Surgeon Of The Heart

At the end he defibrillated the heart to get it started, and contemptuously peeled off his gloves to throw them in the bin by her feet. As a gesture of utter disdain, it could hardly have been bettered.

He marched out of the theatre without another word, leaving the rest of the team to finish up, Morgan and Phil both looking disgruntled.

‘What the hell’s eating him?’ demanded Phil. ‘He was fairly reasonable yesterday. Well,’ gloomily, ‘as reasonable as any of these flaming experts are.’

‘There, but for the grace of God, go you!’ said Morgan.

Dr Crone regarded Cat speculatively. ‘Something tells me that our Cat might just responsible for his temper,’ he mused.

Every pair of eyes was turned in her direction, but she set her face in its most glacial Ice-Queen expression, and no one dared speak to her, save when necessary, for the rest of the operation.

She was longing to just escape, to be alone with her thoughts, to try to make sense of this nightmare situation. Why the hell was he here? But there was to be no escape. As soon as she walked through the swing doors she saw Sister Henderson, a serious expression on her face, and knew exactly what had happend.

‘Sister——’ she began, but the older woman uncharacteristically interrupted her.

‘Would you please come into my office?’

Miserably Cat followed her, and once there the older woman turned to her, an anxious look on her face. ‘Catriona—if you’re not fit to come back to work then you simply shouldn’t be here.’

‘But I am fit, Sister, honestly I am.’

Sister Henderson shook her head. ‘I have just had Professor Rossi in my office. To say he was angry would be a mild understatement. He was absolutely furious. He said that you were incompetent and substandard. He said that your performance today was not what he expected at all—he called it an insult to provide him with a nurse who was simply not up to scratch. Do you deny that what he said is true?’

Cat bit her bottom lip. ‘No, Sister.’

‘I explained to him that you’d been ill recently, but he soon gave me short shrift. I told him that you were the best nurse I had, but he didn’t seem to be listening.’ The older woman’s eyes were creased with anxiety. ‘Don’t you see, my dear, that if we subject visiting and very eminent professors to situations like that it makes us all look very foolish. It whittles away at our reputation. We are the finest cardio-thoracic centre in the country. Surgeons come here, knowing that. They expect—and they have a right to expect—the very best, and today Professor Rossi did not get it. I’d like to know whether you can offer me a satisfactory explanation for what happened in Theatre today.’

Cat hung her head, shame staining her cheeks. She had never received such a blunt dressing-down in all the time she’d been nursing. It was justified, she knew that, but it didn’t make it any easier to bear.

‘He wants to see you in his office, Catriona. I shouldn’t dawdle, if I were you.’

Cat felt as though she were going to the gallows, and not just because she was about to get a professional scorching—she would have withstood a million of those, anything rather than have to face him, to have to stand alone in the same room with him.

She tapped on the door of his room. The visiting professor was awarded a room that reflected his status, and consequently was very large, well-appointed, and right to the back of theatres. Cat had only been in there once before, when a very amiable American professor had invited them all for drinks on the eve of his departure. An enjoyable occasion, and anything less like the encounter she now anticipated she couldn’t imagine.

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