The Doctors' Christmas Reunion / Unwrapping The Neurosurgeon's Heart

Many of the local farmers retired to houses in the town, leaving their sons to run the property, and things like indoor bowls or card games might be too tame for them.

A Men’s Shed, that was what she needed, but one with a purpose. She’d talk to Andy about it tonight.

And the ease with which that thought came out startled her enough to spend the rest of the afternoon with her mind focussed fully on work.

Which was just as well, as her next patient presented with a racing pulse and a pallor that would make cream look suntanned. Bill Stevens had a history of atrial fibrillation which was usually controlled by his medication. He’d sensibly bought an app for his phone that could tell him when he was in AF, so he could take three more tablets, upping his medication from one hundred to a total of four hundred mgs.

‘It usually works for me,’ he told Ellie plaintively.

‘Well, maybe it still will,’ she told him, ‘but I’d prefer it if you were in hospital. If it doesn’t settle down, they can give you the drug intravenously, and keep you on a monitor so they know what’s happening. How did you get here?’

‘My wife drove me. She’s doing some shopping while she’s in town.’

The ‘while she’s in town’ reminded Ellie that many of her patients came from properties up to eighty miles away, and although she knew Bill was closer than that, she certainly didn’t want him out there with his heart still playing up, risking a stroke unless they stabilised it. She pressed the buzzer that would bring Maureen into the room.

‘Would you please phone an ambulance for Bill, then keep an eye out for his wife. She’ll be back when she finishes shopping and we need to let her know he’s gone to hospital.’

‘Will I phone and let them know he’s coming?’ Maureen asked.

‘No, I’ll do it. Andy can access Bill’s file there but I’d like to fill him in on today’s situation.’

‘And if we don’t get it back in rhythm with medication?’ Andy asked, when Ellie had explained that Bill was on his way.

‘Are you up for a cardioversion or will you fly him out?’

Andy peered at the phone for a moment. Was Ellie really asking him that?

Okay so he’d trained in the use of the defibrillator—hadn’t they all? He’d even used one to re-start a patient’s heart. But the difference with cardioversion was that it had to be synchronised to a particular point in the heart’s rhythm, and although the machine itself did that job quite efficiently, as long as you pressed the sync button before shocking, he felt uneasy about it.

If something were to go wrong—if Bill had a seizure when they shocked him—what back-up did he have? One anaesthetic-trained nurse and Ellie at a pinch. No cardiologist for hundreds of miles.

‘Send him to the coast,’ he heard Ellie’s voice say, coming from afar as he still had the phone in his hand in front of him, not up to his ear. ‘Presumably he’s had lunch, which means you can’t anaesthetise him for a few hours, so far better to have a specialist do it. He should be at your hospital by now, I’ll send his wife on there. She can either fly out with him or drive to wherever they’re taking him. Maybe do neither. If all goes well, they’ll send him back tomorrow or the next day, whenever they have an ambulance car coming this way.’

Andy was grinning as he hung up. Ellie was so far ahead of him in some ways, you’d think it was she who’d grown up in the bush with its limited facilities, not him. But everything she said made sense. The state-funded ambulance system had several helicopters used for ferrying patients from outlying districts to specialist hospitals.

He went to meet Bill and explain what was going to happen, asking Andrea, who was on duty in the small ED, to phone for the air ambulance.

‘It’ll fix itself, it always does,’ Bill argued as Andy removed the ambulance leads, replacing them with hospital ones and attaching them to the monitor. Bill’s heart rate was still spiking around the one hundred to one hundred and twenty mark, the line occasionally dropping down to ninety-five at the lowest.

‘When did you take the extra dose?’ he asked Bill, who looked mutinous for a moment, then finally admitted it had been first thing in the morning. That he’d woken with his heart bouncing around in his chest.

‘Well, that’s what it always feels like,’ he added, and Andy nodded, imagining how frightening it must feel even to people who’d experienced it before.

He saw Bill safely away, returning home much later to find Chelsea in the kitchen.

Oh, Andy,’ she said, spinning around with a half-peeled potato in her hand and enveloping him in a tight hug. ‘Thank you so much for having me. Ellie’s been so kind, and I’ll try not to be a nuisance, see…’

She held out the potato.

‘I’m fixing the veggies for dinner!’

He eased out of her embrace and smiled at her.

‘You don’t have to earn your keep here,’ he said gently. ‘After all, we’re family.’

Laughter greeted his pronouncement.

‘I know but I love cooking, so if you and Ellie don’t mind, I might do some now and then.’

‘I’m sure neither of us will mind, we’re often so tired it’s a choice between Thai or Chinese takeaway.’

‘It’s bad for your health, too much takeaway,’ his young cousin said sternly.

Andy laughed.

‘You’re right, but apart from cooking to keep us healthy, I’m hoping you might be a help to me in another way. Do you know anything about soccer?’

‘I was in a team back home, and I played at school,’ she said. ‘Do you think it would hurt the baby if I played?’

‘I’ll check that out. I imagine the baby wouldn’t be too happy being hit with a soccer ball. But you could be goalie. None of them are good enough to score many goals yet, but you could yell advice to them if they got close. And if a ball actually comes near you, you could always hide behind the post.’

‘Not that I’ll fit behind a post for much longer,’ Chelsea said, and returned to peeling potatoes.

He watched her for a moment, then said, ‘When you’ve finished those, would you mind sitting down with me to look at the drills I’ve been working out? I only know the game from school, where it didn’t seem to matter what you did, but I’ve watched about a thousand internet videos on coaching it.’

She put down the peeled potato and came towards him, wiping her hands on an old apron of Ellie’s she’d put on.

‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

She stood over his shoulder and read what he’d set out, with stick-figure illustrations, and smiled.

‘For someone who only played the game at school, that’s excellent. You could probably give your forwards more goal-kicking practice. Your two forwards should be the best strikers and they really need to practise a lot so it comes more easily to them in a game.’

There was a slight pause, before she said, ‘I used to be a striker.’

‘You were?’ Andy asked in delight. ‘That’s just perfect. Even if you can’t play, you can take the striking practice, try to help them understand different tactics.’

He paused, then said, ‘They’re all misfits, Chelsea, my soccer players. A few of them are kids who badly need to lose weight and somehow getting them into something that would interest them seemed a better way than nagging them to diet. There are a couple of migrants and it’s helping to settle them into the community, and two of the girls are recovering drug addicts so they’re a bit tetchy at times.’

She smiled at him.

‘Then a pregnant teenager should fit right in,’ she said, and went back to the sink, to peel carrots this time.

As he, Ellie, and Chelsea sat down to a meal of lamb cutlets with mashed potatoes, peas and carrots a couple of hours later, he realised just how big an asset Chelsea could be. Not only by helping to prepare meals, but her cheerful chatter broke through the tension that usually reigned when he and Ellie were together.

Tonight they’d even laughed, teasing each other, remembering silly things, something that had become so rare it made his heart ache for what had been.

‘You prepared the dinner, Chelsea, so I’ll clear the table and stack the dishwasher,’ Ellie announced.

‘And I’ll do the pots and pans,’ Andy volunteered. ‘Have you got something to do, something to read?’ he asked Chelsea. ‘Or feel free to use the television in the sitting room. Ellie might have explained there are only two channels but you might find something you’d like.’

‘I’d rather read and there are plenty of books in the bedroom.’

She paused.

‘Whose room was it?’

Andy thought for a moment.

‘The three girls were always swapping rooms, but I think it was Eliza who ended up in that one. They were definitely her posters on the walls.’

Chelsea disappeared, but as he washed the few pots and pans, Ellie by his side, stacking the dishwasher, life felt almost normal—like the old normal…

He waited until she straightened then slid an arm around her shoulders.

‘It might be good for us, having Chelsea here,’ he said, then he couldn’t resist drawing her closer and pressing a kiss, not on her lips but on her temple. He felt her tremble in response, then ease herself away.

But the dreamy little smile on her face told him she hadn’t minded…

Ellie woke suddenly, startled by something she couldn’t immediately place.

It had been a phone ringing. It must have been Andy’s mobile because she could hear his voice now.

Had he changed his ring-tone that she hadn’t immediately recognised it?

But why?

Maybe she was just confused.

She lay awake, aware a phone call to a doctor in the middle of the night wasn’t a good thing.

The talking stopped, then she saw his shadowy figure appear in the doorway.

‘Did it wake you?’ he asked quietly.

‘Habit,’ she said. ‘Do you need me?’

‘Only every day!’

The words were barely there, nothing more than a jumble of sounds, and probably she’d imagined it for now he was talking again. Asking about someone, a patient apparently…

‘Yes, Madeleine’s one of my patients,’ she said, catching up with the conversation although the ‘only every day’ words still hovered in her head.

And heart…

‘Has something happened to her?’

‘Accident out on the Wyndham Road,’ Andy said, pulling on the clothes he must have carried as far as the doorway. ‘I don’t suppose—’

‘You need me to come? Why didn’t you say so?’

Ellie was out of bed and pulling on the clean clothes she’d left out on a chair for the morning.

More mumbling from Andy—what was wrong with the man?

But her own guilt was more urgent now than whatever was worrying Andy. For weeks she’d been seeing Madeleine for what had seemed like minor and confusing symptoms—aches and pains, tiredness, night cramps.

Ellie had seen her so often without pinning down a diagnosis that thoughts of Munchausen’s syndrome had flashed across her mind, but the symptoms had never seemed serious enough. Not that she knew much about the syndrome.

‘She has been complaining of dizzy spells lately. Where is she?’

‘Apparently, she ran into a tree. Someone saw the accident and phoned the ambulance so she should be at the hospital by now.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Ellie said, and was startled when Andy gave her a hug as he thanked her.

Although after that kiss, mild though it had been…

She followed him out to the car—rarely used as the hospital was only three blocks away—wondering what was going on. Could Andy also feel that they could make their way back together as they’d first begun their courtship?

With touches, shared glances, even a little kiss…

But if Andy was happy to have her company, Madeleine seemed less so.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ she told Ellie as Andy completed the handover from the ambulance personnel.

‘You’re my patient,’ Ellie said, hoping she sounded more sympathetic than she felt. ‘I was worried about you.’

‘Well, I told you I was having dizzy spells and what did you do?’

Quite a few investigations, Ellie would have liked to remind her, but this was hardly the time.

Though Madeleine seemed only a little the worse for wear. A graze on her forehead was the only visible injury.

‘Did your airbag deploy?’ Ellie asked.

‘No, it didn’t!’ her patient snapped. ‘The ambulance people insisted on bringing me here and calling Andy,’ she said, ‘although I’m really perfectly okay.’

‘Best we keep you under observation for the night,’ Andy said. ‘I’ll do a scan of your head to make sure there’s no internal damage, and nurses will check you every two hours. You won’t get much sleep as they have to wake you, as well as check your blood pressure and temperature.’

‘You’ll be here, won’t you?’ Madeleine asked. ‘Just in case anything goes wrong?’

‘I could stay,’ Andy said, and Ellie raised her eyebrows. The woman was playing him—surely he could see that!

She stomped out of the cubicle, then heard Andy leave behind her.

‘There’s no way you need to be up here all night just to hold that woman’s hand,’ Ellie told him.

He looked slightly startled.

‘I’ll do an X-ray and a scan first and take it from there,’ he said.

‘It’s a graze!’ Ellie reminded him. ‘She didn’t hit the tree hard enough for the airbag to deploy.’

‘But there could have been whiplash,’ he said.

‘Believe me, there will be!’ Ellie muttered. ‘That woman comes to see me at least three times a week and I swear she’s the healthiest patient I’ve ever seen.’

Andy looked puzzled.

‘But if you don’t like her, why did you come up to the hospital with me?’

She looked into the dark eyes she knew so well.

‘I don’t dislike her, and anyway, you asked me to,’ she reminded him, which seemed to make him even more puzzled.

‘I’ll walk home,’ she said, desperate to get away from the hospital and Madeleine Courtney, but most desperately needing distance between herself and Andy—distance so she could think…

CHAPTER FOUR

‘I MIGHT JUST as well have stayed with you at the hospital for all the sleep I got,’ Ellie grumbled as she bumped into Andy in the en suite bathroom next morning.

A freshly showered and shaved Andy. The scent of his familiar aftershave filling her with a sense of longing.

‘I slept like a log in a spare room at the hospital,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The nurses knew to wake me if Madeleine’s condition showed any signs of deterioration, but there was really nothing wrong with her. I saw from her file she’d been seeing you quite often—is there something specific, do you think?’

‘Not that I and a battery of tests can find,’ Ellie muttered, so distracted by her husband’s proximity she could barely think straight.

Had Andy picked up on a terseness in her voice that he said, ‘Well, she’s been very helpful to me with the soccer teams.’

Ellie bit back the comment, I’m sure she has, which she’d have liked to utter, and backed out of the room. Maybe if she took a few deep breaths, the room would be vacant by the time she returned.

And had Andy always worn aftershave to work?

She didn’t think so, given the variety of allergies doctors were likely to encounter in their patients.

Was that jealousy coiled like a serpent in her stomach? And, if it was, did she have any right to be jealous? Whatever she and Andy had, it was hardly a marriage in the real sense of the word.

Not now. Not any more…

But I love him, a voice whispered in her heart, which she instantly dismissed as nonsense.

She was tired. She needed to have a shower, a quick breakfast, and get back to work. She must remember to phone the high school about Chelsea getting in there, probably starting next week as there were only a couple of weeks left in the term…

And she should give their guest some money for paint. The previous night, after some prodding and prompting, Chelsea had admitted she’d like pale green walls, and both Andy and Ellie were happy to go along with that idea.

Ellie would need to buy brushes and rollers, a tin for the rollers, and some plastic spreadsheets.

By the time Ellie was showered and dressed the list she’d been using as a distraction had grown so long she knew it would be easier to take Chelsea to the hardware store in her lunch hour with the car, so they could bring everything back home.

The gods had decided to be kind to her. She reached the kitchen to grab some breakfast, to find it was Andy-free.

‘He only came home for a shower and some fresh clothes,’ Chelsea explained to Ellie. ‘He said he’d had a patient in a road crash last night so I suppose he was up all night.’

There was no point in disabusing Chelsea of that notion, no reason why she should be caught up in their marital stalemate…

Much better to concentrate on pale green walls.

‘I should be home by twelve-thirty,’ she told Chelsea. ‘If you grab something to eat before then, we’ll go down town and get what you need for decorating your room. Have you done any painting?’

Chelsea beamed at her.

‘Dad taught me. He said girls should be useful around the house, so when I turned ten I got to choose what colour I wanted my room, and he showed me how to paint it.’

Not a totally absent father, then, Ellie thought.

Ellie’s morning passed smoothly, although again, as she listened to some of her elderly male patients, she wondered what could be done to occupy their time.

Chelsea picked up on it when they were in the hardware store, where several older men were poking around, fiddling with bolts and nuts, lifting things and putting them back, looking, more than shopping.

‘Don’t they have anything to do?’ she asked.

‘Not a lot,’ Ellie told her honestly.

‘They need a Men’s Shed,’ Chelsea said, echoing what had only been a nebulous thought in Ellie’s mind.

‘What do you know about Men’s Sheds?’ she asked, and Chelsea smiled.

‘My gramps—Mum’s dad—belongs to one. They get old bicycles and old plastic chairs, sometimes from hotels, and turn them into wheelchairs that they send off to Africa and the Pacific Islands—anywhere people can’t afford fancy wheelchairs.’

‘Does your gramps still do it?’ Ellie asked, excited by the idea.

‘Sure.’

‘And would he send you instructions on how to do it?’

‘I’m sure he would.

‘Well, let’s phone and ask him—you can use our phone.’

‘I’ll write to him,’ Chelsea replied, ‘because I’ll have to explain why I’m here and not at home. He’ll probably assume Mum arranged it before she went away.’

They collected all they needed, Chelsea insisting on paying with her credit card, and headed home, seeing more elderly men sitting on a bench outside the supermarket.

The Men’s Shed idea was growing, but how many old bicycles and plastic chairs could they source in Maytown?

‘Plenty!’ Andy said, when they were discussing the idea over dinner. ‘I bet you’ve never had a good look in our garden shed. I’d say there’d be half a dozen in there. We all had bikes as kids, and when we outgrew the small ones, we got bigger ones, or for the girls just fancier ones. The old ones always ended up in the shed—just in case we might need them later, or could give them to a friend or a cousin.’

‘And I suppose the garden shed might also house any number of old plastic chairs?’ Ellie said, with only a slight edge of sarcasm.

‘Well, if you mean those white ones that stack easily, then yes, there’d be some. We always needed extra chairs when relatives came for Christmas, and Mum and Dad never threw anything away. You never know when it might come in handy, that’s Mum’s favourite saying.’

Ellie could only shake her head, but Chelsea was all for going down to explore the garden shed immediately.

‘Not at night, my girl,’ Andy said firmly. ‘The place hasn’t been opened for months and who knows what snake might have made his home in there. I’ll go down in the morning and open the doors and bang the sides a bit so any nasties lurking in there will have time to get out before we explore.’

‘Oh, well,’ Chelsea said, ‘I have to email Gramps anyway, so I’ll do that now.’

‘Just as soon as we’ve cleaned up after dinner,’ Ellie reminded her, and Chelsea leapt to her feet and began to clear the table, Andy deciding that with two people already cleaning up, he could get on the internet and investigate wheelchairs made from old bicycles. The idea intrigued him, although how they did it, he couldn’t imagine.

He paused in the doorway, looking back at Ellie, who was stacking the dishwasher.

‘This Men’s Shed is a good idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone Ray at the pub about old plastic chairs.’

Ellie smiled at him, feeling that this was as close to normal as they’d been for many, many months.

Could working together on a project like this heal the breach between them?

Or was it simply because they had a third person around—someone with her own problems—that the tension between herself and Andy seemed to have eased somewhat?

Andy had barely left the room when his phone rang.

It was Madeleine Courtney, who was feeling faint and dizzy, and wondering if it could be delayed concussion.

‘Are you at the hospital?’ he asked.

‘No, I didn’t like to drive,’ came the weak and plaintive reply.

‘Then I’ll let Ellie know and she’ll come to you,’ Andy said. ‘She’s your GP.’

He could hear Madeleine suggesting he’d be better, but he stopped the conversation, returning to the kitchen where Ellie was on her own, doing the last of the wiping down of the benches.

‘It’s Madeleine Courtney,’ he said, aware that the name had come out as a growl. ‘She thinks she might have delayed concussion.’

‘She’s at home?’ Ellie asked, and he nodded.

‘I’ll go,’ Ellie told him. ‘But if there’s any doubt at all she should be in hospital, shouldn’t she?’

The frown on her face told him more than the words.

‘Is there something wrong with her?’ he asked.

‘Apart from a maybe concussion that had her phoning you rather than me?’ Ellie muttered. ‘I’m beginning to think she feels I’ve failed her. There’s nothing I can find—or have found so far—but you know full well that we do miss things.’

She sighed, then gave a little shrug.

‘I’ll go and see her and if I’m worried I’ll drive her to the hospital myself and ask the staff to do hourly obs. And maybe if she’s in hospital you can run more tests on her to see if I’ve missed something. Her symptoms are so vague, and change from pains in the abdomen to pains in her shoulders, to general tiredness, fuzzy concentration and, really, there’s something new each visit. I’ve done tests for a thyroid condition—both hyper and hypo—but nothing’s come back positive.’

‘Could it be some kind of lupus, do you think?’

‘I really don’t know. None of the blood tests showed indications it could be that, and her urine analysis was clear, but I’ll keep looking.’

She sighed.

‘Sometimes I wonder if she’s just homesick, but she always talks quite happily about the school and all she’s doing.’

Ellie sounded so depressed by the thought Andy wanted to hug her.

Damn it all, why shouldn’t he?

He gathered her in his arms, holding her close.

‘We’ll work it out, I promise,’ he said, then bent and kissed her, a feather brush, nothing more, on the lips.