St Matthew's Passion: A Medical Romance Read Online Free PDF

stepped into the theatre, where amongst the beep of the monitoring equipment and the clatter of the instrument trolley as it was moved into place, her patient lay supine on the operating table, draped in green apart from his exposed abdomen, yellow in the harsh light from above.
    The next hour would linger in Melissa’s memory as one of the most intense of her life, in which her senses – sight, smell, hearing – were heightened to an almost animal level. She made the incision in the upper abdomen at the midline and opened the abdominal wall. As she’d predicted, and as the scan had confirmed, the cavity was filled with blood. In short order, while the junior doctor assisting her held the retractors to keep the cavity exposed, Melissa used suction to visualise the internal organs, detached the anchoring ligaments of the spleen, clamped off and cauterised the vessels connecting the organ to the vascular system, and lifted the spleen free. It was a wreck, fragmented beyond salvage. After that the process was straightforward: examine the rest of the organs including the pancreas for damage, clear out all remaining fluid from the cavity, check for bleeding vessels, and, at last, suture the abdominal wall closed.
    Melissa emerged into the scrub room and fired her gloves at the waste container with a loud snap. She felt delirious, light-headed, and fifteen feet tall. For the first time she’d taken charge completely, suspecting a problem and following her instincts to make the correct diagnosis, then operating to solve the problem, without any outside advice or supervision. There was still a lot that could go wrong, of course, and the patient would have to adjust to life without a spleen which would render him more susceptible to infection. But he was alive now, all because of Melissa; his wife still had a husband and his children a father. Nothing Melissa had ever experienced before came close to the bursting joy she felt now.
    One by one people filtered into the scrub room to slap her on the back and offer their congratulations: her junior assistant, the theatre nurse, even the anaesthetist, who’d perched through most of the operation on a stool reading a newspaper, as nonchalant as members of his specialty usually were. Melissa basked in the praise, all the while knowing there was someone else whose admiration would matter so much more.
    Fin emerged nearly two hours later from the adjacent theatre, his gown painted with blood, the sweat matting his hair to his forehead. Melissa helped with the post-operative write-up of his case – the severely injured construction worker, Mr Khan, would live, though it would be a long time before he’d walk again – and found Fin as he was coming off the phone.
    ‘How did the laparotomy go?’ he said, as if he’d only just remembered it.
    ‘Not badly,’ she said as neutrally as she could. Quickly she described her approach. He listened, nodding slightly.
    When she’d finished he nodded and asked, ‘Mind if I take a look?’
    She led him into the post-op room where Barry, her patient, was still unconscious and being tended by a nurse. Fin uncovered him and gently peeled away the dressing, inspecting the incision she’d made in his belly.
    Melissa watched Fin’s face, her body taut with tension. At last Fin smoothed the dressing back in place.
    ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Spacing of the sutures could be a little more even.’
    With that, he turned and left.
    Melissa slumped into a chair, closing her eyes. She felt like a tyre which had suddenly had all the air let out of it. The adrenaline, the exuberance she’d been coasting on for the last few hours had dissipated like smoke in a storm.
    What was his problem? Why was nothing she did ever good enough for this unreadable, infuriating man? 

Chapter Three
     
    The blow-up with Deborah Lennox happened on a Wednesday evening, and it was the first really serious point of conflict Melissa had had with anyone at the hospital