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Alex raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh?’ There was a vehemence in her voice that sounded as if it came from personal experience.
Isobella tensed. ‘I did a rotation there in my grad year,’ she lied, amazed at how easily it slipped off her tongue. But she shouldn’t be. Hadn’t she been lying by omission to everyone for years, hiding from her past?
‘Trust me, being in hospital at all is no Club Med.’
Isobella glanced up as the bleak truth in his gravelled tone swept to her very core.Ain’t that the truth?
Then the doors opened and they were ushered inside, and Isobella’s heartbeat picked up to a crazy canter.
The first thing that registered was the smell. It was that hospital smell. The same smell they all had, no matter where you were in the world. Disinfectant and industrial-strength soap, mingling with floor wax and air deodorisers. Her nose wrinkled, and she realized it was one of the things she didn’t miss about being a nurse.
And then the noises took over. Mechanical clatters. Monitor alarms trilling. Suction units slurping. A range of machines and pumps all blaring, attracting attention. A special ventilator called an oscillator, its membrane thumping at three hundred a minute, sounded like a pimped up car vibrating with too much bass. At one bed a woman was sobbing, at another a nurse was talking loudly to her patient while she restrained his flailing arms and called for assistance.
Isobella’s eyes darted from bed to bed. The noises reverberated around the walls and ricocheted across her nerves. She felt like a cat on a hot tin roof. Somewhere the peal of a bedside buzzer splintered her tenuous hold on normality, and she lurched into Alex, clutching his arm.
Alex looked down at her, one dark brow winged in enquiry. ‘You okay?’
She nodded, taking a few calming breaths as the spike in her pulse settled. ‘Noisy places,’ she murmured.
They spoke briefly with the consultant, who confirmed that a skin scraping had been taken and sent to the Zaphirides lab in Brisbane. Isobella wished she was there, peering at it through her microscope, instead of here about to witness the damage it had wreaked.
They read through the chart, paying particular attention to the ambulance transport sheet at the front of the notes. Or at least Alex did. Isobella didn’t read that the patient had been given an intramuscular injection of antivenin, or that she’d had just under a metre tentacle contact length. She was trying to find some Zen amidst her freaked-out state. Trying to tune out the noises and the smells and the memories to concentrate on the project.
The consultant personally directed them to the bed, introduced Danielle Cartwright and left them to it. The patient was wired up to a monitor, an oximeter peg attached to her finger. Even twelve hours post envenomation the English girl looked scared witless.
‘I was wondering if we could ask you some questions, Danielle?’ Alex asked, pulling up a chair beside the bed. Isobella stood on the opposite side.
The patient looked from one to the other and nodded. ‘It was so stupid. They told us when we first arrived at the hotel it was stinger season, but the water looked so inviting. I was just going in for a dip. To cool off. I mean…how unlucky can you be? I can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.’
Isobella nodded, understanding the girl’s dazed demeanour—box jellyfish stings were rare. It hadn’t even crossed her own mind, wading into the water off Cardwell for the shoot that day, that she’d be aFleckeri statistic.
‘Can you tell us all you can remember from yesterday?’
‘Like what?’
Alex smiled at her. ‘Everything—from just before you went into the water until you got stung and what happened after.’
Isobella watched as Danielle responded to the calm tones of Alex’s gentle enquiry. He was sitting forward in his chair, his elbows propped against his knees, his attention completely focused on his patient. As if Danielle Cartwright and her story were the most important things in his life.
Danielle responded beautifully, hesitantly at first, and then more surely as Alex’s intense nods and murmurs and succinct questions garnered the information they needed. Isobella wondered, as she jotted down notes for when she was cataloguing the specimen on her return, if this was Alexander Zaphirides the surgeon she was seeing.
His bedside manner was superb—not something one generally learned from peering down a microscope or schmoozing at symposiums. Danielle trusted him—she could tell. He had already built a quick rapport. Had he been that kind of surgeon? The kind who took their time to explain and understand their patient’s fears and worries? Had his patients adored him? Or had he been distant? Arrogant? Like the brief impression she’d had of him at the cocktail party?
