AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Just briefly!
Study her and wonder just why she affected him the way she did—this small, quiet woman.
Looking at her didn’t help, so he turned his thoughts firmly to what lay ahead.
‘With badly injured patients, we often just grab and go. Stabilise them as much as possible but get them into the air and en route to a major hospital as quickly as we can. That’s why we take a doctor, so you can work on the patient while we’re in the air. Statistically, it’s better for the patient.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. In the city, the nearest hospital is usually a major one so it’s not an issue. What’s the nearest one to the crash site?’
‘Retford, a thirty-five-minute flight each way.’
‘And if the patient needs better stabilisation than we can do on the ground?’
She was good, this woman, thinking her way through all the possibilities.
‘Then it becomes a very long night. We bring him—or her—but we’ll stick to him, to Braxton, stabilise him, then take him to Retford.’
They’d reached the base and he was pleased to see Emma out of the car as soon as he pulled up, already hurrying towards the open side door of the chopper. He caught up with her and they jogged over together, Mark, his paramedic air crewman putting out his hand to help Emma up.
‘And up front is Dave,’ he told Emma. ‘These are the best two crewmen in the skies. Mark’ll give you a helmet so you can listen to the chat.’
He slid into his seat, his mind now firmly focussed on what lay ahead, Dave giving him the latest information from the crash site, and the co-ordinates he needed.
The big chopper lifted into the air, and the sense that this was where he belonged swept over him. It was here, in the air, that he really lived, the muddy waters of his early years receding like the tide so he was whole again.
He thought of his foster sister, Liane, wondering if she’d had some place she could go where all the past was forgotten. Perhaps if she had, she might have lived.
Dave’s quiet voice brought him out of the useless speculation, and now he could see the bright arc lights of the emergency services teams revealing a macabre scene of twisted metal wrapped around a substantial tree.
He put the chopper down as close to the scene as he possibly could. Word had come through that the two passengers in the car had been taken to Braxton by ambulance, both suffering from minor injuries.
But whoever was still trapped inside—well, he didn’t want to think about it, because the front of the vehicle had concertinaed and pushed the engine back onto the driver.
A fire officer was using the huge cutters to free the man—his gender confirmed on arrival at the scene. Emma was squatting close by the vehicle, checking what the ambos had already done to help the victim—checking the victim himself as best she could, given that a low, heavy branch of the tree prevented her from getting right up to him.
‘We need to hook the rear of the vehicle up to the fire truck and see if we can haul it off the tree,’ the fire officer told them. ‘Problem is we don’t know if it will make things better or worse for him.’
‘The way the dashboard has come back on him, there could be injury to the femoral artery on both legs,’ Emma pointed out, ‘so we’ve got to be ready for massive blood loss.’
She was speaking to Mark, who nodded his understanding, hauling pads and bandages out of one of the flight bags.
‘And hypovolemic shock?’ Marty muttered, thinking through what lay ahead, the paramedic he’d once been never far away at the scene of any accident.
‘Definitely. But we deal with the normal things, check his airway, immobilise him on the stretcher…’ she turned around and nodded when she saw that Dave had the stretcher ready behind her ‘…put pressure on any wounds to slow the bleeding. I’ll start IVs in the air and check him over properly, but getting him to hospital as quickly as we can will be the best thing we can do for him.’
The deep growl of the fire engine made them both step back, and slowly—protesting noisily—the vehicle was dragged away from the tree. Marty moved in to help the fire officers who were still working on freeing the patient, helping them fit a block and tackle to the front of the vehicle, already cut free, so they could lift it off the injured driver.
And Emma was proved correct. As the pressure lifted, blood spurted from the man’s thighs. Being closest, Marty clamped his hands against the wounds and held tight until Mark and Emma came with dressings.
‘Bind it tightly,’ Emma said to Mark, then she half smiled. ‘Sorry, telling you something you already knew, wasn’t I?’
