handover in the tearoom Maggie was allocated bed three and took bedside handover from Ray, the nurse who’d been looking after Toby Ryan since his admission to the unit at lunchtime.
Toby was a three-year-old boy who’d been born with a rare hereditary haematological disease. He’d been in and out of hospital most of his brief life, undergoing a multitude of different therapies in a bid to cure him. When everything had failed a bone-marrow transplant had been his only option and he was now fifty days post-procedure.
But not out of the woods.
Unfortunately, nothing had gone smoothly for little Toby and his chest X-ray had deteriorated in the last few days and was looking very pneumonic. He’d been started on antibiotics and had had sputum collected for analysis, but it had become obvious that morning that he required closer monitoring and further respiratory support so he’d been shifted to PICU.
She watched her patient carefully, noting even in his sleep he was using the accessory muscles in his chest to help him breathe. The sound of high-flow oxygen whooshing through his face mask and filling the attached plastic reservoir bag was surprisingly loud in an already noisy environment.
He was as cute as a button with tight black curls crowning his head, clutching a raggedy-looking teddy bear that was missing an eye and half an ear. He was wearing only pyjama pants, leaving his upper half exposed. Maggie frowned. He was working really hard, which was concerning especially considering his state of slumber.
Maggie did her start-of-shift checks and nursing assessments. Linda, the nurse in charge of the shift and a close friend, was setting up bed four for a retrieval patient when Maggie asked her to check some drugs shortly after. Then Toby’s mother, Alice, returned and Maggie chatted with her for a while.
It was a good couple of hours before Maggie had the chance to sit down and read back over Toby’s notes. The PICU had electronic charting, with each bedside having its own computer terminal. Maggie sat at hers and read back through her patient’s history. She noted that Toby’s cousin had died from the same condition only last year.
She looked up from the screen and took in Alice dozing by her son’s bed, his hand in hers. Maggie couldn’t even begin to imagine how scary it must be for her and the rest of Toby’s family.
The night settled into a familiar rhythm. Toby slept and held his own. Around her the other patients were behaving themselves also. The everyday noises of the unit didn’t register as Maggie went about her work. The low hum of machines, the beeping and trilling of monitors, the slurp of suckers and the variety of alarms attached to the technology-saturated environment, formed a continuous background drone.
Collectively they were as familiar to Maggie as the sound of her own breath, the beat of her pulse. And subconsciously she registered what each of them were. She knew which ones to worry about and which ones to ignore. And even deeply involved in other tasks, she knew instantly when something sounded different.
Linda relieved Maggie for her first break. She returned half an hour later, coinciding with the arrival of the retrieval patient. Two paramedics pushed the gurney accompanied by a wards man and Gwen, the retrieval nurse.
But none of them held her interest or her gaze. Maggie could focus only on the other member of the party making their way towards her.
Nash Reece.
What the hell? What was Nash doing here? Wasn’t it bad enough that visions of the man with a child on his hip had been in her head like a recurring nightmare since yesterday?
His gaze locked with hers as the gurney rolled past and he winked at her. ‘Hello, Maggie Green.’
Maggie stared at him, not even registering that he now knew her last name as her brain grappled with how exactly he came to be doing a PICU retrieval. Or at least it was trying to underneath the surge of one hundred per cent octane lust that had flooded her system and threatened to overload her circuits.
The man looked incredible. His hair was mussy in a too-sexy-to-be-true fashion, no doubt aided by the inflight helmet. The navy-blue shirt of the retrieval uniform fitted snugly across his broad shoulders and chest, the pocket announcing his position as Doctor in vibrant red stitching. The cuffs were rolled back to reveal those strong forearms dusted with blond hairs.
Flaunting propriety, he wore a pair of faded jeans instead of the