Christmas-Eve Baby by Caroline Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

population is farmers and fishermen and their families, so we have a lot of work-related injuries. I’ve lost count of the number of tetanus shots I’ve given in the last year. We do a lot of needlework, obviously—cuts and tears, many of them dirty, so we have a certain amount of debriding to do. Some have to come to you because they’re too extensive and need plastics or specialist hand surgery, for example. And we have fractures, lots of simple undisplaced fractures and dislocations that with X-ray we could deal with here if we had plaster facilities. They’d still need the care of the orthopaedic team foranything more complex, of course, but there are so many little things we could sort here locally.’
    He nodded. ‘I agree. The medical emergencies are still going to have to come through us, but from the point of view of straightforward physical injury you could take a lot off us.’
    He looked around the room, noting the two couches, the chairs and trolleys and screens, the bench along the side with pretty much the same equipment you would find in a practice nurse’s room or one of the cubicles in his A and E department, but for the most part that was all that would be necessary.
    ‘What about resuscitation equipment?’
    ‘Standard GP stuff for an isolated rural practice. We’ve got a defib and oxygen and a nebuliser, of course, and 12-lead ECG and heart monitor…’
    She rattled off a list of things they had and things they wanted, leaving nothing out that he felt would be in any way useful or necessary, and he was impressed.
    ‘You’ve done your homework,’ he said softly, and she stopped and stared at him, giving an exasperated sigh.
    ‘Did you really think we’d get you over here to talk this through if we hadn’t? I want this to work, Ben. We need it. We’re too far from St Piran. Some of the injuries we see—if we had better facilities so we could just treat them here, at least initially… That journey must be horrendous if you’ve got a fracture. It’s not so much the distance as the roads—so narrow, so twisty, and lots of them are rough. The main road’s better, but reaching it—well, it doesn’t bear thinking about, not with something like a spinal injury or a nasty compound fracture. We have to fly some of our surfers out just for that reason, because they’d have to come to you, but for the others—well, it’s just crazy that we can’t do it. There’s certainly the demand.’
    ‘I’m sure. You know, if you weren’t about to be taking maternity leave, it would make sense for you to come and spend some time in the department. Catch up on your X-ray, diagnostic and plastering skills.’
    ‘I could do that anyway—well, not the X-ray, not until the baby’s born, but the rest. I’m going to be coming back to work—I can’t afford to stop— And don’t say it!’ she ordered, cutting him off before he could do more than open his mouth.
    So he shut it again, shrugged his shoulders and smiled wryly. ‘So where are you going to site the X-ray machine?’ he asked. ‘Bearing in mind that the room needs screening on all six sides?’
    ‘Out on the end of the sea wall?’ she suggested, eyes twinkling, and he chuckled.
    ‘Nice one. Not very practical, though. Do you have a spare room?’
    She laughed wryly. ‘Not so as you’d notice. In an ideal world, as Kate says, it would all be on the ground floor, but down in the old town like this it’s difficult. The sides of the cove are so steep, so all the houses are small and on top of one another. The only way around it would be to build it up out of the town, and that’s not where it’s needed.’
    ‘Unless you sited it up near the church, halfway between the old town and the beach. Handier for the tourists and all the people staying in the caravan park, and no harder for the people you serve who don’t live right in the centre and have to come by car anyway.’
    ‘Except that when we tried to sound them out we couldn’t