Sydney Harbour Hospital: Tom's Redemption

CHAPTER TWO

TOM worked hard not to say anything to Jared about his driving as the car dodged and wove through the increasing rush-hour traffic. Tom knew this route from the hospital to his apartment as intimately as he knew the inside of a brain. In the past he’d walked it, cycled it and driven it, but he’d never been chauffeured. Now that happened all the time.

Being a passenger in a car had never been easy for him, even before he’d lost his sight. Whenever he’d got into a car he’d had an overwhelming itch to drive. Perhaps it was connected with the fact he’d grown up using public transport because his mother couldn’t afford a car. Whatever the reason, he remembered the moment at sixteen, after a conversation with Mick and Carol, when he’d decided that one day he would own his own car. From his first wreck of a car at twenty, which he’d kept going with spare parts, to the Ferrari that Jared was driving now, he’d always been the one with his hands on the wheel, feeling the car’s grip on the road and loving the thrum of the engine as it purred through the gear changes.

Tom stared out the side window even though he couldn’t make out much more than shadows. ‘Give cyclists a good metre.’

‘Doing it. So, did you crash into anything this morning?’

Tom could imagine the cheeky grin on Jared’s face—the one he always heard in the young man’s voice whenever he’d given him unnecessary instructions. ‘No, I didn’t crash into any walls.’

‘What about that woman you were talking to?’

Hayley Grey. A woman whose smoky voice could change in a moment from the trembling vibrato of fear to the steel of ‘don’t mess with me’. ‘I didn’t crash into her.’

‘She looked pretty ticked off with you just as you left.’

‘Did she?’ He already knew she had been ticked off by his ill-mannered offer—an offer generated by the anger that had blazed through him the moment he’d heard her realisation that he was blind. He refused to allow anyone to pity him. Not even a woman whose voice reminded him of soul music.

Jared had just given him a perfect opportunity to find out more about her. Making the question sound casual, he asked, ‘How exactly did she look?’

‘Stacked. She’s got awesome breasts.’

Tom laughed, remembering the gauche version of himself at the same age. ‘You need to look at women’s faces, Jared, or they’re going to punch you.’

‘I did start with her face, Tom, just like you taught me, but come on, we’re guys, and I thought you’d want to know the important stuff first.’

And even though Jared was only twenty, he was right. When Tom had had his sight, he’d always appreciated the beautiful vision of full and heavy breasts. He suddenly pictured that deep, sensual voice with cleavage and swallowed hard. ‘Fair enough.’

If Jared heard the slight crack in Tom’s voice he didn’t mention it. ‘She’s tall for a chick, got long hair but it was tied back so I dunno if it’s curly or straight, and she’s kinda pretty if you like ‘em with brown hair and brown eyes.’

Knowing Jared’s predilection for brassy blondes, Tom instantly disregarded the ‘kinda’.

‘Her nose wasn’t big but it wasn’t small neither but her mouth …’ Jared slowed to turn.

A ripple of something akin to frustration washed through Tom as he waited for Jared to negotiate the complicated intersection he knew they’d arrived at. The feeling surprised him as much as the previous rush of heat. He hadn’t experienced anything like that since before the accident. Even then work had given him more of a rush than any woman ever had—not that he’d been a recluse. He’d had his fair share of brief liaisons, but he’d always ended them before a woman could mention the words, ‘the future’.

The car turned right, changed lanes and then took a sharp left turn. Tom’s seat belt held him hard against the seat as they took a steep descent toward the water and his apartment. He broke his code and said, ‘What about her mouth?’

‘Her mouth was wide. Like it was used to smiling, even though it wasn’t smiling at you.’

‘I gave her a fright.’ He wasn’t admitting to more than that.

He heard the crank of the massive basement garage door opening, and as Jared waited for it to rise, Tom assembled all the details he’d just been given, rolling them around in his mind, but all he got was a mess of body parts. It was a pointless exercise trying to ‘identikit’ a picture because all of it was from Jared’s perspective.

His gut clenched. He’d lost his job, his career and, damn it, now all he ever got was other people’s perspectives.

Stick with what you know.

His ears, nose and skin had become his eyes so he concentrated on what he’d ‘seen’. Hayley Grey was a contradiction in terms. Her fresh scent of sunshine and summer gardens said innocence and joy, but it was teamed with a voice that held such depth he felt sure it had the range to sing gut-wrenching blues driven by pain.

‘Tom, Carol rang from Fiji. She said, “Good luck with today, not that you’d need it.” I told her you’d call her back. She’s sort of like a mum, isn’t she?’

‘Sort of.’ He smiled as he thought of Carol working with kids in the villages, glad she’d actually respected his wishes and had not come rushing back to Sydney when he’d finally told her about the accident and his blindness. She’d be back in a few weeks, though.

Thinking about Carol’s message grounded him—centring him solidly where he needed to be: in the present. Reminding him he had far more important things to be thinking about than a surgical registrar. Just like before he’d lost his sight, work came ahead of women and now he had even more of a reason to stick to that modus operandi. Sure, he’d given the occasional lecture before he’d gone blind, but he wasn’t known for his lecturing style. No, he’d been known for a hell of a lot more.

What was the saying? ‘Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.’ Bitterness surged. Lecturing was hardly going to set the world on fire. The accident had stolen so much from him and was now forcing him to do something that didn’t come naturally, but until he worked out if he was staying in medicine or not, it was all that was open to him. He couldn’t fail. He wouldn’t allow that to happen, especially not in front of his previous colleagues.

He wasn’t afraid of hard work—hell, he’d been working hard since he was fourteen and Mike had challenged him to improve at school so he could stay on the football team. His goals had changed, but his way of achieving them had not—one hundred per cent focus on the job at hand with no distractions from any other quarter. This morning’s trip to SHH had been all about navigating his way around the hospital in preparation for his first lecture. He was determined to show everyone at The Harbour that although his domain had changed and had been radically curtailed, he was still in charge and in control, exactly as he’d been two years ago.

Jared was his sole concession in acknowledging that with driving he required assistance. The fact that Jared had turned up in Perth and refused to leave had contributed to the decision.

‘I’ve got two lectures. One at one p.m. and the other at six.’ Tom hoped he’d hidden his anxiety about the lectures, which had been rising slowly over the last two days. ‘I’ll need you to set up the computer for me both times.’

He heard Jared’s hesitation and his concerns rose another notch. ‘Is there a problem with that?’

‘You know I’d do anything for you, Tom.’

And he did. He’d saved Jared’s life and now Jared was making his life more tolerable.

‘I’ve got a chemistry test at six and I asked the teacher if I could sit it with the full-time students, but that’s the same time as your lecture.’

It had taken Tom weeks to convince Jared to return to school and he wasn’t going to let him miss the test, even though it meant he was going to have to ask for assistance from The Harbour. He swallowed against the acrid taste in his mouth that burned him every time he had to ask for anything. ‘You can’t miss a chem test if you want to get into medicine.’

‘Yeah, but what if someone sets up your computer all wrong?’

Tom gave a grim smile. ‘They wouldn’t dare.’

‘Push fluids!’ Evie Lockheart tried not to let the eviscerating scream of the monitors undo her nerve. She had a patient with a flail chest and she knew without the shadow of a doubt that he was bleeding, but from where exactly she was yet to determine.

‘See this bruise?’ She hovered the ultrasound doppler over her patient’s rigid abdomen.

James, a final-year medical student, peered at it. ‘From a seat belt?’

‘Yes. So we’re starting here and examining the spleen and the liver first.’

‘Even though he’s got a haemothorax?’

‘With his pressure barely holding, we’re looking for a big bleed.’

Everyone stared at the grainy black-and-white images on the small screen. ‘There it is.’ Evie froze the frame. She pointed to a massive blood clot. ‘Ruptured liver, and they bleed like a stuck pig. He needs to go to—’

‘Why the hell isn’t this patient upstairs yet?’

Evie’s team jumped as Finn Kennedy, SHH’s head of surgery, strode into the resus room, blue eyes blazing and his face characteristically taut under the stubble of a two-day growth. His glare scorched everyone.

‘Catheterise our patient,’ Evie instructed the now trembling James, before flicking her gaze to Finn. He looked more drawn than usual but his gaze held a look of combat.

In the past she might have thought to try and placate him, but not now. Not after the night he’d obviously spent with Suzy Carpenter, the nurse from the OR who had the reputation of sleeping with any male who had MD after his name. That Finn had slept with that woman only a few hours after what they’d both shared in the locker room left her in no doubt that she, Evie, meant nothing to Finn.

She lifted her chin. ‘If you want him to bleed out in the lift on the way to Theatre, by all means take him now.’

‘It looks like he’s doing that here.’

‘He’s more stable than he was ten minutes ago when his pressure was sixty over nothing.’

‘Better to have him on the table stopping the bleeding than down here pouring fluids into a leaky bucket.’

‘Five minutes, Finn.’ She ground out the words against a jaw so tight it felt like it would snap.

His eyes flashed brilliant blue with shards of silver steel. ‘Two, Evie.’

‘Catheter inserted, Ms Lockheart.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Packed cells.’ A panting junior nurse rushed in, holding the lifesaving red bags aloft.

‘Check O positive.’

‘Check O positive.’ The nurse stabbed the trocar through the seal and adjusted the flow.

‘Ninety on sixty. Good job, people. James, get the lift,’ Evie instructed, before turning to Finn. ‘He’s all yours.’

‘About damn time.’ Finn kicked off the brakes of the trolley and started pushing it despite the fact that the nurse was putting up a bag of saline. ‘Move it, people!’

A minute later Evie stood in the middle of the resus room with only the detritus of the emergency as company. She could hear Finn barking instructions and knew the nurses and the hapless med student would be shaking in their shoes. The staff feared Finn Kennedy. She had been the one SHH staff member to see a different side of him—the one where she’d glimpsed empathy and tenderness—yet it had been shadowed by overwhelming and gut-wrenching pain.

She swallowed hard as she remembered back to their moment of tenderness in the locker room two weeks ago after one of the worst days of her career. How he’d leaned back into her, how she’d rested her head against his shoulder blade and they’d just stood, cradled together as one with understanding flowing between them. Understanding that life can be cruel. Understanding that some days fear threatened to tear you down. Understanding each other.

Hope had flared inside her, along with flickering need.

And then he’d slept with Suzy.

Don’t go there. She bent down and picked up the discarded sterile bag that had held the intravenous tubing and absently dropped it into the bin. It wasn’t her job to clean up but she needed to keep moving and keep busy because thinking about Finn made her heart ache and she hated that. She wouldn’t allow it. Couldn’t allow it. Letting herself care for Finn Kennedy would be an act of supreme stupidity and if growing up as a Lockheart had taught her anything, it was that being self-contained was a vital part of her life.

‘Move the damn retractor,’ Finn yelled. ‘It’s supposed to be helping me see what I’m doing, not blocking me.’

‘Sorry.’ James hastily moved the retractor.

Finn wasn’t in the mood for dealing with students today. Two minutes ago he’d made an emergency mid-line incision and blood had poured out of the patient’s abdomen, making a lake on the floor. As he concentrated on finding the source of the bleeding, pain burned through his shoulder and down his arm, just as it had done last night and most every other night. It kept him awake and daylight hadn’t soothed it any. Even his favourite highland malt whisky hadn’t touched it.

‘Pressure’s barely holding, Finn.’ The voice of David, the anaesthetist, sounded from behind the sterile screen. ‘Evie did a great job getting him stable for you.’

‘Humph.’ Finn packed more gauze around the liver. He sure as hell hadn’t been in the mood to see Evie. The sharp tilt of her chin, the condemning swing of her honey-brown hair, which matched the reproving glance from those warm hazel eyes, had rammed home how much he’d hurt her the night he’d slept with that nurse from OR.

He’d had no choice.

You always have a choice. You chose to hurt her to protect yourself.

The truth bit into him with a guilt chaser. Giving in and letting his body sink into Evie’s and feeling her body cradling his had been one of those things that just happened between two people in the right place at the right time, but the rush of feeling it had released had been wrong on so many levels. Letting people get close had no value. It just paved the way to heartache and despair, so he’d done what he’d needed to do. But a kernel of guilt burrowed in like a prickly burr, and it remained, making him feel uncomfortable, not just for Evie but for the nurse, whose name he couldn’t remember.

Finn grunted his thanks as the surgical registrar kept the suction up while he zapped another bleeder. The blood loss appeared to be easing, and with the patient’s pressure holding he was confident he was winning the battle. ‘You’re new. Who are you?’

Tired eyes—ones that could match his for fatigue and lack of sleep—blinked at him for a moment from above the surgical mask. ‘Hayley Grey. I’ve been at The Harbour a few weeks, but mostly on nights.’

More blood pooled. His chest tightened. God, this liver was a mess. ‘I don’t need your life story.’

She spoke quietly but firmly. ‘I’m not giving it. This is my final rotation. By the end of the year I should be qualified.’

‘You hope. The exam’s a bastard.’ The packs around the liver were soaked again. ‘More packs.’ He removed the old ones and blood spurted up like a geyser. Monitors screamed with deafening intent.

‘Hell, Finn, what did you do?’ David’s strained voice bounced off the theatre walls. ‘More blood. Now.’

‘It’s under control.’ But it wasn’t. Blood loss like this only meant one thing—a torn hepatic vein. Damn it, the packs had masked it and he’d been dealing with minor bleeders as a result. He pushed the liver aside and gripped the vein between his thumb and forefinger. ‘David, I’m holding the right hepatic vein shut until you’ve got some more blood into him.’ He raised his gaze to his pale registrar. ‘Ever seen a rapid trauma partial liver resection?’

She shook her head. ‘Will you use a laser?’

‘No time.’ With his left hand he pointed to a tear in the liver. ‘I learned this in the army. We start here and do a finger resection. I can have that liver into two pieces in thirty seconds.’ He was gripping the vein so hard that his thumb and index finger started to go numb. ‘Ready, David?’

‘One more unit.’

‘Make it quick.’ He pressed his fingers even harder, although he couldn’t feel much. ‘I’ll need a clamp and 4-0 prolene.’

‘Ready.’ The scrub nurse opened the thread.

‘Be fast, Finn.’ There was no masking of the worry in the anaesthetist’s voice.

‘I intend to be. Keep that sucker ready, Ms Grey.’

He released his grip and slid his fingers through the liver. The expected tingling of his own blood rushing into his numb fingers didn’t come. They continued to feel thick and heavy. ‘Clamp!’

He grabbed it with his left hand and saw surprise raise the scrub nurse’s brows.

‘Hurry up, Finn,’ David urged. ‘Much longer and there’ll be more blood in the suction bottle than in the patient.’

Blood spewed, the scream of monitors deafened and sweat poured into his eyes. You’re losing him. ‘Just do your job, David, and I’ll do mine.’ He snarled out the words as he managed to apply the clamp.

He flexed his fingers on his right hand, willing the sensation to return to his thumb and index finger. He could do some things with his left hand but he couldn’t sew. He accepted the threaded needle from the scrub nurse and could see the thread resting against the pad of his thumb. He couldn’t feel it. With leaden fingers he started to oversew the vein but the thread fell from his numb fingers. He cursed and tried to pick it up but the lack of sensation had him misjudging it. He dropped it again.

Another set of fingers entered the field, firmly pushing the sucker against his left palm and deftly picking up the thread. With a few quick and dexterous flicks, the registrar completed the oversewing before taking back the suction.

Finn’s throat tightened and he swallowed down the roar of frustrated fury that she’d taken over. That she’d needed to take over. He barked out, ‘Remove the clamp.’

Hayley removed the clamp. All eyes stared down.

The field mercifully stayed clear of blood.

‘Lucky save, Finn,’ said David from behind the screen.

Except David hadn’t seen who’d stopped the bleeding.

Brown eyes slowly met Finn’s but there was no sign of triumph in the registrar’s gaze, or even a need for recognition that she’d been the one to save the patient. Instead, there was only a question. One very similar to the query he’d seen on Luke’s face. And on Evie’s.

Don’t go there. He stared at Hayley. ‘And next, Ms Grey?’

‘We complete the resection of the right side of the liver?’

‘And you’ve done that before?’