be wanting six units of O-negative blood, chest, arm and leg X-rays?’ Jane asked.
Elliot’s eyebrows lifted and he grinned. ‘This is getting seriously worrying.’
‘Worrying?’ she repeated in confusion.
‘Your apparent ability to read