PATIENT CARE (Medical Romance) (Doctor Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

because the office they’d been using was directly across the hall from the nursing station and sound carried in a building as old as St. Joe’s.
    He strode down the hall, around a corner and into an empty room. There, he shut the door behind him and locked it, then leaned back and closed his eyes. He was shaking, and his gut felt as though he’d swallowed a vial of acid. He dug in his pocket and popped an antacid tablet in his mouth.
    With painstaking attention to every aspect, he went back over the procedure he’d performed on Betsy Clayton, trying to pinpoint anything that had occurred in the OR that might have precipitated the cardiac arrest.
    He’d done so countless times in the past two days, and again he couldn’t come up with a thing. The operation had been textbook perfect; the orders he’d given for her postoperative care had been meticulous and detailed.
    Whatever had brought on the cardiac arrest and its resulting effects hadn’t been his fault, he assured himself. But old feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt and guilt washed over him.
    He went to the sink and poured a glass of water, which he drank in one long swallow. Then he stood at the small window and stared sightlessly at the traffic on the side street below, as old memories rolled through his mind.
    He’d been a young and arrogant surgical resident, the darling of the head of Surgery because of his prowess with a scalpel. He’d operated on an eight-year-old boy named Paul Renaud, a simple procedure to replace tubes in the boy’s ears. The irony of the thing was the procedure was no longer done; it was now recognized that such tubes did no good whatsoever.
    He hadn’t realized that then, however. Afterward, James gave an order for medication. The child died within the hour from an allergic reaction to the drug. Although there’d been no way of predicting the allergic reaction, James still blamed himself. He’d been so cocksure he’d never for a moment considered the possibility. He hadn’t even thought to ask the mother, though it turned out later that she hadn’t known any more than he had about the boy’s sensitivity to the drug.
    Bad as it was, that wasn’t the worst part of the disaster. The true nightmare had come when he’d tried to notify Marie Renaud of her son’s death.
    Mrs. Renaud, blue eyed and young enough to be the boy’s sister instead of his mother, either couldn’t or wouldn’t hear what James was saying to her—that her son had died.
    “When can I see Paul? I want to be there when he wakes up.”
    James had swallowed hard and repeated the fact that the little boy had died.
    Marie Renaud had given him a sweet smile and even nodded. “I promised I’d be there when he woke up. Can you take me to him?”
    Even now, years later, in a hospital on the other side of the country, James could hear Marie asking repeatedly in her soft, accented English when her son would wake up and when she could see him. Finally, like a coward, he’d turned and fled. The resulting inquiry had absolved him of blame—the drug he’d ordered was a commonplace one, routinely used after such procedures—but James had spent weeks in hell. He’d come close to quitting not just surgery but medicine. It was a turning point in his career. He’d vowed from that moment on that no detail ever would be overlooked.
    He’d become a perfectionist, not just about surgery but about everything regarding the safety and health of his patients. Sure, there were times when a patient died. It was inevitable. He’d learned to distance himself emotionally while he told next of kin the bare facts, as he’d done just now with Melissa.
    Betsy Clayton wasn’t dead, although she might as well be; she was in a deep coma. In James’s experience, such patients rarely woke up.
    As chief operating officer, Melissa Clayton was one of the most powerful individuals at St. Joe’s. She was a woman he’d noticed, admired and applauded for having the same drive, energy and