Page 28 of The Night Shift
As the tip of the needle met the skin Violet turned to him, her expression full of trepidation. She just knew she was going to cock this up and Mrs Chambers would be left with yet another puncture site and no venous access. Gus brought his hand back on top of hers, his fingers interlaced with her own, and applied the smallest amount of pressure so that the needle pierced the skin and the vein beneath. They both breathed a sigh of relief as the flashback of dark red sputtered into the tubing.
‘Steady,’ said Gus, so close now that he could have been whispering anything in her ear and Mrs Chambers would have been none the wiser. ‘Just advance itreallyslowly. This is often the point where you can accidentally pull out.’
Violet snorted in spite of herself and felt Gus’s abdominal muscles tense against her as he held in his own laughter. ‘No giggling,’ he said. ‘This is a serious business.’
‘You two having any luck there?’ Mrs Chambers had deliberately averted her gaze and was staring at the opposite wall. ‘You got it in yet?’
‘I think…’ Gus watched as Violet pulled the needle back and advanced the plastic cannula up to the hilt. ‘I think we have. Well, Dr Winters has anyway.’
He leaned away to get the dressing pack and Violet felt the absence of his body heat immediately, despite the warm room. Every inch of her skin where she’d been in contact with him felt somehow scorched and her breathing was definitely more rapid than it should have been– but it was probably just anxiety about the cannula and whether it was sited properly. She smiled shakily at Mrs Chambers who had returned her gaze to the back of her hand as Violet flushed the cannula through and applied the Tegaderm dressing. She was relieved to see no telltale bumps that would indicate the saline had gone into the surrounding tissue and not the vein.
‘Did it flush through okay?’ Gus was busy tidying the bits from the tray into the sharps container but he leaned over, looking exactly where Violet had for signs of tissuing and nodded, satisfied. ‘Good work,’ he murmured in her ear before he moved off again and Violet was left unsure as to whether having Gus there with his easy manner, his ability to reassure the patient and his practical skill had been an enormous help, or whether the fact of his physical presence, so close and warm and intimate, had in fact been a colossal distraction and set her procedural technique back a few months.
Gus
‘Jesus Christ!’ Gus had only got as far as a toe in the water (well, five toes, but some of them may have fallen off with frostbite) before the icy temperature started to permeate through the neoprene.
‘Glad you got the boots?’ said Violet who was stood two steps down from him, looking as relaxed as he had ever seen her, despite being up to her thighs in cold water. ‘The thought of it is worse than the reality, I promise. And once you’re in and you’ve been swimming for maybe two minutes you’ll start to feel great. It’s just that those two minutes that are…’ She paused, choosing her words carefully. ‘A bit challenging.’
‘You’re not wrong!’ he said, trying to keep his voice light and not start shrieking as he descended the first step. Mid-calf, water over the boots now and directly onto his skin. ‘Twelve degrees, you said. Did you mean Fahrenheit?’
Violet was now at the bottom of the steps, the water level up to her shoulders. How was that even possible? How could she have got so far into the pool without any drama, and how could he have missed the opportunity to study in detail that slim, lithe body now completely obscured by water?
‘No,’ she said, smiling. ‘Twelve degrees Fahrenheit would be minus eleven Celsius.’ She looked up, thoughtful as she did the mental arithmetic. ‘Whereas twelve degrees Celsius is a warm and cosy fifty-three Fahrenheit, maybe closer to fifty-four.’
‘Wow,’ Gus was impressed despite his discomfort. ‘Have you just committed that to memory? Or did you do the calculation there and then?’
‘I love a bit of mental arithmetic,’ she said. ‘Even when I’m relaxing.’
‘Relaxing?’ Gus gave a little squeak which sounded terribly unmanly as the water level reached somewhere around his groin. Any stirrings caused by thoughts of Violet’s lithe body were swiftly doused. ‘I really, really wouldn’t call this relaxing. More a form of torture outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Should I call Amnesty International?’ He took a deep breath in as he descended the final step, his feet joining hers on the floor of the pool– not that he could feel his feet– not that he could feel anything.
She looked at him, concerned for a moment. ‘Breathe,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to keep breathing.’
He realised that he’d completely forgotten to exhale. His chest felt tight as he released the air and he wondered whether he was ever going to be able to manage normal respiration again. It seemed to require an inordinate amount of conscious effort all of a sudden just to force air in and out of his lungs.
‘Slow-ly,’ she said, looking directly into his eyes. He could see out here in the wintery daylight, her misty grey-green irises were also flecked with bright sparks of blue and more closely resembled the colour of the sea after a storm. The thought calmed him, and he was reminded of his earlier attempts to help her with Mrs Chambers’ cannulation when he had given her the same instruction, to breathe. That now seemed like a walk in the park compared to this, but after a few moments of following the pace of her breath he felt able to speak again.
‘I forgot,’ he said, surprised. ‘I forgot how to breathe. And I’ve watchedSAS– Are You Tough Enough?That’s the first thing they tell you about cold water, people forget to breathe.’ He half-laughed, half-gasped. ‘I think the clear answer is, no– thank you, SAS, but I am definitely not tough enough.’
‘You’re doing fine,’ she said, her smile making the corners of her eyes crease a little. ‘The SAS are correct. Everyone forgets to breathe.’
‘But I’m an anaesthetist,’ he laughed. ‘My entire career is based on ventilation. You’d think I’d remember that it was fairly useful in terms of keeping me alive.’
Violet laughed then and crouched slightly so her shoulders were now beneath the water.
‘Stop showing off,’ he said, mock-glaring at her. ‘It’s taking every ounce of strength I possess to just stay at this level. If I go in up to my throat surely it’s game over?’ He was only half-joking.
‘Bet your legs are starting to sting less though?’
He nodded; she was right. ‘Only because my chest is now on fire,’ he said, arms still held aloft. ‘My body clearly can’t cope with alerting me to a state of emergency over multiple sites.’
She took his gloved hand in her own and moved it slowly below the waterline.
‘Where are you taking me?’ He grimaced as his arm started the inevitable process of following his hand beneath the water.
‘Down,’ she said, smiling naughtily. ‘You’re going down.’ Was there something suggestive in her tone? He thought perhaps, but then maybe not. His senses weren’t currently the sharpest. She was just teasing him.
‘Well, as the actress said to the bishop, if we go down, we go down together,’ he said, realising he sounded less like a practised seducer and more like a bad comedian from the eighties. He’d obviously reverted back to his earlier ‘dad joke’ territory of the start of the week. It was probably only a matter of time before he started prat-falling into the pool. Although on second thoughts, that was unlikely given the temperature of this pool.
