Page 22 of My Heart Before You

She glanced at her watch; her next medication pass wasn’t until two p.m. “Sure. I can do it now.”

“Thank you.” His eyes crinkled nicely at the corners.

Her gaze was caught up in them for a moment—today they were bluer than grey.

“Sure thing.” Emilie made herself move towards the medicine room to gather her supplies.

A few moments later, she was entering her patient’s room. “It’s time to change that dressing, Mr. Stowe.”

“All right, darling.” He didn’t look up from his car magazine.

The unforgiving hospital light bounced off his bald head as his bushy eyebrows attempted to take up as much space on his face as possible. She gently lifted his leg, which was propped up on pillows, and put a drainage pad underneath it.

Donning her gloves, she said, “I’m going to soak the old dressing first to make it easier and less painful to get off.”

“Works for me, sweetheart.” He glanced at her. “Did you see that heifer that was just in here? I can’t believe she’s the new coordinator. ”

Camila, the transplant coordinator, was a little overweight but was a compassionate and hardworking woman. She spent hours working tirelessly, helping coordinate care, medications, and supplies for the transplant patients.

“Camila is great at her job,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what she looks like.”

He snorted. “I don’t understand what’s with ladies these days letting themselves get so fat. It’s disgusting. If they just pushed a broom around their house every once in a while, they could keep their figures.”

She glanced at his rotund belly.

You should push a broom around your house.

Letting his obnoxious, sexist comments roll off her back, she went right on working, removing the old soiled dressing and irrigating the wound before packing it with silver impregnated gauze.

“This is looking a little better,” she said, trying to change the subject.

She put an extra absorbent 4x4 gauze pad over the whole thing, and started taping quickly so she could leave.

“Just shameful. That’s what it is,” he paused. “Not you of course, honey, you’re damn near perfect.”

Out of nowhere, his hand leaned over the railing and slapped her bottom,hard. It made a loud popping noise as the sting radiated from the impact point. A startled gasp escaped her mouth as she reeled back several steps toward the doorway.

Two bodies moving down the hall stopped and course corrected towards her. She flipped her head to see Colin striding briskly towards her with her charge nurse, Bettina, on his heels. Emilie knew they must have seen what happened. Colin’s jaw was set tight as his hand clenched into a fist the closer he got to the room. Quickly, she held up her arm with her palm flat to the both of them, and they stopped in their tracks just beyond the door.

Swallowing against the sour tang in her mouth, she slowly turned to face the man in the bed. “Not only was that incredibly disrespectful and inappropriate . . .” She glared at him. “. . . that was incredibly stupid.”

“Oh pumpkin, it was just a harmless tap—”

Now, it was his turn to get a palm in his direction. “I am not your pumpkin, honey, sweetheart, or darling.”

The muscles in her shoulders tensed, and she had to intentionally push them down. “Unfortunately, the staff here has to put up with the things a patient says in order to do their best to heal them, but the minute you put your hands on one of us, that’s grounds for immediate dismissal from the hospital. I can call security right now and have them turn you out on the pavement whether or not your antibiotic treatment’s done or your wound’s doing better.

“The doctors and the administration would completely back me up. You might just find yourself without care, and we’ll see how that wound does without medical attention. Maybe the wound gets better.” She forced a casual shrug. “Maybe it gets worse and you lose the leg. Maybe the infection gets into your bloodstream, and you become septic anddie.”

She was bending the likeliness of outcomes, but it felt damn good to see fear creep across Mr. Stowe’s smug face.

Her eyes fixed on his. “What you have to ask yourself is, do you want to behave, or do you want to die?”

On that she turned on her heel and stormed out of the room, ripping her gloves into the trash as she did so. She grabbed a handful of antibacterial wash on the wall and ducked out of the doorway, rubbing her hands together furiously. Colin and Bettina sidestepped into the charting area just outside the door next to her.

Bettina let out a low whistle. “I’m impressed.”

As her heartbeat slowed and her breath returned to normal, she noticed the look of surprise on Colin’s face morph into a barely obscured grin of pride.

---