Nursing The Doctor (7 page)

“It’s not easy for anyone.” Frannie was a social worker. Her office was in the rehab section, and she worked with many of the patients there. “If you come by the hospital tomorrow, page me and maybe we can have a coffee together after you’ve visited your doc.”

“I’ll do that.” Lily picked up her spoon and began to eat, but the chowder seemed to have lost its flavor. All she could see in her mind’s eye was Greg Brulotte’s broken body in a hospital bed.

“That...hurts...god...damn it, that...hurts.” Greg barely recognized his own voice. It was that of a stranger, hoarse and very weak. And it was painful just to talk.

He knew his face was bruised and battered, and his broken ribs sent excruciating pain shooting through his chest with every cautious breath. Every part of his body registered varying degrees of torment, depending on the injury it had sustained.

He’d thought his chest was the worst, but now the nurse was swabbing at the surgical site on his right leg, changing the dressings on the wound with what he considered all the finesse of a ham-handed gorilla.

They’d taken out the chest tube yesterday morning, and it felt as if burning coals were heaped under his breastbone. They’d also taken away the morphine, even though his broken ribs were agonizingly painful. Even the shallow breathing he’d more or less perfected caused him intense discomfort.

Today a barrage of specialists had paraded past his bed all day long, poking and prodding and questioning, and finally one of them, a specialist Bellamy had called in from God knows where for a consult, had told Greg in a doleful tone that he might just have a paraparesis, a partial paralysis affecting his lower limbs.

Not for certain, just a possibility, the wizened little man assured Greg. He wasn’t to get upset by the fact that he could move his toes sometimes and not others. That might just be due to the swelling of the spinal cord.

Time would tell.

So now, added to the physical pain was a tight knot of apprehension in Greg’s gut. And this last half hour before the medications came was excruciating; at least the powerful drugs dulled his senses for a time.

The added aggravation of this clumsy nurse with her dressings enraged him. He flinched and clenched his teeth to prevent a moan as she did something that sent a shudder of agony through him.

“Sorry, Dr. Brulotte, sorry. I know it’s painful, but it’s necessary. I’ll be done in a moment.”

She stabbed at the wound again, and he couldn’t bear any more. He let out a roar and used his left arm to sweep across the bedside table, sending swabs and antiseptic smashing to the floor.

“Get the hell... away...from me. Get...away, you hear me? It’s...obvious you’ve never done this ... procedure before. Get ... away. You’re not...practicing on me...you, you...sadist.”

The tall, middle aged nurse drew herself to her full height and looked down at him with a narrow-eyed, scathing glare. “Dr. Brulotte, there’s no need for this kind of behavior. My name is Polly Gibbs, and I’m not a sadist, I’m a nurse. And I assure you, I’m no newcomer to the job. I’ve been working here for seven years. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m attempting to give you the best nursing care available and cause you the least amount of pain I can, and you’re making it difficult. Things would be much easier if you’d cooperate, you must know that. After all, you are a doctor, you ought to understand the procedures.” Calmly she opened another sterile package and resumed her prodding.

Greg tried and failed to curb the anguished moan that escaped his throat. He despised his own weakness, he abhorred his helplessness. He cursed, low and guttural and foul, and the frustration and panic that threatened to drive him mad battered at his brain like the wings of a raven, black and ominous.

He’d never been immobile in his life. He’d never even been sick to speak of, apart from a mild case of measles and several bouts of flu when he was a small boy. Now he was encased in plaster, weighted down by pulleys, unable to feed himself properly. He couldn’t even turn over.

He was trapped, flat on his back, totally reliant on the nursing staff for everything, every single intimate bodily function, which totally humiliated him because he’d dated at least three of the nurses who were presently caring for him, in what he was beginning to think of as his past life.

It was utterly devastating to have them load him onto a portable potty chair and wheel him into the bathroom like a two-year-old being toilet trained.

And now there was the possibility that he’d damaged his spinal cord after all. There’d been more than a few moments in the past couple of days when he wished he hadn’t survived the cursed accident.

“All done, Dr. Brulotte.” Polly Gibbs stripped off her plastic gloves, whipped the sheet up over his nearly naked body and pulled open the curtains she’d drawn around his bed.

The old man who was his roommate gave him a solemn salute, and Polly Gibbs started for the door at a near trot.

“Could I have some water, nurse?” Greg could see she was eager to escape, and he deliberately delayed her.

“Certainly.” She handed him the glass on the bedside table.

¹
”Some fresh water?”

Tight-lipped, she marched over to the sink and refilled his pitcher, then sloshed some into his glass.

“With ice?” He was deliberately provoking her, but she deserved it.

“I’ll have to get it from the kitchen. And I do have other patients to tend to, Doctor, so be patient. I may not be back right away.”

“I’ll wait. Five minutes, and if you’re not back, this goes on the floor.” He gripped the water pitcher in his left hand and watched with satisfaction as her face turned magenta.

They were interrupted by a cheerful greeting.

“Hey, Doc, how’s it going?”

“Hi, Dr. Brulotte.”

A chorus of familiar voices sounded from the doorway, and Greg wished fervently that he still had the morphine. He longed to give himself a double shot of the stuff and simply disappear. Two of the interns and three of the nurses from the ER came in and grouped themselves around his bed. They had cards and flowers, baskets of fruit and wide smiles.

“Well, isn’t this nice?” Polly Gibbs was smiling now in triumph. She knew he wouldn’t dump the water with half the staff from Emergency looking on.

“Afternoon, everyone,” she cooed. “Come on in. We’re all done here for the time being.”

Greg looked up at the interns, Martin and Harry, and the nurses, Mary, Elizabeth and Lily, and he vowed grimly that as soon as they left he’d damn well lay down the law to his own physician and the staff on this ward. He’d tell them all in no uncertain terms that no one was allowed in to see him except Ben.

His brothers, Theo and Jeremy, had come in the day before despite what he’d said to Elise, but at least they’d had sense enough to leave after he’d told them he didn’t want them there.

Somehow, at this moment, he couldn’t bring himself to say the same thing to these people. They were his team, and for now there was nothing to do except get through the next few minutes as well as he could.

He prayed they wouldn’t stay more than a few minutes; he wasn’t sure how long he could maintain any sort of social interaction. The pain was building again, and part of his brain ticked off the exact number of seconds before the nurse arrived with his medication.

“So if all of you are up here, who’s minding the store?” His weak attempt at humor made everyone laugh. They opened up a huge card they’d made him, which everyone in the ER had signed. Elizabeth and Mary and the interns were all in their hospital scrubs.

“We’re just here on our break, Dr. Brulotte.”

“And you’re wasting it by coming up here?” The effort that speech and levity cost him was brutal, and he was pathetically grateful when the two older nurses kept a running banter going, filling him in on the usual amusing and bizarre occurrences in the ER.

Lily was quiet She’d brought him a small bouquet of late-blooming winter roses, their thorny stems tucked into an old-fashioned jelly jar, the type his grandma had used for making jam. She looked around and then set the bouquet carefully on the windowsill, where he could see it by simply turning his head to the side.

She obviously wasn’t working; her raincoat was slung over her arm and she was wearing a long, slender denim skirt that skimmed her hips and emphasized her narrow waist and long legs. With it, she had on a simple close-fitting white T-shirt and a short denim vest. Her silvery blond hair molded her well-shaped skull and glistened with raindrops, and her golden skin glowed.

Greg looked at her and acknowledged that she was truly beautiful; he’d have to be dead not to notice that. It utterly enraged and humiliated him, having this glorious-looking creature witness his helplessness, seeing him unshaven, stripped of his power, his body broken.

The last thing he’d ever dreamed of was becoming an object of pity to her, but he imagined he could detect that very reaction in Lily’s clear green gaze as her eyes traveled slowly over the cast and the traction device and came to rest on his battered face.

“The roses are nice, Lily. Thanks.”

“I tried to get daffodils, but I couldn’t find any.”

She held his gaze for a long moment. Since the accident, he seemed capable of only two sensory reactions, anger and pain, and both fought for supremacy as she looked deep into his eyes.

This time the pain won, but it was more emotional than physical. Greg had always taken for granted his good looks, his raw masculine physical appeal. Now those things were gone, and he couldn’t even envision a future beyond the next dose of Tylenol.

Who and what he was had centered around his sense of himself as a competent, confident, sexual man. So, who was he now?

“I have to go, Greg.” Lily reached out and touched his fingers. “I just came up for a moment to tell you that I’m sending you good thoughts,” she said quietly. “We all are.”

“Thanks.” The single word was offhand, devoid of feeling. If he allowed the facade to crack even the tiniest bit, he was afraid he’d roar like a crazed animal, throw himself out of the bed, smash what was left of his body on the hard tile floor.

To his everlasting relief, the others left with Lily. When they were gone, he struggled to control the trembling that had begun in his gut and spread like a virus through his entire body.

He acknowledged for the first time that what he was feeling was raw fear, that seeing Lily had brought home to him as nothing else could the full and awful effects of what had happened to him.

Life as he’d known it was over, at least for the foreseeable future. Until now, he’d been too obsessed with the physical pain to give any thought to the future.

“Dr. Brulotte? It’s time for your pain medication.”

The syringe slid into his thigh, and he swallowed the pills that the nurse placed on his tongue.

One hundred and one. One hundred and two. One hundred and three. He counted, staring at the roses on the windowsill until at last the drug stole slowly through his body, quieted his thoughts and brought a kind of peace.

Lily chatted brightly with Mary and Elizabeth and the interns on the elevator, agreeing with them that Dr. Brulotte had really wrecked himself, poor guy. He looked terrible.

They hurried off to the ER, and she slipped into an employee washroom and locked herself in a cubicle. Her knees were trembling and her chest hurt with the effort she’d made to hold back the overwhelming emotions that had flooded over her the moment she’d walked into Greg’s room.

She sank down on the toilet and bent forward, hugging her knees. Uncontrollable tears poured down her cheeks, and she sobbed and gulped and choked.

What on earth was wrong with her? She’d seen people far more mangled than Greg, people with limbs missing, youngsters with spinal injuries that guaranteed they’d never move again, children burned beyond recognition.

Why should this one particular man’s misfortune affect her so profoundly? He would, after all, recover. She didn’t know why. She didn’t care. All she could do was feel, and her heart hurt for him.

Greg, oh Greg.

Tears poured from her eyes, and a new round of sobs wrenched painfully through her chest.

CHAPTER SIX

Tears spent, Lily regained some measure of control. She washed her flushed face, ran her fingers through her hair and reapplied lipstick and a touch of mascara, then made her way down the labyrinth of corridors that led to Frannie’s office.