Twins for Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

probably due to the amount of blood she’d swallowed by the time we got her out. She denied any cervical tenderness but, given the mechanism of injury, it seemed prudent to immobilise her spine.’
    ‘Let’s get that nose packed,’ Rory directed. ‘I don’t want her losing any more blood. I’ll get a line in and we’ll hang some fluids. What’s the blood pressure now?’
    ‘One-fifteen on sixty,’ a nurse relayed.
    Not too bad, considering. ‘Do you have any medical history I should know about, Mary?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘No problems with your heart or blood pressure or breathing?’
    ‘I get a bit of angina. Nothing buch.’
    ‘Any chest pain at the moment?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I’m going to loosen this collar and check your head and neck, but I don’t want you moving just yet, OK?’ Rory was surprised to see just the flash of a twinkle in the pale blue eyes watching him. Was Mary actually weighing up whether she would co-operate or not?
    ‘OK,’ she agreed.
    Rory smiled. He could see beneath that twinkle. He could see the fear that her condition might prevent her doing what she desperately needed to do, which was to look after all the children she had chosen to take into her care. The trust being put in him was one he would do his utmost to honour. He admired what this woman was doing with her life, and how she was coping with a potentially disastrous situation.
    He would do whatever he could to help her, and it was a privilege to be in a position to do so. He’d missed this part of medicine more than he had allowed himself to admit.
    ‘We need X-rays,’ he ordered moments later, having checked for obvious injuries to Mary’s head and neck and found nothing. ‘C-spine, chest and pelvis. The sooner we can clear Mary, the sooner we can untie her.’ They couldn’t use the overhead X-ray facilities in this trauma area because they were over the bed the boy was occupying. ‘Is X-ray free?’
    ‘Yes,’ a nurse responded. ‘Helen’s just gone through to the plaster room.’
    ‘Let’s move Mary, then.’
    There was huge relief in being able to issue the instruction. He could move away from what was happening in here. An intubation attempt to secure the airway of a child that had clearly failed.
    ‘Bag him,’ Braden Foster was ordering. ‘I need a guide wire, Kate. We’ll have one more try.’
    Rory almost managed to escape. The bed Mary was on was being wheeled through the door and he was following. Relieved to be moving. Confident that a broken nose was the worst of Mary’s injuries and that she was in no immediate danger.
    It was Braden’s voice that caught him.
    ‘Rory?’ The tone was quiet—a warning all by itself. ‘I need you.’
    He had to turn. To face the concern he knew he would see in his colleague’s face. The fear that he was losing his young patient.
    God, he knew that fear. He had lived with it every day he had been a practising doctor. Statistically, it was a ticking bomb. You couldn’t be a specialist in emergency medicine without losing the battle to save a paediatric patient at some point.
    It hadn’t happened to Rory, but the fear had finally crippled him. Would have destroyed him if it hadn’t been for Kate. And he could feel even before his gaze moved the way Kate was looking at him.
    There was a plea in her eyes. She knew how much he didn’t want to do this. Maybe she knew he was convinced he   couldn’t   do it, because there was also encouragement in that steady gaze. A belief in him.
    You can do this , her gaze told him.
    For just a heartbeat he could feel it again. The memory of her touch. The feeling that he   was   worth the space he took up on the planet because this woman felt that way. The seed of strength he had taken with him to the most distant corner of the planet he’d been able to find.
    He couldn’t let her down.
    Facing that fear again   was   his worst nightmare, but he had to step into it. He had to   try . He owed Kate that much, at