Christmas with Her Bodyguard

‘You have a blood bank?’

‘Yes. I’m guessing she’s going to need a transfusion.’

‘Possibly multiple,’ Myles confirmed. ‘You’re not really geared up for skin grafting here, but we can do something.’

And then his mind clicked over, like turning on a light switch, and the past six months faded away and it was as though he’d never stopped operating. Never stopped thinking about medical solutions.

This was who he was. This was what he had been built to do. How had he forgotten that? But could he begin to separate his army career, which was now over, from his medical career, which didn’t have to be?

He’d been an army surgeon for so long, were the two inextricably linked in his mind?

He was so preoccupied with his thoughts that Myles didn’t realise they’d been working for almost an hour, and the girl was finally freed, and they were loading her onto a gurney and rushing her into the single, makeshift operating area, where the only surgeon the forward camp had was hastily going over the triage lists.

He checked the girl as quickly as he could.

‘Leg’s too far gone.’ The doctor pulled a sympathetic face. ‘We’ll have to amputate.’

‘She’ll be ostracised.’ Myles barely recognised his own stiff, raw voice.

A hand appeared on his arm and it took him a moment to realise it was the doctor.

‘I’m sorry but we simply don’t have the equipment out here, certainly not paediatric.’

‘I can do it.’

He heard the words but didn’t remember saying them.

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m a surgeon. Trauma. Ex-army.’ Why did it sound so jolted? So staccato? ‘I can try something.’

‘I thought you were a manual work volunteer?’

‘I haven’t operated in six months. Ever since I came out.’

‘I can’t authorise that. Besides, she’ll need a skin graft and all sorts.’

‘Multiple operations and skin grafts over about a month to six weeks, I would imagine.’ He was beginning to warm to it now.

Beginning to feel a little more human.

A little more...real.

‘Give me some plastic tubes, some wires, maybe some aluminium rods and I can cobble together some kind of external medical scaffolding. A homemade mechanical construction device to realign the bones and hold the leg in the right position.’

‘I don’t know...’

‘Speak to whoever you have to speak to,’ Myles commanded, his voice sounding much more like his own. ‘Get whatever authorisation you need... I need. I can do this. But you amputate without even trying and you’ve condemned a six-year-old kid for life. You know how harsh their society can be.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Starting with early insertion of a subclavian line. Get me an eight-point-five-gauge trauma line.’

* * *

‘You didn’t say your man was a surgeon, too,’ Clara accused jovially as she came on shift to find Rae moving back and forth between two mercifully non-complicated deliveries.

‘My man?’ She commanded her stomach not to somersault at the idea. There could be little doubt who Clara was talking about.