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‘Completely unresponsive, no signs of injury’ Annie called as she turned the water off. ‘Labored resps. I’m going to have to position her, she’s blocking her airway.’
‘Can you lay her down?’
The door’s going to have to come off! Unless...’
‘Unless what?’ he barked.
‘I might be able to shift her around enough to get the door open, but she could have a neck injury.’
‘She could well be a corpse with a neck injury if we don’t get to her soon,’ Iosef pointed out—and in this instance he was right. Although a patient generally shouldn’t be moved, her position was actually life-threatening and though Annie would do all she could to support her alignment, she had no choice but to move her. She raised the woman’s head a fraction and her breathing was instantly less noisy and labored. ‘I’m throwing a towel over to you—use that under her arms so you can get a grip. Does she have a medic alert bracelet or anything?’
Annie rolled her eyes. ‘I think I might have managed to mention it if I’d seen one.’
‘No time for sarcasm, Nurse!’ She could almost see his smile as he delivered his rebuke, but rather than respond she got on with the job in hand.
‘Here.’ She pulled off a rubber bracelet with a key on it from around the unconscious woman’s wrist and threw it under the door.
‘That’s not an alert—’ Iosef started then stopped, telling the trainer to go to the locker and search it.
‘Could you throw a couple more towels?’ Annie called, and even if Iosef didn’t give a damn as to whether or not the patient was naked, as a few towels were thrown over, Annie knew that no matter how dire the situation she’d want whoever found her to take a couple of seconds to preserve her dignity.
On the other side of the door she could hear Iosef barking orders to her, but Annie wasn’t actually listening—there was no effective advice that could be offered from someone who hadn’t seen and assessed the situation. The best she could do now was rely on her own instinct.
God, she was heavy. The woman’s dead weight and the slippery tiles combined to make the task exhausting, but finally Annie managed to angle her enough that the limp body was leaning against her and, doing as Iosef had said, she placed a towel under the woman’s armpits and gripped her as she leant backwards. She watched with a mixture of frustration and relief as the door opened a few inches, allowing Iosef to look inside.
Why did he have to look so fabulous?
Of course, in theory it shouldn’t have mattered a jot what the doctor on the other side looked like, but just as she had preserved her patient’s dignity, it would have been nice to preserve her own. But, of course, Dr Perfect looked impeccable while she lay sprawled, drenched and positively beetroot with exertion on the floor.
‘Just a few inches more—come on, Annie,’ Iosef ordered.
Which was fine for him to say, Annie thought, grunting with the exertion of it all.
She hadn’t actually seen him when he’d first burst into the changing room; her mind so busy with the task in hand, she’d more heard him, been aware of him— only now she could see him and it was impossible not to notice the contrast between them. A fraction of a second to take in his immaculate appearance. His hair was wet but, unlike Annie’s, it was neatly combed backwards, utterly unruffled he stood resplendent in a suit. The only ungroomed part of him was that he hadn’t yet shaved, but then again, her mind quickly processed, in the short time she’d known him he’d always had that smudge of designer stubble on his strong jaw.
‘Where is she bleeding?’ he asked, seeing the reddish tint to the water and running his hands through the woman’s hair.
‘That’s mine!’ Annie said tightly, neither expecting nor receiving a shred of sympathy.
‘It could be cardiac.’ He was crouching down, feeling a carotid pulse with one hand and lifting the unfortunate woman’s eyelids with the other, his scent heavy in the confined space.
‘Hypoglycemia,’ Iosef said, more to himself than her, ‘or stroke.’
He was working his hands down her body, then pulled out a pen and scraped the soles of her feet to check the woman’s reflexes, breathing a sigh of relief as the response was correct, her big toes pointing downwards. Had they lifted, for example, it might have indicated a cerebral problem. His expensive pen was, for now, Iosef’s only diagnostic tool, and he continued to wield it without pause, rolling it against the bed of her fingernails to check her response to pain.
‘How long for the ambulance?’
‘Soon,’ Annie said helplessly. ‘It seems like ages but it’s probably only been—’
‘I’ve got her bag.’ Even the personal trainer was breathless. ‘It was one of the lockers down by the pool,’ he explained, but Iosef wasn’t listening. He was tipping out the contents like a kid with his stocking on Christmas morning. The riddle was solved before the contents had even hit the wet floor, a small diabetic kit drawing their eyes. Without a beat of hesitation both set to work, Annie pricking the woman’s finger and placing a drop of blood on the dextrose strip as Iosef pulled out a glycogen injection and snapped it open.
Her blood glucose was desperately low and within seconds he had delivered the vital injection.
The paramedics arrived moments later. ‘Hypoglycemic!’ Iosef called. ‘She hasn’t got a scrap of glucose in her. I want IV dextrose!’ Even though the woman had been given a glucose injection, it had been given into the muscle and would take longer to work than intravenously—and time was of the essence, dextrose urgently needed to prevent brain damage. Iosef didn’t introduce himself as a doctor as he barked his orders, and whether or not the paramedics recognized him from emergency was almost immaterial—he was so commanding, so utterly in control of the situation there could be absolutely no question he knew what he was doing.
Or maybe it was that they knew Annie!
Oh, the morning was just getting better and better.
