Lucas looked around the room, certain there were people there who needed his skills more. If someone had managed to get themselves to the hospital, they couldn’t be as needy as those who had been brought in and were waiting for operations.
“She needs you right now,” Hettie said, this time her voice more urgent.
“Go check for me, Frankie. Use your triage skills. Only people who need surgery can come into the hospital, otherwise we simply won’t be able to cope.”
She nodded and followed Hettie to the door the older woman indicated. Lucas started towards the area that was functioning as their nurses’ station—a stack of boxes with clipboards on top where details of those requiring surgery had been hurriedly scribbled onto notepaper. Real hospitals had charts, histories, blood work and all the usual things. Lucas and his co-workers had this parody of good practice among complete chaos.
“Lucas, come now!” Frankie’s already pale face had lost its colour. Hettie stood behind her, hands planted on ample hips.
He dropped the notes and followed them outside. A young woman lay on her side, clutching her distended belly, eyes wide with fear.
“What do we have?” He looked at Frankie.
“I haven’t had a lot of obstetric experience, but I think it might be a placenta praevia.” Frankie spoke quickly while reaching out a hand to squeeze the other woman’s fingers. “The doctor is here. He’ll take care of you and your baby.”
Lucas doubted the woman knew the meaning of the condition Frankie had suggested, and her thoughtful manner suggested she was a much better, more caring nurse than he’d given her credit for. He’d more or less presumed she trained to be a nurse to please her heart surgeon father, but her concern for their patient showed him there was so much more to it.
“Okay, Hettie, can you arrange for someone to take….”
“Victoria, her name is Victoria.”
“… Victoria inside? Onto a vacant operating table?”
“You haven’t examined her.” Frankie stood, pulling Lucas away from Victoria.
“I’ll examine her inside, but I trust your judgement.”
“You do?” Frankie raised her eyebrows. “Since when?”
He didn’t know the answer to that question, but he did know he’d underestimated her several times. He needed to stop doing that. He had his faults, but repeating errors was not one of them. If he kept a tight control of things around him, it minimised the risks of something going wrong, of the past repeating itself because of his mistakes.
“Since now.” He told her, as she seemed to expect an answer. “I’ll get scrubbed and gowned up. Can you have a look in the ward upstairs, directly above the cafeteria…um…our operating room? That was paediatrics, bring everything you think we might need for a pre-term delivery.”
Hettie rounded the corner with two young men Lucas recognised from the previous day. They, too, were volunteers from the neighbourhood who’d come to help with carrying and transporting patients—and the dead—to the places they needed to be.
Frankie caught hold of Hettie and together they headed towards the stairs.
Lucas hurried to get ready for the emergency caesarean he would perform if Frankie was right in her diagnosis. He had no reason to doubt her. Blood stained Victoria’s clothing and he was certain Frankie had ruled out an accident. This left a lowlying placenta as the probable cause. If Victoria was already in active labour with the placenta covering the cervix, a natural birth was impossible. They needed to act quickly to minimise the risks to both mother and baby. Contractions could, right now, be causing the placenta to break up, limiting the baby’s oxygen.
He made quick time of anaesthetising Victoria and had his scalpel ready for the first incision by the time Frankie was back. Frankie gave Hettie instructions for readying the equipment they had brought before she hurried off to wash.
Lucas looked over at everything, glad he’d trusted Frankie. He didn’t think she’d missed anything. In fact, she’d brought things he hoped they would not need. Performing caesareans wasn’t rare as a disaster-relief doctor, but he hadn’t done too many with no anaesthetist, no paediatrician available to take care of the baby when it was delivered, and a nurse who hadn’t practiced for God-only-knew-how-many years.
Taking a deep breath, he pulled his legendary control around him for comfort and…for once…a quick shot of confidence. He could do this.
He made the incision through the skin, then into Victoria’s uterus. Using clamps, Lucas made the opening before breaking the water bag surrounding the baby. Easing it out, he handed the small but perfectly formed infant to Frankie. As he clamped and cut the cord, she briskly rubbed the little boy, who gave out an outraged shriek of disapproval.
“There’s a lot of blood. Will you be able to save her uterus?”