Bride by Accident

Helen remained with Kyle, her face closing in distress. ‘I’ll call in a stretcher for Kyle,’ Helen said, as Dev fought his way over the upended seats to reach Emma and Suzy. ‘Unless you need me there. Do you?’

‘Go ahead,’ Devlin said grimly. And then he paused.

He’d reached them. He saw—and his face grew almost incredulous as he saw the situation they were in. As he saw Emma’s makeshift attempt at a viable tracheostomy. ‘How the hell—?’

‘Don’t ask questions,’ Emma said, fighting off faintness once more. ‘I want morphine and intravenous fluid and I want it now.’

‘But…’

She didn’t have time to listen to buts. ‘The ballpoint’s secure enough,’ she said grimly. ‘For now. But we need to work fast.’

A stunned pause.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. He cleared a flat spot to put his bag and hauled it open, with another fast, incredulous glance at Emma. Then he started work.

‘It’ll be a couple of minutes before we have Suzy ready to shift,’ he told Helen. ‘Go ahead and lift Kyle free. I’ll manage here. I think. Or rather, we will.’

It was a dreadful place to work. An impossible angle. Far too much broken glass. Seats that were upside down. Suzy was lying on the outside wall of the bus, jammed against the bus wall and two seats. Over the last half-hour Emma had wiggled so she was right in there beside her, supporting her head as best she could. It was impossibly cramped.

Dev had taken the situation in at a glance. Emma underneath the little girl, her fingers holding the ballpoint tube.

‘I can’t move,’ Emma said—unnecessarily—and Dev nodded.

‘Don’t.’ He smiled down at Suzy, a slow, lazy smile that almost reassured Emma. Almost. ‘You guys just stay still while I do my stuff,’ he told them. He wouldn’t be sure if Suzy was hearing him but he wasn’t taking chances.

‘Suzy, I’m giving you something for the pain right now,’ he told her. ‘Then I’m going to put a little tube in your arm so we can replace some of the blood you’ve lost. As soon as you stop hurting so much, we’ll lift you out of here. Your mum and dad are waiting on the cliff.’

Of course they would be. Emma winced. All the mums and dads would be frantic. By now the rest of the kids would probably have been taken back to town, she thought, and reunited with their parents.

Except for Kyle.

Don’t go there.

She was close to breaking, she thought, suddenly fighting another wave of nausea. It was adrenaline that had kept her going until now. But Dev was here and…

‘Don’t give in now, Emma.’ Devlin’s voice jerked her back. To the urgency of what she was doing. The dizziness receded. ‘Suzy needs you too much.’

‘I wasn’t planning on giving in,’ she said with what she hoped sounded like indignation. ‘Only wimps give in.’

‘And you’re no wimp.’

He sounded teasing, she thought. Nice.

That was another crazy thing to think. Just because he had Corey’s face…

No.

He had a syringe prepared now. Swiftly he swabbed Suzy’s arm and injected what must be morphine. He wasn’t touching her throat. He had too much sense.

‘I don’t think a stretcher’s going to work in here,’ he said, glancing at the chaos around them as the morphine slid home. ‘That ballpoint needs to stay absolutely still. I don’t think taping’s going to work.’

‘I don’t see how it can.’ She was lifting the tube a little so it wasn’t hitting the far wall of the trachea. A proper tracheal tube would go down, past the damage and the swelling. But to put a proper tracheal tube in now…To remove the ballpoint and to take such a risk…

No. She needed to keep it in place until they got somewhere with decent theatre facilities, where they could operate fast. Where they’d have oxygen to compensate for faltering breathing.

She couldn’t leave her ballpoint.

‘I think the only way is if we inch her out,’ Devlin was saying. He was setting up an IV line, knowing they had to get fluid in. It’d make it more complicated to lift her but they could place the bag on her chest and she needed the fluid so much… ‘Literally inch by inch,’ he continued. ‘If I lift her, can you come with me every step of the way? Can you do that?’

‘I can.’

He was looking at her—really looking at her—and there was concern in his face. ‘You’ve been in the accident yourself. You were concussed. You shouldn’t be here.’

‘I am here. Let’s get on with it.’

‘I can ask Helen to take over.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s taken me time to figure out where this has to lie,’ she told him, motioning with her eyes to the ballpoint. ‘If I wobble even a fraction from where I’m holding it, it’ll block, but I’ve figured out now how to get it back. I’m the only safe person to hold it.’

He stared at her for a long moment—and then nodded. There was no choice and he knew it.

He went back to fitting the intravenous line. Above them came the sound of scraping, of broken glass being scrunched.

Kyle’s stretcher was being hauled from the bus.

‘Do you want any more help in here?’ Helen sounded subdued—as well she might. She’d helped the stretcher out and then had paused at the window.

‘We’re going to have to do this on our own,’ Devlin told her. ‘Just clear a path, Helen, and cross every finger and every toe. And then some.’

He shouldn’t ask her for help.

He didn’t have a choice.

Dev lifted the little girl carefully, so carefully, inching his way backwards out of the bus. Every move had to be measured so the woman—Emma—could keep up with him. Her hand was holding the ballpoint steady so air could enter Suzy’s lungs. She looked so battered he’d been afraid she’d faint, but that battering wasn’t affecting her hand. It was rock steady.

Could she keep it up?

Maybe they should stay, he thought. Maybe they should try and stabilise the airway.

To operate in these confines, to remove the ballpoint and try and replace it here…

They couldn’t.

It was a huge risk to move Suzy, but it was a risk they had to take. He was forced to depend on this woman he didn’t know. This woman who should be a patient herself.

She must be a doctor. She had to be. To perform a trach-eostomy in these conditions, with such a result—it was an operation that was little short of miraculous.

But where had she come from? She wasn’t a local. Yet tourists didn’t tend to travel alone, not when they were six or seven months pregnant.

Now was not the time to ask questions, he decided as he kept inching out. He had Suzy cradled in his arms and Emma was with him every inch of the way.

Just as long as she held up.

He glanced at her face and it was sheet-white. She had the baby to consider, he told himself savagely. She’d been almost unconscious when he’d found her. She should be in hospital herself.

If she were in hospital, Suzy would be dead.

He needed her. Suzy needed her.

He kept inching out backwards.

Emma kept following.

They emerged to a scene that made Emma blink.

The children were gone—all of them. The bus driver, the truck driver, the injured teacher—they were gone, too. They must have been ferried away from the scene at some time while the bus had been in the process of being stabilised. There were two steel cables running from the bus’s chassis to the trees on the opposite side of the road.

Since those cables had been attached, they’d been safe.

What else?

Kyle was still there. His tiny, blanket-covered body lay to one side and there was a fireman sitting beside the stretcher. Just sitting. As if he’d sit however long it took. No matter that there was nothing to do. The man’s stance said that he was simply here to guard. To begin the grieving for the loss of a tiny life.

Once again Emma felt tears welling behind her eyes.

‘Not yet,’ the man beside her said, and she blinked.

He knew what she was thinking?

‘I’m fine,’ she muttered, and he smiled, albeit a shaky one.

‘I know you are. You’re great.’

There was a stretcher waiting, with Helen hovering. They lay laid Suzy down with care. The morphine had taken hold now and she was drifting in a haze of near-sleep.

‘I’ll take over now,’ Devlin said, moving to take over her grip on the ballpoint, but Emma shook her head.

‘I know how it should feel,’ she told him. ‘I have it right where it should be. I’m hanging on until we get to a proper theatre with proper equipment. And a surgeon. Tell me there’s a surgeon at Karington.’

‘That would be me,’ he said gravely.

That would be him.

Her eyes met his. A surgeon. She had a surgeon right here. The relief was so great it made her dizzy all over again.

‘Well, hooray,’ she managed. ‘So what are we waiting for? Let’s find you a theatre and a scalpel and something to replace this blasted pen. But you’re not removing me from it except by scalpel.’

And twenty minutes later she was finally, finally able to step away.

Not only was Dev O’Halloran a surgeon, he was a surgeon with real skill. Inserting a tracheostomy tube into a wound that was massively swollen, where the cut was jagged and rough, where there was too much bleeding already and where the patient was a child with a trachea half the size of an adult’s…It was a nightmare piece of surgery that Emma couldn’t imagine doing. But, then, she couldn’t have imagined using a ballpoint casing and a pencil sharpener to perform similar surgery. It seemed that on this day anything was possible.

Devlin’s surgery worked. Finally, finally the tube was in place. Emma’s ballpoint casing was just an empty piece of plastic abandoned on the tray, and she was free to step back from the table.

They’d used a local anaesthetic. Anything else would have been too risky with the breathing so fragile. But Suzy was so shocked and so groggy with the morphine that she didn’t register as Emma stepped back.

‘Give the lady a chair,’ Devlin growled, and one of the nurses pushed a chair under her legs.

Emma sat.

Her legs felt funny, she thought.

Dev was still working, closing the wound, doing running repairs to the ravages of the little girl’s face.

Preparing her for the trip to Brisbane where a skilled plastic surgeon could take over.

She needed to get out of there, Emma decided. Dev had skilled nurses to help him. He no longer needed her.

The smells of the theatre were making her feel ill. She was accustomed to them. They shouldn’t…

‘Excuse me,’ she said, and pushed herself to her feet.

‘Go with her, David,’ Devlin said urgently to one of the nurses.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she muttered.

But she wasn’t.

No matter. She made her jelly legs move.

Ten minutes later, after as nasty a little interlude in the bathroom as she could imagine, she emerged a new woman. Or almost a new woman. She’d washed her face, splashing water over and over until she felt that she was almost back to reality.

What was she about—almost passing out in Theatre?

It was hardly surprising, she told herself. Students did it all the time, and even more experienced theatre staff did it more often than they liked to admit. The trick was to hold it back until you were no longer needed.

She’d done that. She should be proud of herself.

She wasn’t.

She swiped some more cold water onto her face and stared into the mirror.

What had she done? Realisation was only just dawning.

She’d risked her baby.

The sight of those cables when she’d climbed from the bus had made her feel sick. She hadn’t realised. When she’d climbed on board she’d thought at some superficial level that the bus might slip, but she hadn’t considered it as a real possibility. It was only now as she thought back to the huge cables and thought of what might have been…

Her hand dropped to her swollen belly and she flinched.

She’d taken a gamble. She’d won, but such a gamble.

Maybe she wasn’t such a new woman. Maybe she’d better splash some more water.

Finally she took a deep breath and went to face the world again. In the waiting room there was a man and a woman—farmers? They looked up as she emerged from the washroom, and their faces reflected terror.

Oh, help. They’d be Suzy’s parents, Emma thought. They’d seen her go into Theatre with their daughter, and then they’d seen her rush out to the washroom. Ill.

Two plus two equals disaster.

‘Hey, it’s fine,’ she told them, rushing to take that dreadful look from their faces. ‘Everything’s gone brilliantly. Suzy’s breathing’s stabilised and Dr O’Halloran is just fixing the dressings. She’ll need to go to Sydney to have her face repaired by a plastic surgeon, but even that doesn’t look too difficult. I’d imagine you’ll have a Suzy with a couple of scars—but that should be the extent of the damage’s all. Honestly.’

The couple visibly restarted their breathing process. Their combined faces sagged in relief.

‘But you…’

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, trying to make her voice cheerful. ‘I’m really sorry I scared you, but pregnant women throw up all the time.’

Their faces cleared still more. ‘Oh, my dear…’ the woman faltered, and Emma suddenly decided against medical detachment. She bent over and hugged her.

‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘It’s been dreadful but now she’s safe.’

‘We’ve just seen Kyle’s parents,’ the man—Suzy’s father—said heavily. ‘He’s the only one dead. We’ve been lucky, but they…’

‘The nurses won’t let them see him.’ Suzy’s mother pulled herself out of Emma’s arms and she sniffed. ‘But you…you’re a doctor.’

‘I am.’

‘Helen—the ambulance officer—said you saved our daughter’s life.’

‘I was in the right place at the right time,’ she said softly, but Suzy’s mother had something else on her mind. Her daughter would make it. She had room to worry now about others.

‘The hospital’s chief nurse, Margaret Morrisy…she’s a stickler for the rules. She’s told Kyle’s parents that they can’t see Kyle until Dr O’Halloran says so. They’ve been waiting and waiting for Dev to finish and I think…they’re going crazy.’ She gulped and gave a little nod towards the theatre. ‘If it had been Suzy who’d died, then I know what I’d want and I’d want it now. If you’re a doctor…can you figure out how they can see him? Now?’

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