Date with a Surgeon Prince(22)

Had no one seen the child since then, apart from ward cleaners and the maid who’d carried in the meal that was uneaten on his table?

Giving up on the bell, she carried the chart out into the corridor, heading for the nurses’ station, needing urgent attention for Safi and ready to demand answers.

The place was deserted, although she could tell there was still a major commotion in one of the rooms she’d passed earlier and a fair level of noise coming from a room further up the corridor.

There had to be a nurse in one of those rooms.

Three nurses and two doctors, in fact, and a crash cart pushed to one side.

‘She just went flat,’ the nurse Marni hauled into the corridor explained, ‘about two hours ago. The doctors thought we’d lost her but she’s coming round now.’

Marni accepted it had been an emergency but that only accounted for three of the nursing staff.

Not that she had time to complain! She hurried the nurse towards Safi’s room.

‘I came to visit, and there he was, burning with fever.’

‘Oh, not Safi!’ the nurse wailed. ‘I’ll have to page Gaz—he insists on knowing any change in Safi’s condition—and get a ward doctor in as well. Can you go back and sit with Safi for a few minutes?’

She looked about her and frowned as if she’d just become aware of the emptiness of the corridor and nurses’ station.

‘I’ve no idea where the others are,’ she added, peering vaguely around.

‘I don’t care where they are,’ Marni snapped. ‘I just need someone to see Safi and see him now.’

She might have raised her voice just slightly, but she was pretty sure she’d kept it below a shout, which was what she’d really wanted to do.

Hurrying back to Safi’s room, she wet the now warm towel and bathed him again, pressing the cold cloth on his wrists and in his elbow joints, below his knees and against his neck and head, talking all the time, wishing she knew his language, wishing she would somehow conjure up his mother for him, for his little body was now slack, his eyes closed—the fight gone out of him.

The nurse came in and Marni stepped back while the woman checked his pulse, temperature and blood pressure, then a young doctor appeared, looked at the figures and fiddled with the drip, checking the catheter in the back of Sufi’s thin hand, making sure the tape was in place.

‘I’ve been off duty for a few days but I know that since the wound in his hip where they took the bone from has healed quite well, he’s been walking around the hospital, even going outside at times. He must have picked up an infection,’ the nurse suggested as the doctor drew blood for testing.

An infection that could cause such a rapid response?

Marni wondered about it but said nothing—in this room she was a visitor.

And she was still angry that the rise in his temperature hadn’t been picked up earlier, before he’d become so distressed.

Gaz’s arrival provided answers. He must have been on the phone during his journey from the palace to the hospital, telling her, as he examined Safi, that apart from the child who’d needed resuscitation, an accident to a school bus had brought a rush of, thankfully, minor injuries to the hospital, diverting staff to the ER, then to top it off the mother of another patient in the post-op ward had gone into labour and actually given birth in her daughter’s hospital room.

‘Still no excuse,’ Marni thought she heard him mutter, but the barely heard words were followed by a rush of orders, arranging for Safi to go straight to Theatre.

‘But with his fever—with the infection still so active?’ Marni protested.

Gaz shrugged.

‘Unfortunately yes. His temperature rose the day before yesterday and we’ve had him on vancomycin, which is usually the most effective drug for multi-resistant bacteria, but it obviously isn’t working. I need to remove the grafted bone before the infection spreads into good bone.’

He paused for a moment, then said, ‘There are still staff problems. Will you scrub?’

‘Of course!’

An orderly appeared to wheel Safi to Theatre and Marni backed out of his room so he could be moved, waiting until he was wheeled out then falling in behind the little procession.

Gaz was walking beside the gurney and turned to glance back at the woman who’d erupted into his life, spinning it in a direction he’d never expected it to take—well, not right now.

She’d come from what must have been a fairly momentous day, given the job he was thrusting her into, to see a child she barely knew, and now was quite happy to spend however many hours it would take in Theatre for Gaz to remove the bone graft because there was no way the infection could be anywhere else.