Nurse in Love Read Online Free PDF

hospitals, when the patients come to us or ours go to them. It is a pattern that goes on and on ceaselessly. And it’s so linked together by everyone’s work —all their work—that I suppose that, almost any day on any ward, you could say ‘nothing’ happens. But for all the ill patients who come in, others are going out cured. So that something has been accomplished in between. And nursing is the ‘something’ that has.”
    Sara said a little bleakly: “But don’t you ever have the satisfaction of feeling that you are fighting illness, instead of just keeping it at bay?”
    Kathryn smiled. “Not as often as you’d think, mainly because you aren’t fighting alone—only as part of a team. But the rare times that you do—believe me, they make all the rest worthwhile.”
    “I’ll try to remember that,” said Sara.
    “It’s only the way I look at it myself,” Kathryn reminded her.
    “It’s good enough for me,” declared Sara loyally before going on to ask about Kathryn’s own ordeal — her first meeting with the new specialist to her ward.
    “Dr . Brand? He’s—awfull y capable. I think.” Kathryn hoped she had sounded non-committal, but Sara’s quick ear had noted the brief hesitancy.
    “Capable—but you don’t like him otherwise?” she queried. “Is he going to be cantankerous?”
    “No, I’d say he’s much too controlled and sure of his own skill for that.” Again Kathryn paused. “Something I didn’t know is that he’s a great friend of Steven Carter’s.”
    “The doctor who asked you to marry him and then went out to Africa?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh.” The news, to Sara had not much significance, and Kathryn changed the subject to tell her that as the following day was her day off duty she proposed to spend it with the Thorleys, asking Sara what messages she had for Carol.
    Sara eagerly gave several, produced from a drawer a bar of chocolate for Carol, and warned Kathryn that she must on no account fail to enquire for Edward.
    “Edward?”
    “Carol’s teddy-bear. He’s been sickly—malingering, I suspect, but I daren’t say so—ever since I began nursing training. Last night I took his temperature — under his arm, as his mouth doesn’t open.”
    “I hope it didn’t give cause for alarm!” laughed Kathryn.
    “No. I had to leave room for a bit of fluctuation, so I made it a hundred and one degrees and warned against shock to the patient. He may be considerably better to - day —or he may be worse.”
    “Well, I’ll certainly ask after him,” promised Kathryn as she prepared to go to her own room.
    But before they parted Sara asked with studied casualness: “I say, house surgeons and house physicians—do they visit the wards often?”
    “Mostly every day, and one or the other of them must be always on call. Why?”
    “Oh, nothing,” said Sara indifferently. “I only wondered.”
    When Kathryn reached Barbara Thorley’s house the next day she found that the unfortunate Edward had been put to bed in a doll’s pram on the sun-porch, but Carol, of course, was at school. She attended morning kindergarten at the grammar school where Victor Thorley taught, and Barbara chuckled as she related how the two of them set out together each morning, holding hands and usually in solemn conversation.
    “From the time they both kiss me good-bye I’m made to feel that I have no share in the weighty matters that exercise them,” she laughed. “ ‘School’ claims them from that moment.”
    “I daresay they make up for it when they come home,” suggested Kathryn.
    “The hug I get from Carol certainly does. As for Victor, he adores his work so much that I’ve always said he has never been wholly mine since we married.” But the gentle contentment in Barbara Thorley’s tone belied her words. She went on: “As you know, Victor doesn’t get in until tea-time, and Carol has lunch at school, and I meet her bus after I’ve had lunch myself. She goes to rest in the afternoon,