The Surgeon's Meant-To-Be Bride

Finally everything was ready. The suction was working, the diathermy was in order and an earthing plate had been stuck to the patient’s thigh. The patient was draped and the surgical area prepped with Betadine. Joan signalled she was happy with their patient’s condition and for Gill to commence.

As he removed the staples he had placed less than twelve hours ago, Harriet placed an Ella Fitzgerald CD in the portable player and switched it to background. It was Gill’s favourite, his grandfather’s influence, and he loved to listen to her dulcet tones as he operated. She knew it helped him relax into the job at hand and, well, she’d suffered worse surgeons’ tastes in her many years as an operating nurse.

One particular surgeon she had worked for had insisted on listening to arcane, obscure Gregorian chants, and by the time the theatre list had ended, she’d always been at screaming point.

Gill quickly opened the abdominal wound. ‘Retractor,’ he said, and Siobhan placed it in his hand. He inserted the heavy metal contraption into the wound and turned the cogs, watching as it slowly cranked open, taking the skin and layers of adipose tissue with it, pushing them back to either side to give a clear view of the abdominal cavity.

‘OK, folks,’ he said, ‘let’s find us a hole.’

Gill knew this could take five minutes or two hours. Finding a little tear was sometimes like trying to find a needle in a haystack. He decided to try a short-cut first.

‘Saline.’

Gill tipped the sterile bowl full of warmed sterile saline gently into the abdominal cavity, submerging the bowel, and waited. After a minute a small bubble squirmed to the surface and popped. As he’d suspected, he’d missed something. Now he just had to find it! And hope that one bubble meant only one hole!

It was probably on a posterior side somewhere. He’d have to start from the top and work his way down. Siobhan used a sucker to remove the fluid and Gill began the painstaking process of checking every centimetre of the intestine. It felt warm in his gloved hands and sort of rippled. It was all gooey and squishy, like a bowl of warm jelly, but looked and felt like a string of sausages.

He heard Harriet humming to ‘Cry me a River’ and glanced up. She always did that. Even scrubbed, she would hum along to Ella, completely unaware she was doing it. He’d missed that this last year, watching Harriet move around a theatre, humming quietly to herself. Or standing next to him, rubbing shoulders, passing him instruments as she hummed away. He’d had it back for a blissful two months and she was going to snatch it all away again.

His eyes flicked back to what he was doing. He really needed to concentrate, damn it! He was too aware of her. Today in particular. Today, the day he’d signed pieces of paper that would put them asunder for ever—it was most distracting! He was excruciatingly aware of her every move around the theatre. Opening things, writing things, murmuring something to Helmut and humming along to Ella.

‘Could you adjust the light, Harry?’ he asked. Why, he didn’t know. The light position was just fine. But then she moved closer and reached up so the fabric of her scrubs pulled taut across her chest and he could smell her perfume, and he was very glad he had asked.

She’d moved it a millimetre when he said, ‘That’s fine.’

Harriet glanced at him, a puzzled look in her eyes—she’d barely moved the wretched thing! Only his eyes were visible to her gaze and she raised her eyebrows at him. Their gazes locked and she saw a flicker of desire brighten the grey. She rolled her eyes at him and stepped back.

After another twenty minutes of looking, he finally located a small nick on the posterior wall of the ascending colon not far from the appendix.

‘Bingo,’ he murmured. ‘Suture.’

Gill over sewed the minor tear, and then gave the entire area a good lavage with warmed saline to wash out any debris that might have found its way into the abdominal cavity through the small hole. Fortunately the patient already had triple antibiotics on board to cover infection. Siobhan suctioned the saline out again as Gill reinserted a new drain through the old tract.