Deadly Medicine Read Online Free PDF Page A

coffee before Ward left for her shift, even packed some snacks to help her make it through twelve hours in the ER. It was the kiss good-bye, though, that had gotten her through the day, and the smile she knew she’d soon see that pushed her to see the next patient.
    Taking the top chart from the rack, Ward headed into exam room five to evaluate the man who’d come in for wrist pain.
    “Hi, there,” she said. “I’m Dr. Thrasher. Are you Mr. Billings?”
    “Well, if you insist that I call you doctor, I insist you call me Tom.”
    Ward chuckled. “You got it. What’s going on with your wrist, Tom?”
    Tom looked to be in his fifties, and a glance at his chart confirmed that he was, but his mop of unruly hair and the twinkle in his eyes made him seem much younger. He grinned. “I kinda rolled my quad,” he confessed.
    “What?” Ward asked, instantly alarmed. Six-hundred-pound ATVs on top of two-hundred-pound men often proved to be hazardous, causing a variety of life-threatening injuries. He seemed to understand her alarm and made an effort to reassure her.
    “I jumped clear of it, Doc. Just landed on my wrist when I fell.”
    “Well, that’s a good thing. I’ve seen quads cause too many injuries to count.” In just a few months in the country, Ward had witnessed two fatalities, one irreversible spinal-cord injury, and a host of broken bones. They were dangerous machines, and she wished there weren’t so many of them roaming the woods around Garden.
    “Something’s gonna kill me eventually, Doc. If it’s not a beautiful woman, or her husband, it might as well be a powerful machine.”
    Ward couldn’t help but laugh again. “Can I check you out, anyway? Just for my own peace of mind?”
    Reluctantly, he agreed, and Ward went over him from head to toe. He seemed fortunate to have escaped a near-catastrophe with just a wrist injury. It was badly deformed and Ward suspected a fracture. “Did they x-ray it yet?” she asked.
    When he nodded, Ward pulled it up on the computer screen on the exam room’s wall and showed him the crushed bone fragments in his wrist. They continued to chat as she numbed his wrist, tugged on it to realign the bone, and applied a splint to hold the pieces in place. While she worked, he kept her laughing with stories and jokes.
    “Where do you ride?” she asked.
    “It’s getting harder to find places. Mostly, my buddies and I just keep to Towering Pines. Didn’t I see you up there last fall?”
    Of course, in this small town in the center of this small county where she was dating the sheriff’s daughter, everyone knew who she was and where she’d been. His question was a formality.
    “Oh, was that you the day Jess and I were kayaking?”
    “Yep, that was the day. Must have been a weekend. A bunch of us go out every weekend.”
    As Ward recalled, it was quite a large group, and they’d been an impressive sight as they came out of the woods, one after another, spreading out as they reached the flat lands near the lake, then disappearing into the woods on the other side. Ward told him her thoughts.
    “Let me give you my number,” he offered. “In case you ever wanna go out ridin’.”
    He must have sensed her hesitancy. “Your reputation’s safe with me, Doc. Marla and I have been happily married for almost forty years.”
    “All right, then,” Ward agreed, just to keep the peace. She entered his number into her smart phone and saved it as Quad Tom Billings. One day, when she was scrolling through her contacts, she could laugh as she recalled her encounter with this funny man.
    After escorting him to the discharge area, Ward walked back to the nurses’ station and smiled with delight as she saw Jess putting orders into the computer. “Hello, gorgeous,” she said, and she thought that, perhaps, the corners of Jess’s mouth turned up in a smile.
    “How was your shift?” Jess asked. “Busy, huh?”
    It wasn’t a particularly busy day, but a few time-consuming