The Doctor's Mistress

Bruce was out of the car before it had even come to a stop. Hayley followed him through a sunny private courtyard newly planted with salt-tolerant shrubs and flowers and up the stone steps that led to a dramatic front balcony.

In the doorway stood Tori, a pretty child with a high ponytail of fair hair and brown eyes. Her pink cotton dress was wet all down the front and she was shivering and crying.

Shock? Hayley thought at once.

It was a possibility in a child of this age, if that water on her dress had started out scalding hot. The water must have hit...Hayley calculated quickly to give a very rough estimate...as much as eighteen per cent of Tori’s total body area, possibly including a portion of the sensitive genital area. The symptoms she displayed could be the life-threatening medical condition known as shock, or it could be simply the aftermath of the body’s adrenalin reaction.

Ahead of her, Bruce had picked the little girl up.

‘I can feel the heat,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Where’s the kitchen? I’ll get water on it before we ask questions.’

They went into the house, finding their way by instinct. Through a front hallway and a swing door straight ahead there was a large, ultra-modern kitchen and open-plan family room, overlooking a gorgeous rear deck and a gentle slope of garden, its lawn still just a tender new fuzz of green shading the carefully groomed earth.

Hayley overtook Bruce and found an American-style sink sprayer with an extendible hose and squeeze control. ‘First piece of good news,’ she said, pulling it out, turning it on and testing its temperature. It was fresh and cold, and the pressure was good.

‘Look, the stove’s still on,’ Bruce observed. ‘And here are two eggs cracked on the floor. And bread and butter fingers on a plate. You were trying to get some lunch, weren’t you, Tori? Doing a pretty good job.’

A half-empty saucepan of water rested at a precarious angle at the edge of the stainless-steel stove top as well.

‘Here we go, love.’ Bruce sat Tori on the granite counter top and peeled off her dress, and Hayley began to irrigate the area of the burn. On the child’s sandal-clad feet, she noticed two more patches of angry red and realised that there was further burning there as well. There were also some splashes on her thighs. Putting the plug in the sink, she let it partially fill to cover Tori’s feet, then took the sandals off beneath the water, wishing she had two more hands.

‘I know it hurts, sweetheart,’ she said. Mentally, she added another three per cent to her estimate of the total burn area. ‘This cool water will help, OK?’

‘I’m going to see who else is around,’ Bruce said. His voice dropped to an ominous growl. ‘Someone had better be.’

He’d been in the ambulance service here for twenty years, with level four advanced life support qualifications, and he often claimed that nothing could surprise him any more. Plenty could anger him, though. Accidents to children that would have been prevented or made less severe by adequate adult supervision came close to the top of his list.

He handed Hayley a cotton blanket which she draped around Tori’s narrow, shaking shoulders. The scalds needed to cool, but the rest of the child’s body needed warmth. She needed the comfort of a friendly arm, too. Holding her, Hayley felt the spray from the sink hose dampen her white uniform shirt. She would be saturated before this was finished.

Tori’s sobs had begun to subside into convulsive tremors. Her brown eyes were huge and tear-filled and she hadn’t yet said a word.

‘Is it not hurting so much now?’ Hayley asked gently. ‘Feeling a little bit better? We’re here now, and we’re going to look after you.’

She had a four-year-old herself. A boy named Max. Max’s father lived in Melbourne now. Their divorce had been finalised for almost three years. Being on their own together, herself and Max, created a special closeness between mother and child, and Hayley was protective of the time Max spent with Chris. Chris loved his son, but that wasn’t always enough.

Who loves this child? she wondered. Who is going to be devastated about this? Who is going to be guilt-ridden? Who is going to get blamed?

Above the sounds of Tori’s sobs—she still hadn’t spoken—Hayley heard Bruce’s heavy footfalls on the tiles of the front hallway.

‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Anyone here?’

He went to the back door and surveyed the unfinished garden, then headed left along the corridor to the bedrooms.

‘We’re going to take you in the ambulance in a minute,’ Hayley said to the little girl. ‘We’re going to put some wet cloths on your tummy to keep it cool. Do you have a mummy or a daddy coming home soon?’

She was losing faith in the very existence of the grandmother, was beginning to believe that Kathy must have heard wrongly and that the child had been at home alone.

‘I’ve got a daddy,’ came a tiny voice at last, still shuddery and squeaky with sobs.

‘Where’s Daddy now, sweetheart?’

‘At work.’

‘Do you know where he works?’

‘At the hospital.’

Bruce came back along the corridor, and entered another room just to the right of the hallway. Its door had been closed. Hayley heard his loud exclamation, and a few moments later his voice on the two-way radio, talking to the dispatch office. His words carried through the hall as far as the kitchen, easily clear enough for her to make out the words.

‘Second car required at 154 Beach Road, Kathy. The grandmother wasn’t taking a nap, Hayley,’ he called, ‘She’s unconscious, and I’m going to check her out.’

‘OK, I’m handling things here,’ she yelled back to him.

It was axiomatic in the ambulance service—never leave the patient. That made things difficult in this case. They weren’t a large station, and only one crew was on station duty during the day. A second on-call crew would have to be brought in, which slowed response time.

Meanwhile, Bruce would already be checking out the most obvious possibilities. An ECG would confirm or rule out a heart problem, while a quick test of the woman’s blood-sugar level would indicate whether this was a diabetic coma.

After a few minutes, Bruce called to her again. ‘It looks like a stroke.’

‘You’re sure?’ Hayley asked. She continued to irrigate Tori’s burned skin.

‘The ECG isn’t right for a heart problem. Her blood sugar’s normal. But she’s still unconscious, just lying here on the couch. That suggests CVA rather than TIA.’

‘Yes, it does.’

She recognised the abbreviations. Cerebral vascular accident and transient ischaemic attack. The latter was sometimes called a mini-stroke, and rapid, complete recovery from this condition was much more common than from a CVA. The blocked blood vessel or leaking blood involved in the more serious event usually caused at least some permanent brain damage.

‘I’ve checked her responses,’ Bruce went on. ‘She’s reacting to pain and light. I’ve covered her and put her on her side, secured her airway. I’m going to keep talking to her, trying to get a response. How’s your little heroine? Hayley, I don’t want to leave until that second car gets here.’

‘No, obviously not,’ Hayley agreed, ‘but it’s difficult. She needs more than what I’m doing now, judging by her skin and her breathing.’

Tori looked clammy and pale, in contrast to her dark hair, and her breathing was too fast and too shallow. Her pulse was thready and rapid as well.

‘Has she said anything?’

‘She managed to tell me her daddy works at the hospital, didn’t you, darling?’

‘I wonder if he’s there now,’ Bruce said. ‘We’ve no idea who he is?’

‘No, but... Well, look at this fabulous house.’

‘Yeah,’ the older man agreed. ‘There are more great views from this room. It limits the options. He’s not the janitor. Doctor? Health Service Manager? I know him, and his kids aren’t this age.’

Hayley was pulling sterile gauze pads from an equipment kit as they batted these questions around. Tori had paled further and was silent now, no longer in tears. Suddenly, her shoulders and stomach heaved, and she leaned forward and vomited.

Hayley took it in her stride, soothing the little girl, holding her shoulders more firmly as two more heaves came and rinsing the mess quickly down the sink when it was done. She gave Tori a glass of water, and the child spat out two or three mouthfuls then drank thirstily. Hayley turned off the sink sprayer and draped the soaked pieces of gauze over the area of the burn.

It was already beginning to blister, suggesting a partial thickness burn. Fortunately, the red area stopped a few centimetres below Tori’s navel and her genital region had been spared.