THAT WAS THE last of the paperwork cleared up.
Max glanced at the clock on his wall in satisfaction. He was due to collect Imogen within the next half hour and take her to see Evie. Tonight might be Evie’s last opportunity to spend time with her daughter before her transplant.
He had one outstanding patient, a particularly complex, long-standing case, which he intended to return to do himself. He’d already approached his colleague, Gareth Collins, to monitor the pre-op tests and pass on the results, but there were just a couple of last points he wanted to go over. Gareth was on call tonight, so Max knew if he swung by A&E he’d likely catch the guy. Hopefully in between cases.
He moved purposefully through the hospital. It was a novel experience, getting ready for time out that wasn’t going to be spent out in some war zone with the charity. How was it that he had never once questioned his ability to handle anything they could throw at him, and yet the prospect of a couple of weeks with his baby daughter filled him with a long-forgotten feeling of inadequacy?
Caught up in a sudden memory of his childhood, wondering at nine years old whether he really was cut out to be a surgeon as his parents expected, he burst through the double doors only to come face to face with a familiar—battered and bloodied as usual—face.
‘Hey, Dean, been fighting again?’
He crossed the resus bays to where the young boy lay, his mother worried and teary by his bedside, and his broken nose only the start of his injuries by the looks of his chart.
‘Punctured lung?’ He cocked his eyebrow at the kid to conceal his deep concern. ‘You can’t let them get to you, mate.’
Not that the boy was in much condition to respond anyway, but the soft touch didn’t work with this particular lad, as Max already knew. This was the fourth time the boy had been in in as many months and the injuries were getting substantially more serious. This time it was a fractured rib with a suspected lung injury.
Max’s instinct told him it had been a fight where Dean had been on the ground when he’d been kicked in his ribs. A fight Dean had likely started, from everything Max already knew.
And all because he had prominent ears. Wing nuts. Jug-head. Dumbo. Dean had heard them all and was desperate for surgery to correct the problem. Apparently that wasn’t going to happen. Max stepped away from the curtain just as a man shot around the corner and hurtled into him.
Dean’s dad.
Max caught the man before he rounded the curtain, leading him a step away.
‘You know I can resolve the problem, don’t you?’
‘Mr Van Berg.’ The man recognised him instantly.
‘General anaesthetic and ten days in a bandage and it’ll all be done.’
He only had to cut away the skin and tissue behind the ear and stitch the ears into their new positions. The main issue was ensuring the surgeon was competent enough to carry out a procedure that required such visual accuracy. Badly done and the patient would end up with ears that either didn’t match, or looked plastered down.
Max wasn’t worried. His skill wasn’t in question.
‘We understand.’ The father nodded with a sad smile. ‘But we just don’t know what to do for the best. To the wife and me, Dean’s a handsome little lad with a great personality, and so what if his ears stick out a little? But...’
‘But...?’ Max encouraged.
‘But we’ve spoken to some experts who’ve said that it’s just name-calling and that life can be a lot harsher than that so Dean needs to learn to ignore kids like that. They’ve pointed out that he can’t go through life fighting everyone who says something unpleasant to him, so if we let him have surgery then he’s just never going to learn how to deal with criticism.’
Easier said than done, especially when you were eleven years old. But Max appreciated Dean’s parents had only their son’s best interests at heart. Better than his own parents.
‘And what does your gut tell you?’ Max shoved away the shadows that stalked the edges of his memories.
Like the time he’d ended up in hospital for exactly the same thing at about the same age Dean was now, for pretty much the same injury. Max had had his own share of fights, and instigated by himself just like Dean. But unlike Dean, he hadn’t had a valid reason for them. He hadn’t got any obvious physical or mental impairment, and unlike Dean’s concerned parents, who were trying to teach Dean to be strong of mind, Max could only remember his own parents expressing disappointment at such childish and inappropriate behaviour, before getting back to their all-important careers. But now wasn’t the time to push Dean’s parents.
Maybe Evie would be the best person to teach him how to go about helping the kid? He didn’t know what it was but something about the boy made Max want to do more to help.
‘My gut says that my son’s coming home with broken bones,’ the father exclaimed, torn. ‘That isn’t something he should have to learn to deal with at eleven years old. But I just don’t know.’
‘Well, you know where to find me, Mr Foster.’ Max nodded. ‘Any time you need me.’
Allowing the father to get back to his son, Max continued down the corridor in search of his colleague, but he couldn’t shake the desire to do more for the lad. Before the kid ended up in here,
and didn’t leave. He’d just have to be careful; he couldn’t afford to push these parents into something they weren’t ready for.
By the time Max had got a moment with his busy colleague to go through the patient’s notes, it had already been getting dark outside. He’d long since missed taking Imogen to see Evie, and had been compelled to call the crèche and arrange for another of his colleagues to take the baby to her mother. He’d been inflexible about being informed exactly who was taking his daughter, and when they were doing so, even ensuring it was a colleague he knew well. But none of it made up for the fact that he was doing the very thing he’d been so afraid of—the very reason he’d never wanted a family—he’d let them down, broken his promise to them, and all because his career had got in the way.