The Surgeon's Convenient Fiancée (Medical Romance) Read online

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  Perhaps if he had leaned across the table to kiss her, she might have accepted there and then. As it was, the warmth of his hand on her free hand suffused her with emotion. There was so much to sort out.

  The tension in him was evident as he looked at her with a frown between his brows. Love for him, her need of him, threatened to overwhelm her…yet she had to be sensible, had to think this out very carefully, because it also affected Mungo and Fleur. Her chances of finding someone else who would accept her with two children who were not her own were not great.

  ‘I’d like to think about it, Shay,’ she said, forcing herself to say it, even though she wanted to tell him that she would accept him unconditionally. ‘I will have to discuss it with the kids—you appreciate that?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I do understand. I get impatient sometimes when I’ve made up my mind what it is that I want.’

  Each occupied with their own thoughts, they sat silently to finish the coffee. Deirdre felt a sense of elation, yet a sense of unreality at the same time. There were times in life when you had to take the plunge, because there were no perfect times. It was just that some times were better than others. It was like having a baby, she surmised. You could wait for the perfect time then find that it never came, or that you were, after all, infertile.

  Out in the rain again, under the umbrella, they linked hands to walk back to the hospital parking lot and their respective cars.

  ‘Don’t keep me waiting too long, Deirdre,’ he said, as they stood beside her car.

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ she said. They kissed goodbye.

  ‘I’ll see you on the weekend. I’m on call, but hopefully there will be time,’ he said. ‘Mark wants to get together with Mungo and Fleur, probably at your place, if that’s all right with you?’

  ‘Yes, they did ask me,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, Shay.’

  ‘Goodnight, sweetheart.’

  When he had walked away and she sat in her car, trying to calm her thoughts, while the rain pounded on the roof, she wondered whether the love of one person was enough for two people. Could she live with what Shay had to offer on a personal level? And would it be wise?

  You don’t marry the person you love, you love the person you marry—how good that sounded. Something to think about. Perhaps it was a promise of sorts, otherwise why would he have told her about it?

  With that in mind, she started the engine, turned on the windshield wipers and moved out.

  * * *

  ‘That means Mark would be a sort of brother to us!’ Fleur said delightedly later as they sat at supper in Deirdre’s parents’ house. ‘Does that mean we could all live together?’

  ‘I haven’t got as far as thinking about where we would live,’ Deirdre said tiredly. ‘I expect it would mean that, unless Jerry made trouble. I expect Granny would be happy with that arrangement. Remember, I haven’t said yes yet.’

  It had been a hectic day in one way and another. Before coming back to her own house, she had gone to Jerry’s house to check up on it, to make sure that the light timers were functional, that the burglar alarm was on, even though both Fiona and the cleaning lady checked up on it as well.

  She had decided to tell Mungo and Fleur while she had them as a captive audience at the dinner table. So far, so good.

  Mungo gave a slow smile and looked at her knowingly. ‘Is it what you want, Dee?’ he said. ‘You must think of what you want, not what would be best for us.’

  Deirdre returned his smile. ‘I think it is what I want,’ she said. ‘It takes some getting used to the idea, and there are a lot of practicalities to sort out. It’s something that you can’t rush into.’ As she said those words, she wondered why Shay was in such a hurry to have her answer.

  It was impossible to tell these two eager young people that Shay did not love her. For them, love would be a prerequisite. But she also knew that love and attraction were not necessarily enough. Perhaps too much was made of them. There had to be genuine willingness, she felt instinctively, to have the other person’s interests at heart, on a par with your own. There had to be room in the relationship for each person to become the person they wanted to become. Perhaps the practical considerations that Shay had put forward were very sensible. If other things were not there, you could fall out of love with someone eventually, could gradually no longer find them attractive. Perhaps that was what had happened between Shay and Antonia…the long hours of work, the loneliness.

  Mungo and Fleur already knew that their granny had made Deirdre their legal guardian for the future, if need be. They also knew that the lawyer had advised that her chances would be better if she were married, should Jerry make trouble. Nothing was assured. They accepted it with the stoic matter-of-factness of the young. They had to be with someone; they had to be taken care of until they were in a position to take care of themselves, to earn a living. These days, the higher education process was lengthy.

  * * *

  ‘Mark’s coming round here tomorrow,’ Mungo said. ‘Is it all right if we talk about it to him? I want to know what he thinks.’

  ‘That’s all right. Shay’s already discussed it with Mark,’ she said.

  ‘Go for it, Dee,’ Mungo said quietly. ‘He’s a great guy.’

  ‘I agree,’ Fleur said.

  Deirdre smiled.

  Later that night, when the kids were in bed and Deirdre sat on the floor of the sitting room in front of the gas fire, she tried to collect her thoughts. Absently, she stroked the purring cat. Uppermost in her mind was happiness, a strange contentment, as the love she felt for Shay seemed like a miracle that she could never have dared hope for. Although she wanted to call him and accept, she knew that she must think things through first, all the practical things—where they would live and so on, and the fact that her love for him was not reciprocated in the same way. Of course, he cared for her—that much was obvious when they were together—but it seemed to have more to do with a strong physical attraction.

  ‘Ah…’ She stretched out her legs in front of her on the carpet, her feet towards the fire. It was good to have the weekend ahead of her, not to be on duty. A steady rain pattered on the roof, while strong gusts of wind buffeted the house from time to time, making the inside feel secure and safe.

  To add to her feeling of strange happiness was a letter from her parents that had been waiting for her when she got to the house, to say that they were planning to come home very soon. They missed her very much and needed to come back. She still needed her parents, their wisdom and advice, their love. It had seemed very odd to her not to have her family around her, although Fiona and the kids were like family. In times of crisis you needed the people you loved, who loved you in return, unconditionally.

  As though on cue, her mobile phone rang.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart,’ Shay said, his voice tired. ‘I was hoping I’d find you still up. How are you?’

  ‘All right,’ she said huskily.

  ‘I’m on call, have just finished an emergency repair of ruptured spleen about an hour ago,’ he said. ‘The patient’s stable, nothing else doing right now, so I wanted to hear your voice.’

  ‘I’m missing you,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Can’t live without me?’ There was laughter in his voice.

  ‘It seems like that,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘Shay…could we become engaged?’ she said impulsively, having only just thought of it. ‘I like the idea of being engaged. It’s a promise of sorts. I think I’m a traditional woman, in the best sense, I hope.’

  Shay laughed. ‘I think it’s a great idea. Why didn’t I think of that? Do you fancy throwing a ring in my face if you decide against marrying me?’ he said.

  ‘It’s an idea,’ she said, laughing. ‘Although I don’t think I want a ring. At least, not the usual diamond or other precious stone ring. Maybe silver and amber, something chunky but not expensive. Just so that I can remind mysel
f what I might be letting myself in for when I look at it.’

  ‘We’ll look for one,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘PASS ME TWO of the long Debakey clamps, please, Deirdre,’ the surgeon said to her, not looking up as his hands were in the abdominal cavity of their patient on the operating table. ‘Then I’ll have a piece of tape for retraction, mounted on one of those long, angled clamps.’

  ‘Yes,’ Deirdre said, looking at her array of instruments on one of her wheeled tables that stood beside the operating table. She was the scrub nurse and had everything laid out neatly in rows and types of instruments, so that she knew exactly where everything was, and could put a hand on what was needed immediately.

  It was late morning and the routine operating list of elective cases had been temporarily suspended in room one while an emergency case took precedence. They had been told that a man with a dissecting aortic aneurysm was coming in by ambulance, and the case would be theirs as they had just finished a procedure. They had rushed around getting the room ready for this emergency in which, if the aneurysm ruptured, the patient could bleed to death in minutes.

  An aneurysm was an abnormal ballooning out of a small section of an artery. When it was ‘dissecting’, this weak area was gradually splitting open and leaking blood. Because the artery had to be clamped during the operation, cutting off the blood supply to the lower part of the body, they had to work quickly, methodically and efficiently.

  Deirdre passed the clamps, then the piece of thin cotton tape used for retraction. Shay smiled at her briefly, his eyes lighting up behind his protective goggles and mask. He had been pressed into being an assistant to the vascular surgeon for this emergency, as his operating room had been taken over anyway and he could not proceed with his own operating list.

  Deirdre smiled back, glad he was there, then her eyes scanned her instruments and equipment again, memorizing where everything was placed.

  There was a quiet tension in the room; no one spoke unless absolutely necessary. The vascular surgeon would cut open the aneurysm with a vertical incision, now that the artery had been clamped above and below it, then a graft of synthetic material would be sewn to either end of the damaged section of the artery, to form, essentially, a new blood vessel. The walls of the aneurysm would be trimmed and sewn over the graft to protect it. They would use a very fine suture needle and a fine silk or nylon suture that was also very strong, as it had to withstand the pressure of the blood flowing through the artery.

  There could be complications in this operation, as the blood supply to the lower part of the body was cut off while the major artery was clamped. Deirdre’s mind ranged over these possibilities, as she prepared for the next move.

  ‘I’ll take the Dacron graft now, please,’ the surgeon said, after a while. ‘Give me a medium-sized one.’

  The circulating nurse dropped the graft, in its sterile package, onto Deirdre’s instrument table.

  The operation went on steadily, as it should, with Deirdre mounting the tiny suture needles onto suture holders for the surgeon to use in sewing the graft to the cut end of the artery. When the graft was securely sewn into position and the cut portion of the artery sewn over to protect it, the moment of reckoning would come when the surgeon released the two clamps on the large artery to allow the blood to flow once again, this time through the artificial vessel. It was a tense few moments, when they had to be sure that there was no leakage of blood from the graft. If there was leakage, it meant more sewing. Sometimes blood leaked out later, in the recovery period, in which case the patient had to be subjected to another operation to correct it. So they took great pains to assess the handiwork of the surgeon before he closed the abdominal cavity. She kept careful count of the large gauze sponges, blood-soaked, that came out of the abdominal cavity.

  Just before the end of the operation, the internal telephone rang, and was answered by the circulating nurse.

  ‘Excuse me, Shay,’ she said quietly, having come over to stand near Shay. ‘That’s the front desk to say there’s an outside call for you from your son. He doesn’t want to leave a message.’

  It was impossible for Deirdre not to hear what the nurse had said, as she was standing at the side of the operating table directly opposite Shay. Her heart gave a sickening lurch. Every parent dreaded getting a personal call at work from a child, as it so often was not good news.

  She looked at Shay sharply, noting the sudden stillness in him for those few seconds during which he contemplated the message.

  ‘He’s still on the line?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please, get a number—it should be his mobile phone—and I’ll call him back in about fifteen minutes. If it’s an emergency, he will have to leave a message.’

  ‘All right, Shay.’

  So Mark was calling his father because something serious had happened. Family members knew not to call the hospital for any other reason. Deirdre felt frightened, her concentration on the job momentarily broken. Mark had become almost like a son to her, which he would be if she were to marry Shay. She liked him, felt protective towards him, in spite of his veneer of sophistication beyond his years, and felt a delicate maternal love flowering within her where he was concerned.

  In the month that had passed since Shay had asked her to marry him, she and Shay, plus the three children, had spent a lot of time together, often sharing an evening meal at one place or another. After each occasion, it seemed to her, they felt more and more like a family.

  As for Jerry, he had been away for long periods, only passing through for one or two nights. Deirdre had carefully told him nothing of her plans, of her relationship with Shay, and had asked the children not to mention it to him. As for her new job, he seemed unconcerned. So long as everything carried on as usual for him, he was not interested. If not for the fact of Moira’s money, he no doubt would have sold the house, left the children with her or their grandmother, where they belonged anyway, and disappeared from their lives. Deirdre had long ago decided that she could tolerate the status quo so long as Fiona remained well.

  Quickly she pulled her thoughts back to the job in hand, checked what she had to hand next to the surgeon. There would be time later for Shay to tell her what was going on with Mark. Nonetheless, the feeling of anxiety remained with her.

  ‘I’ll need a vacuum drain, Deirdre,’ the surgeon said.

  ‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, picking up the drain that was on her table—it consisted of a plastic box that could be compressed to create a vacuum and form a suction when attached to tubes. One of the tubes would be placed inside the abdominal cavity through a small incision made for the purpose. This drain would siphon off excess fluid and any blood that accumulated in the cavity.

  When they were about to sew up the abdominal cavity, bringing the operation to an end, the surgeon spoke quietly to Shay. ‘Thanks a lot for your help, Shay. Much appreciated. If you want to leave now, we can manage from here.’

  ‘Thanks, Doug,’ Shay said, backing away from the operating table. ‘I appreciated the opportunity. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a dissecting aneurysm.’

  In seconds he had taken off his bloodstained latex gloves, the nurse had undone his surgical gown for him, he had stripped it off and left the room.

  Deirdre felt her anxiety level increasing, as she hoped he would come back at the end of the operation to tell her what had happened. It would be a while before she could get away herself for a late lunch. Now she was conscious of being very hungry, desperate for a cup of coffee, and had already decided to go to the hospital cafeteria for a proper meal.

  There was still a lot for her and the circulating nurse to do before either of them could leave to get something to eat. In a major operation like this, with the abdominal cavity open, all the sponges, instruments and suture needles that were on the sterile set-up had to be counted twice. Before Shay departed they had completed one count; now they had to do the second count.

  When Deirdre
looked at the clock, she was surprised to see how much time had elapsed since she had last checked. At this rate, she would be working late, staying on to help the evening shift nurses, who were due to check in for duty at a quarter past three.

  When the second count was completed, she passed the surgeon the first suture for the sewing up. The circulating nurse gave her the thumbs-up sign, signalling that she had done a good job. It had been a long time since she had last assisted with a ruptured or dissecting aneurysm. The little knot of anxiety that had seemed to settle in the pit of her stomach at the start of the operation, over whether she could cope, dissipated now that she was on firm territory. It was replaced more clearly by a worry about Mark.

  When the operation was over and the patient wheeled out on a stretcher to go initially to the recovery room, from where he would go on later to the intensive care unit, Deirdre stacked her used instruments in a bowl of water. All would be wheeled by her out to the dirty prep room, where they would be cleaned and sterilized. Now that it was finished, her concentration over, she felt fatigued. Her back ached, as well as her feet. The longing for a cup of good coffee, which she had felt for the last hour or two, translated itself into a craving now.

  ‘Shall I go on for a lunch-break now?’ she called to the circulating nurse as she wheeled her used instruments on a bowl-stand through the door.

  ‘Sure, Dee. You must be starving. I’ll set up here for Shay’s next case.’

  Having divested herself of the dirty instruments and other equipment, Deirdre washed her hands at the scrub sinks, took off her paper hat, ran her fingers through her hair and put on her white lab coat over her scrub suit. She would go to the locker room to change her shoes, then go down in the elevator to the lobby and on to the cafeteria.

  There were several other people in the elevator, no one she knew, and they all got off en masse in the lobby. Deirdre found herself pushed forward with the small crowd, and as she turned to cross the lobby in the direction of the corridor to the cafeteria, she saw Shay crossing the lobby ahead of her. Her face lit up with a welcoming smile.