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‘I know how you feel.’
Charlie glanced at her. ‘Oh, yeah?’
‘I had an official-looking letter like that four years ago, just after Dana was born. It held the results of the Medical Registration Board’s review into an incident I was involved in where a child died.’
Carrie held her breath. She’d never talked about the horrible incident to anyone other than her family. In fact, she hadn’t talked about it in a long time at all, just buried it and the churning emotions that usually overwhelmed her beneath mounds of paper.
Charlie noted the rigid way Carrie was holding her cup, the way her gaze didn’t quite meet his. This was obviously difficult for her to talk to about. It also explained a lot. He’d suspected all along something serious had occurred in her career.
‘What happened?’ he asked gently.
Carrie’s hand shook. Rehashing that awful night didn’t seem quite so easy now.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, and reached out a hand to cover hers. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
She saw the compassion in his eyes, the softening, his reassuring smile. Suddenly she wanted to tell him more than anything. To talk to someone who knew how crazy it could be at the coalface. Who could relate. Empathise even. Family understood because they loved you. Colleagues understood because they’d lived it.
She stared into the murky depths of her coffee. ‘I was an intern working in Accident and Emergency. It was one of those crazy Saturday nights where half of Brisbane seemed to either have food poisoning or flu. And it was full of the usual bloodied drunks and we had a major car accident that had just come in, along with a fractured neck of femur from a nursing home. It was mad.’ She looked up from her coffee. ‘Bit like here, really.’
Charlie chuckled and it was such a lovely warm noise it gave her the courage to continue.
‘A man bought in a friend’s child who he was minding for a few hours, complaining that the child had bad breath and he’d rung the mother and she’d told him to bring the boy into us.’
Charlie cringed—halitosis in a busy emergency department. That must have gone down like a lead balloon. ‘I gather the child wasn’t assessed as a priority.’
Carrie gave a small smile and shook her head. ‘So after an hour of waiting he starts to get annoyed and there was a bit of a lull amidst all the chaos so the nurses asked if I would see the little boy next.’
‘And you did?’
Carrie nodded. ‘Kind of. The chart was handed to me, I called the boy’s name—his name was Harry, Harry Pengelly…’ As long as she lived she would never, ever forget the boy’s name or his face.
Charlie heard her voice go husky as she mentioned the patient’s name. No wonder she hadn’t been able to function properly at the accident scene. This obviously still affected her very badly.
‘I didn’t open the chart. I asked what the problem was. He said, “The kid’s mouth stinks like an animal’s died back there.” And he was right, it did smell very offensive. I asked some basic questions—had he eaten anything unusual or different, had he choked on anything and about his medical history of which this guy knew nothing. At a quick glance the child seemed reasonably alert, a little pale but he was interactive and certainly didn’t appear unwell. So I said to wait there, I was going to get some equipment to look down Harry’s throat.
‘I left to get a tongue depressor and a torch and planned on doing a more complete assessment once I’d established he didn’t have a visible obstruction. I was stopped twice by nursing staff for different medical orders so it was probably ten minutes before I got back to the cubicle, but by then the man had gone and taken Harry with him.’
Charlie nodded. Too often people grew impatient at the wait and left emergency departments without being seen.
‘The triage nurse said he’d stormed out, muttering about incompetence. I planned to flip through the boy’s chart but a middle-aged man with a suspected heart attack came through the doors and the chart got left on the doctors’ desk.’
‘I’m getting a sense that there was some significant medical history with Harry.’
Carrie nodded, tears pricking her eyes. She blinked rapidly. She hadn’t cried over this in a long time and she wasn’t going to start again in front of Charlie.
‘Two hours later a woman runs into the department, an unconscious Harry in her arms. It was his mother. She was crying hysterically. He was cold, shocked, shut down. Unresponsive. Whiter than a sheet. His abdo was distended. We rushed him into Resus. Mum was too emotional to put a sentence together and someone grabbed his chart and flipped it open and discovered that he was ten days post-adenoid and tonsillectomy.’
