Nursing The Doctor (16 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Flabbergasted, Greg lay still for several minutes. Physically he was more comfortable than he’d been in days, even though he’d been royally told off by an expert. He wavered between insult and outrage and then, for the second time that day, he started to laugh, grabbing a spare pillow and clutching it against his broken ribs, groaning between bursts of merriment when the pain became acute.

He’d met the Nurse From Hell, and she had a twin in rehab. He couldn’t wait to tell Lily.

Exhausted, he finally relaxed, and as he slipped easily into a half doze he wondered if...when...he recovered, there was any chance of getting the Krupps sisters to work with him in the ER.

It dawned on him that this was the first time he’d thought of going back to work as something that would occur in the foreseeable future. It was also the first time since his accident that he was actually looking forward to the next day. Lily was coming.

He fantasized about her, about wicked, wonderful things he’d like to do with her the moment his body was able. And then he sobered, thinking of the funeral soon to take place in Greenwood. He sent a silent apology winging to whatever medical ward in heaven Gramps was terrorizing.

“
I wish I could be there, old man, to say goodbye properly. ”

The sorrow was still there, deep and aching like a bruise inside his heart, but in spite of everything, his injuries, the new threat of Hep C hanging over him, that sorrow was now strangely tempered with optimism.

The following afternoon Lily hurried down the hallway toward Greg’s room carrying a plastic bag in which she’d brought two containers filled with the leftover spinach pasta Kaleb had made for dinner the night before.

She figured Greg might prefer it to whatever the hospital was serving. The door to 417 was open, but when she looked in, there was no one in the bed and the room was empty.

“You looking for Doc Brulotte?”

A nurse Lily didn’t recognize came down the corridor and stopped beside her. “He was transferred down to rehab this afternoon.”

Lily got back on the elevator and followed the tortuous corridors to the rehab unit. After checking at the desk she located Greg, now in a four-bed ward.

He was sitting in his wheelchair with a mystery novel on his lap, but he wasn’t reading. He looked up when she came in and his bleak expression brightened.

“Lily. I’m glad you found me.”

“Hi, Greg. I brought you some pasta. I should have brought wine to go with it. Getting off orthopedics calls for a celebration.”

“I thought so, too, until I got here and found out that once again there are no private rooms available.”

They both glanced around at the other beds. An elderly man with one leg was in the bed closest to his. The other two were occupied by a man with a huge belly wearing a neck brace and a tiny person Lily recognized from the ER.

He had the face of a gnome, and he grinned cheerfully at her.

“Hiya, I’m Sammy. What’s your name?” His speech was slurred but understandable.

“Lily. What are you doing in here, Sammy?” She knew he was much older than he looked, somewhere in his mid-forties, severely mentally and physically challenged. He’d had a broken heel the time he’d been in the ER, she recalled.

“I had a stroke,” he announced cheerfully. “This hand won’t work now, see?” He lifted his helpless right arm with his left and shook it, totally unselfconscious. “What’re you doing in here, Lily?” he mimicked.

“I’m visiting Dr. Brulotte.”

“Did he have a stroke, too?”

“He’s going to if he doesn’t get some privacy,” Greg muttered through gritted teeth. “Pull the curtains around the bed, would you please, Lil?”

She did, explaining gently to Sammy that she and her friend wanted to talk privately.

“Thanks.” Greg gave a sigh of relief. “He’s been asking me the same questions over and over. He keeps insisting he knows me.”

“He does.” Lily handed him the pasta. “His mother brought him into the ER one busy Saturday night about a year ago. He’d broken his heel, don’t you remember?”

Greg frowned and shook his head. “You know, I don’t.”

“He was doing the same thing then, asking the same questions over and over, and it drove you nuts. You lost your patience and called him a gomer.”

It was an acronym for Get Out Of My Emergency Room. “We had an argument about it.”

“Seems to me we had a few of those heated discussions, Lil. And I guess this is what’s called karma, right? Me and Sammy, trapped in the same room for God only knows how long.” He looked so morose she had to laugh.

“Look at it as an opportunity for you to mend your impatient ways, Doc.”

He groaned. “I swear to God if I just get out of here while I’m still halfway sane, I will never call Sammy or anyone a gomer again.”

Lily grabbed a paper and a pen from the night-stand and extended them to him. “Write that down and sign it, Dr. Brulotte. I’ll post it above the admissions desk in the ER.”

They both laughed and concentrated on their food for a few moments.

“I guess I was an insufferable jerk at times, huh, Lil?”

“Yeah, you were,” she agreed without thinking, and when he looked surprised and a little hurt she added quickly, “But you’re also one of the best docs I’ve ever worked with, so that evens it out.” She smiled at him.

“Y’know, it never crossed my mind that I was the least bit tough to get along with?”

She laughed. “That’s because no one but me ever dared tell you.” She thought of all the women he’d dated. “Every other female is bowled over by your charm, Doctor.”

“You’re wrong there, Lil.” His eyes twinkled. “Nurse Krupps wasn’t the least bit affected by my so-called charm. If I’d spent one more day on ortho, I wouldn’t have an ego left at all. She tore a strip off me last night about three feet wide and left me raw and bleeding.”

Delighted, Lily grinned. “I told you not to mess with her, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, well, I should have listened.” He related the exchange with Krupps word for word, and Lily was giggling uncontrollably by the time he finished.

“And that’s not all. She says she has a sister working here in rehab. A twin sister if you can envision such a thing.”

“She was probably just trying to scare you into behaving yourself. She’s one of the old school. I had an instructor in training just like her, her name was Celia Tennant. All of us were petrified of Miss Tennant.”

“Yeah, well, I’m petrified of Krupps.”

“That’s a first. I’ll bet you’ve never been frightened before, have you, Greg?”

“Oh, yeah, a couple of times. The worst was when I came to after the accident and thought maybe I’d be paralyzed. And then Bellamy sent a counselor up to see me who said he’d been in some kind of motorcycle accident and that now he worked with people with spinal injuries. That scared the bejesus out of me. I figured they were trying to break it to me gently that I might not walk again.”

“That would be Wade Keenan. Frannie knows him. She says he’s really good at what he does. His sister’s a doc who used to work in the ER. I think her name was Alex Ross.”

“Sure, I remember Alex. I only met her a couple of times before she moved away. I’d just transferred to the ER about then.”

“I’ve heard some of the nurses tell the story about the day Wade Keenan was brought in. It was pretty awful. Dr. Ross was the physician on duty that morning, and she had no idea it was her brother the medics were bringing in. He was an international rugby star before his accident, and afterward no one could even say whether he’d walk again.”

Greg nodded slowly. “I remember hearing about it now. Wasn’t his dad a surgeon here at St Joe’s?”

“I think so.” Lily could tell that the story had affected Greg. He sat lost in thought for a while. “International rugby,” he finally said thoughtfully. “It must have been tough to accept that he’d never be able to play again.”

“Lives change. We see it all the time in the ER.”

“This has taught me that there’s no comparison between seeing it happen to a patient and having it happen to you. Nobody’s certain yet that I haven’t got some paraparesis, and believe me, I can’t be objective about it” He gave her a crooked smile. “I pray a lot”

All of a sudden, the lighthearted banter that had come so easily fell flat and Lily was forcefully reminded of how drastically her and Greg’s lives could change.

Hep C, paraparesis...

He noticed the difference in her mood and abruptly changed the subject. “You never said what made you move back to Vancouver, Lily. Didn’t you tell me once you were working at a hospital in Calgary?”

“I was.” She debated for a moment wondering how much she felt comfortable telling him. “There was a doctor I worked with there. We were...involved for a while. He wanted marriage and I didn’t. And right about then, Gram was diagnosed. Kaleb had moved in with her, but he was having a rough time caring for her on his own. It was the right time for me to move home. And then the job came open here in the ER, so everything worked fine.”

“You ever hear from him?”

“Richard?” The question surprised her. “He calls every now and then, but I haven’t seen him since I left Calgary.”

“What was his specialty?”

“Surgery.” Her answer was abrupt.

“I dated a surgeon for a while. Jessica Townlee,” he volunteered.

“Seems to me you probably dated every available woman in this hospital,” she dared to say. “Maybe most of the available women in Vancouver,” she added, and then she was relieved when he laughed.

“Oh, so you were keeping track, were you? Well, I probably missed a few. For instance, you never would go out with me, Lil. Why the heck was that, anyhow? I could never figure it out. And your old argument about not dating somebody you work with doesn’t hold water now that I know about Richard.”

“It just didn’t seem like a good idea at the time.” This was dangerous territory. She could feel herself flushing, and she got to her feet and put the lids on the containers she’d brought, turning away from him and loading them back into the plastic bag.

“So what about now, Lil? The date might be pretty limited, but I could probably manage dinner at the cafeteria and then a movie on the tube. Have to give you a rain check on dancing, I’m afraid. And it’d be a ridiculously early night, this joint locks up at nine or thereabouts. I couldn’t pick you up or drive you home, either.”

“Oh, I can drive myself. We modern females are pretty independent, you know.” She’d thought he was joking, but when she turned and looked at him, she realized he wasn’t at all.

“Okay, so what’s your rotation?”

Stunned by the intensity of his voice, she said, “I’m finished days, I have two night shifts and then I’m off.”

“That’s Friday. Would you stay in with me Friday, Lil? As opposed to going out?”

There was such wistful appeal in his beautiful eyes she couldn’t resist. “Sure. Yes. I’d like to stay in with you, Greg.”

“It’s a date, then.” He grinned, the old crooked, heart-stopping grin that made her breath catch and her heartbeat quicken.

“I’ve got to get back to work now.” She was suddenly shy with him. “I’ll see you Friday, then. What time?”

“Better make it early. Say, five-thirty?”

“I’ll be here. Until Friday.”

“’Bye, Lil.” He held out his left hand and she took it, and before she realized what he was going to do, he’d deftly pulled her down and planted a kiss on her lips. The embrace was over in a second, but it served as a powerful reminder of the longer, more intense kiss they’d shared the day before.

“You’re pretty agile for a guy with all those broken ribs,” she managed to say. With a wave, she hurried out of the curtained area and into the ward, where three sets of interested male eyes centered on her.

The curtains might have provided an illusion of privacy, but she was all too aware that the others had likely heard every single word she and Greg had exchanged.

She plastered a smile on her flushed face and squared her shoulders as she walked out of the ward, aware as never before that there really were no secrets in a hospital.