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A TIMELY AFFAIR

Helen Shelton

Obsession…

Merrin Ryan totally enjoyed her training, but now she’s out in the real world, a house officer on Professor Neil McAllister’s team. In admiring his skills, Merrin sees that Neil, widowed for two years, doesn’t take care of himself properly. So, she provides sandwiches and tells him to take his proper rest -- and, in nurturing him, she falls in love! But when she tells Neil he is, well aware that, whatever his feelings for her, he could damage her career…

'Neil
, you're one of the best surgeons in the country,' the casualty charge nurse murmured softly. 'The National's lucky to have you.' She pulled up a sheet to cover their patient's face and they both turned away from the bed. 'Don't blame yourself for this. He couldn't have had better treatment over the years.'

'Not that it did him any good.' But Neil managed a weary smile for Lucy, concealing his bitterness, appreciating her efforts even if her words provided scant comfort. 'What was it?' he asked quietly. He knew that Eddie had used illicit substances as an escape from the realities of his illness. 'Heroin?'

'Among other things,' the nurse told him. 'He left a note. It's too soon for the lab results but the ambulance crew said that it looked as if he ground up and injected every pill he could get hold of, before taking the heroin. I guess that explains why we couldn't bring him around with the naloxone.'

Neil felt his hands curl into fists at his sides. More than a decade and a half out of medical school, he ought to be used to failure by now, he told himself. But when your patient was barely twenty-five and you'd been looking after him since he was sixteen it still hit hard, regardless of how disease-ravaged Eddie's body had been and regardless of the fact that the inevitable end had come at a time of his own choosing.

They were outside the cubicle now and Lucy's hand touched his arm briefly. 'You need a break,' she said. 'Your registrar said you'd both been in Theatres all weekend. You should go home. You must need sleep.'

She was right about it having been a hard weekend, he acknowledged, even if he wasn't about to go home. It was the first week in February and after an unseasonably mild London January the bluebells were out in the gardens beside the hospital, yet on Friday temperatures had plunged. The resulting sleet and snow had rendered the capital's roads lethal, destroying any ambition of the quiet weekend alone with his research which he'd hoped for.

Now, at almost two on Monday morning, things had quietened in Casualty and upstairs in Theatre and on the wards, but even the realisation that he needed to do something to prepare himself mentally before facing another working week wasn't enough to make him think he'd sleep now. 'Thanks, Lucy,' he said. 'Thanks for calling me about Eddie.'

Neil walked away and out of the department. He didn't need to go home—he had fresh clothes for the morning in his office and there were showers in the main theatre block—so, eschewing the overheated stuffiness of the consultants' common room, he headed instead for the junior doctors' mess, expecting to find his registrar still there.

But Douglas must have been bleeped away because the place was darkened and empty. A dreary lounge and a dank kitchen tucked away at the end of a disused hospital ward, the word 'mess' was applied aptly, he reflected. Every available surface, including the floor, was strewn with discarded mugs and remnants of the duty doctors' take-away pizzas and Chinese meals from the restaurants across the road from the hospital.

Not bothering to search for the lights, he made his way towards the kitchen's sink, the glow that filtered through the narrow strip of barred windows just below the ceiling from the security lights outside enough to illuminate his path and faintly the rest of the room once his eyes had adjusted. Darkness did the place a favour, he decided.

After rinsing an unwashed mug, he added coffee and water from the heated cylinder above the sink. But then, ignoring his drink, he braced his hands against the cold veneer of the bench and lowered his head. His eyes were hot and they ached as much as the rest of him did. He felt raked with tiredness, both mental and physical, as well as grief and sheer rage at the unfairness of life.

It was two years to the day since Isabel had died. He'd had black moments since, black weeks—even black months—but this was the worst, he acknowledged. The anniversary of her death, this busy, painfully tragic weekend and now Eddie Jackson's suicide merely compounded the despondency that had been growing in him for months.

With a muffled curse he straightened, collected his coffee and went carelessly through the debris to an old armchair in one corner of the mess. Once seated he took a long swallow of his drink then tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling broodingly.

It was entirely possible he was clinically depressed, he accepted. But the thought of taking a pill to treat his emotions was anathema to him despite his acknowledgement that he had organic symptoms of the illness. He slept poorly, his appetite for food at best was barely existent and the weekly squash games and occasional game of golf he tried to manage seemed to keep him fit but weren't enough to account for the loosening he'd noticed in his clothing.

And as for any other appetites... He closed his eyes. Since Isabel's death he'd been virtually celibate. Not that he'd lacked offers. It hadn't taken him long to discover there were still women who found him attractive, including, he'd been forced to accept, a number of his dead wife's friends. But while many had offered him a very tangible brand of comfort after his loss, he'd only rarely been tempted.

And not recently. On the few occasions on which he had allowed himself to lose himself in feminine arms he'd discovered that the oblivion was fleeting and that he was in
variably left physically sated but emotionally uncomfortable. The sensation wasn't enjoyable. These last six months he doubted he'd even experienced a single incident of desire. His senses seemed dulled. Sex, the thought of it and the experience of it, no longer interested him.

The realisation drew a bitter if reluctant smile from him. 'Isabel, wherever you are, I hope you appreciate that,' he muttered, lifting his cold coffee to her in a heavily ironic toast.

He knew conventional wisdom was that he should talk to someone about the way he was feeling but he couldn't face that. He was coping. Surgery was in his blood and he was still managing to do his job and still managing to do it well. Although the satisfaction he'd once had from his work had gone, he grasped at the knowledge that on that one level he was still doing some good.

Knowing just how close he was coming to giving it all up though didn't make it any easier for him to contemplate seeking help. He was a man used to keeping his own counsel. A psychiatrist could only tell him things he already knew, he told himself heavily. He or she might prescribe him pills which might make him feel better but he didn't want a drug-induced better.

Whatever was happening to him, he would deal with it, he vowed. And if he couldn't...? His mouth tightened. If he couldn't, he didn't know what would happen.

The sound of the door opening and the light that flooded in from the corridor outside drew his reluctant attention, but it wasn't his registrar but a fair-haired young woman, wearing a white doctor's coat. Despite the dimness of the room she obviously saw him because she lifted her hand in a brief acknowledgement, before going towards the kitchen.

Relieved that the intruder hadn't bothered turning on the main lights, Neil contemplated leaving, but he was comfortable for now and he still expected that his registrar
would turn up eventually and be able to give him a progress report on how things were going on the ward.

He could hear sounds of drink-making and hoped selfishly that the other doctor would simply collect her drink then leave.

But she didn't. Seconds later she emerged from the kitchen. She didn't go to the lights but instead picked her way carefully across the room, to his surprise passing him her mug to hold before throwing herself full length onto the battered couch beside him, her head at the end closest to his chair. 'What a night,' she exclaimed cheerfully. She held out her hand—for her drink, he assumed—and so he passed it to her.

'Not just a night, what a
weekend'.'
she continued brightly. 'I can hardly believe I'm still standing. I've never been so exhausted in all my life.'

Neil observed that she didn't sound particularly exhausted. 'First weekend on the job?' he asked reluctantly, suspecting that was the explanation. The beginning of February was change-over time for the hospital's house officers, and the newcomers, particularly those who'd only just qualified, were invariably enthusiastic. At first.

'My first weekend ever as a doctor,' she replied happily, her air of barely suppressed excitement as much as her words confirming his suspicions.

An excitement which a week in the job would doubtless dull for ever, Neil thought roughly, knowing how quickly stress and overwork could dull enjoyment into despair and cynicism.

But not yet, it seemed, for this young doctor because her voice stayed cheerful. 'This time last week I was technically still a student. I can hardly believe it. I've had two and a half hours' sleep in forty-three hours. Please, please, tell me this isn't normal?

He hesitated but realised that, however tempting the idea, he could hardly ignore her. 'Two and a half hours isn't normal,' he said finally. 'My house officers complain that they never sleep.'

'Which means that you must be a registrar.' She held up a free hand and waggled it at him until he found himself forced to shake it. 'Hi. Merrin Ryan. I can hardly see you but I should have known you sounded too old to be a house officer. Are you on the medical side?'

'Surgical.' Feeling a brief flicker of amusement at her blithe dismissal of him as old—which, he reminded himself, from her perspective he probably was—he didn't bother correcting her assumption. It seemed too much trouble and if she was a medical house officer then their paths were unlikely to cross again.

'I love surgery.' He heard her take some of her drink. 'Well, I love medicine too, and paeds, and obs and gynae, and everything I've ever studied if it really comes down to it.' She sounded as if she was smiling. 'I love it all,' she chirped. 'I love everything. I love helping people. I love making them better. I love the mystery of trying to make a diagnosis. I love being here in the hospital. I love just...everything. Don't you?'

Neil decided not to answer that. In his current mood, he realised, he was quite capable of telling her precisely and cynically exactly how long her enthusiasm would last and why it would eventually vanish, as it invariably did. But although that might satisfy some unpleasantly sadistic impulse of his own, it wouldn't be fair to her. 'Loving everything is going to make choosing a career path difficult next year,' he said calmly.

'I suppose.' But she didn't sound daunted and he suspected that at her age a year still seemed like a terribly long time.

'How did you decide on surgery as opposed to anything else?' she asked.

'It seemed right.' It was true. He didn't think he'd ever given his career any particular thought; once he'd tried surgery no other field had seemed to compare. He was good with his hands—'gifted' was the word his examiners had used years earlier—but he also had a brain that he knew how to use and a gut instinct for the nuances of surgery and its aptness. It was an instinct he'd never fully understood but one which had served him well.

'I'm so, so tired.' The girl beside him made dramatic yawning noises. Although he didn't like thinking of her as the 'girl', he realised he'd already forgotten her name.

'I mean really, really tired,' she continued. 'But at the same time I'm so scared and nervous about what I might be called to that I know I won't sleep.' In the shadows he saw her sit up then swivel around to face him on her knees. 'Is this normal?' she asked keenly. 'Tell me everything. Will it always be like this or will I get to know everything there is to know and not be nervous any more?'

'You never get to know everything,' he said quietly. 'But the nervousness goes away.'

'When?'

'There's no answer to that,'

'When did it go for you.'

'I don't remember.'

'Are you nervous when you're on call now?' she demanded. 'Are you the least bit scared?'

'No.'

'Are you excited? Do you look forward to being called? Are you wanting to be busy?'

He sighed, wishing he'd obeyed his initial impulse to leave when she'd arrived. 'It's not like that.'

'How is it, then?'

Boring, he wanted to tell her. Boring. Irritating. Predictable. Tedious. He wanted to tell her that he found being on call, aside from the moments of sheer technical enjoyment which operating could give him, merely an unwanted intrusion into a life which lately seemed increas
ingly banal and senseless, but he bit back that impulse just as he'd bitten back the earlier cynicism he'd come so close to revealing.