In his haste to do a runner, Finlay didn’t entertain any of this stuff and, just as fatefully, the fleeing Finlay didn’twitness Nell slipping her collar and bounding like a seal on legs, her hindquarters undulating with excitement as she broke away, her tail helicoptering with the sheer joy of being free, an itinerant dog once more. He also didn’t see poor Murray, not a natural hillwalker by any stretch of the imagination, trudging exhaustedly behind, wheezing the wayward mutt’s name (and a number of other more colourful names as well), just as the clouds were sinking down further over the hills with the weight of their freezing raindrops.
30
Somehow Alice had made it to work, and somehow she’d dodged Gracie, who’d looked positively bursting to talk with her when she’d pushed through the doors and headed straight to the sample-sorting bench in the nurse practitioner’s room.
All she had to do was put the different patient sample tubes in the correct envelopes and posting bags for the collection driver who’d be here at one, and in order to do that she had tonotthink about Bastian, or the fact he’d told her own father the thing she was most ashamed of in the whole world, her biggest secret. Their big secret. The terrible thing Bastian had told her never to tell anyone, and now her father knew, and he’d sent Bastian up here to check she wasn’t losing her mind. And she couldn’t truthfully say that she wasn’t.
She sorted through the sample bottles, organising them by sticker colours, checking the attached docket matched the name on the stickers. The nurse’s handwriting was clear but still, Alice had a hard time focusing.
How could he?And he’d smarmed his way back in and slept in her bed last night! Thank God nothing happened. But, Alice dreaded to think what could have happened if he had not made the mistake of banging on about his special relationship with her dad, and all his ambitions to be part of the family. Maybe they’d have had a good day? Maybe he’d have wheedled his way into staying another night?
‘Ugh!’ She brought a bottle closer to her eyes. ‘Is that McDonagh or McDonald?’ She couldn’t tell. ‘Come on, Alice,’ she told herself. ‘Red goes in the white bag, orange ones go in individual white envelopes, or is it the blue bag…?’ She didn’t seem to know, even though she’d done this task last Monday and she hadn’t made any mistakes then, or had she?
The tubes on the table before her seemed to lose their shape, and she felt the pins and needles feeling at the back of her neck, the one that made it difficult to hold her head straight. ‘Oh.’ She bent double, head to her knees. ‘I was getting better,’ she told no one at all, her chest tightening.
The knock at the door brought her round and she found herself on her knees on the floor. ‘I’m fine, Gracie. Let me concentrate on this…’
‘It’s me,’ tolled Dr Millen, as he opened the door. ‘Now, are we going to talk about all of this, or am I sending you home on leave?’
Alice looked at him through teary eyes and he locked the door and came to sit cross-legged before her. ‘Ooft, my knees! Well, now we’re both down here, and there’s very little chance of me getting back up any time soon, you’d better start explaining why my new doctor is crying on the floor, surrounded by poo, blood and wee samples.’
* * *
Alice’s words, once unstoppered, came out in a gush, and since she was ending her career, she figured she might as well unburden herself fully.
‘It was about,’ she stopped to think, ‘about nine months ago now. I was in General, and a patient who’d come back in for wound care after surgery suddenly turned morbidly unwell in Bastian’s clinic.’
‘Bastian was the fellow that turned up last night at the Burns Supper?’ the old doctor confirmed.
‘That’s right. Well, this patient, it turned out they were having a major internal haemorrhage and needed theatre right away. Me and Bastian were supposed to be clocking off, but of course he scrubbed in immediately and headed in to support the surgeon and I stupidly offered to assist and observe, even though I was tired. We both were. The surgeon asked me to start the major haemorrhage protocol…’
‘Preparing for a transfusion?’
‘That’s right. I had the patient’s blood tested for a match with the donor blood, and I was bringing the bags down myself to hand over but I… I don’t know how it happened…’
Dr Millen wasn’t saying a word, only listening like she was a patient in his office and this was a normal consultation.
‘I get… caught up in these dreams. I get distracted, or confused. And before I knew it, I wasn’t coming down the stairs from the blood bank, I was in theatre scrubbed in and in charge of the instruments, counting them in and out and imagining myself miscounting and how awful it would be to leave a clip in the patient’s stomach and how it would be all my fault, and… I was still daydreaming about how I’d break it to the family, telling them that I shouldn’t even have been assisting, I wasn’t qualified, and that’s when I realised I was just standing there being shouted at by Bastian, outside the theatre, and he was dragging me into the scrubs room and barking at me, showing me the labels on the blood as if I was crazy, which I… I really think I must have been, because I was about to give A plus to an O minus patient and in the state they were in…’
‘A haemolytic transfusion reaction could have killed them,’ Dr Millen finished her sentence gravely.
Alice swallowed hard. ‘Yes.’ Now she knew how criminals felt when they turned themselves in at the police station after years on the run because they’d been unable to keep their secrets any longer.
‘That’s a Never Event,’ she told him, pleadingly, hoping he’d berate her, as if his censure might set her free from the guilt. ‘Something that should never,everhappen.’
‘But… it didn’t happen,’ the old doctor said.
‘And we have a duty of candour to tell the patient about the mistake, to confess. I didn’t fill in a Datix report. I was a coward…’
‘Woah, hold your horses! Was anyone hurt?’
He didn’t seem to understand what she was telling him. ‘Well, no, but…’
‘Did anything actually happen that you needed to report to the patient or to officially log?’
‘I shouldn’t have got so far as bringing that blood to the theatre door. Bastian sent me home, and he sorted out the mess.’
‘And yet you learned from it?’
