Page 13 of Broken Heart Syndrome
‘You were polishing off a cottage pie when I came in yesterday,’ I reminded her, and she scowled at me. ‘And I’ve told you not to call anyone a darkie. All your nurses are white anyway. The only even vaguely dark-skinned person you see is Dr Patel, and he’s from Bognor Regis.’
‘Just stick on the tape, you impertinent girl,’ she said grumpily. Her niece had brought in her TV with old VCR player attached and Mrs Jones watched vintage eightiesNeighboursepisodes continuously. I stuck in her favourite one (Scott and Charlene’s wedding, of course) and curled up on the big chair next to her bed.
She begrudgingly shared her toast with me, and I began to feel a little better. I mean, if there was ever a feelgood telly moment, it had to be Charlene walking down the aisle to ‘Suddenly’.
Mrs Mangel had just caught the bouquet and was eyeing Harold up when Ash stuck his head round the door. I sighed and looked up at the ceiling.
‘Come on, Frankie,’ he said, smiling, as he came in. ‘ “A man who cannot tolerate small misfortunes can never accomplish great things.” ’
‘I swear to God, Ash, one more bloody proverb and I will lose it.’
‘Oh no, another darkie,’ Gladys mumbled unhappily.
‘Gladys!’ I said sharply. ‘What did we talk about?’
Ash was chuckling now. ‘Frankie: “Never try to reason the prejudice out of the man. It was not reasoned into him and cannot be reasoned out.” ’
I rolled my eyes. ‘I take it the high commander wants to get on with the round now? How did you find me?’
He looked affronted. ‘Mrs Jones is one of our patients, Frankie.’
I gave him a long stare and raised my eyebrows. We both knew that neither him nor Tom would ever enter her room willingly.
He shrugged. ‘Okay, the nurses gave you away. Look, don’t be too hard on the boss-man.’
I snorted, ‘Me? Hard on him? Were youinthe conference room?’
‘He’s just trying to encourage you, get you involved. Cardiology can be a cutthroat specialty, Frankie, you’ve got to be on top of your game to be successful.’ Why was he going on about cardiology?
‘I don’t give a flying foo-foo about cardiology,’ I semi-shouted as we approached CCU.
‘You don’t mean that, Frankie.’ I heard the deep, familiar voice from behind us, and turned to see Tom striding down the corridor, his brows drawn together.
‘Um, yes, yes, I really do,’ I told his jaw, distractedly noting that he needed a shave, and also noting that his stubble was dense, all man, and, like everything about him, unbelievably sexy.
He sighed. ‘Look, I’m really sorry about the meeting. I’ll lay off the questions, okay? We’ll just work on getting you up to standard on the ward, and you can spend more time in clinic and the cath lab.’
These guys were insane. I wasn’t a cardiology trainee. My brief before I started this job was that I was going to be working for a consultant who didn’t have time for training. They said they needed an experienced core trainee who could do the ward work but wasn’t interested in cardiology as a specialty. I was beyond confused, but I couldn’t be bothered to argue the point with them.
‘Okay,’ I agreed, pulling out my list, ‘may as well get this over with.’ We trudged to CCU to start the round and were confronted with two medical students who, the sister told us, were attached to our team for the next two weeks. They looked nervous and like they were trying to shrink into the central desk and disappear, a tricky feat as they were both pretty substantial guys. One was tall and skinny with glasses; the other was a big, bulky rugby type.
Although having students is a bit of a pain in the arse and slows the ward round down, Tom seemed genuinely pleased for them to join us. It became apparent very rapidly that neither of them knew anything about cardiology. And it was fun to at last sit back and let someone else get grilled for a change. Despite this, Tom was patient with them, and I could see that he had a flare for teaching.
I already knew that he was the head of training in the department, so this didn’t surprise me. However, I was becoming more and more confused about why he had been given a core trainee who had no interest in his specialty and was only there for service provision. Maybe he thought he could change my mind about cardiology? I didn’t think that was likely, as I could probably write a book on the reasons I hated it.
As there were now three doctors, two medical students and two nurses in tow on our round, it became difficult for him to do his normal routine of keeping me at arm’s length. Day to day it seemed to cause Tom physical pain to be around me, which was fairly insulting.
You’d think I was covered in anthrax or something, the lengths he went to, to avoid touching me. If I were on one side of the trolley he’d move to the other. When we passed each other in the confines of a patient bay he would literally leap out of my way as if I was on fire.
However, the patient bays were small, and with our swollen numbers we were packed in like sardines. As always I had the notes, so Tom had to be next to me to read them. I was still smarting from him embarrassing me in the meeting, so I decided to try and piss him off, just a little.
My hair is thick and the kind that often simply won’t stay up because it’s so straight. It falls to my bra strap and is usually in a ponytail. However, in my mad dash to hide in Mrs Jones’s room, I had managed to lose my hair-band and it was now loose.
Standing next to Tom, I flicked my hair back over my shoulder, hoping to whack him with it and give him a dose of whatever disease he imagined I was carrying. After executing this manoeuvre, I felt him go completely still behind me.
Glancing up at him, I noticed that he had stopped breathing, and had that pained expression on his face again. Ha! I then leaned back over the notes on the trolley and started summarizing the plan.
When I looked back at Tom, I saw that his gaze, instead of being directed at the med students (who were now gamely listening to the patient’s heart with no obvious clue as to what they were doing), was fastened to my lower back. I had on a high-necked pink jumper and black trousers. The jumper (having shrunk a bit in the wash) had a tendency to ride up when I bent over or stretched up, so I knew that the skin of my lower back was exposed.
