Marion Lennox – The Australian's Desire: Their Lost-and-Found Family / Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family / A Proposal Worth Waiting For (страница 27)

The second ambulance was there now, and a third, and there was a battered four-wheel-drive pulling in behind it.

There were patients everywhere, some walking wounded, suffering only bruising and lacerations, but others serious.

For all the chaos, the place was working like a well-oiled machine. Maximum efficiency. Minimal panic. Charles had divided his workforce into teams, but the teams were fluid, doctors and nurses moving in and out of teams as an individual needed specific skills.

Every medic in Croc Creek was on duty by now, including a nurse heavily pregnant with twins.

‘Don’t mind my bump,’ she said cheerfully as they worked around her. She was cleaning and stitching lacerations with skill. ‘Yeah, I’m ready to drop but I’ve told them to be sensible and stay aboard until this is over. Just hand me the stuff that can be done sitting down.’

There was more than enough work to hand over.

This was emergency medicine at its worst. Or at its best.

‘You know, if this had happened in my big teaching hospital back in the US, I doubt if we’d do it any better,’ Alistair muttered as they worked through more patients, and Georgie felt it was almost a pat on the back.

For all of them, she said hastily to herself, but it didn’t stop a small glow …

She was carefully fitting a collar to a man who’d been playing it hardy. ‘I’m fine, girl,’ he’d said. He’d come in sitting in the front of one of the cars but now he was white-faced and silent. Georgie had noted him sitting quietly in a corner and had moved in. Pain in the neck and shoulders. Query fracture? Collar and X-rays now, whether he wanted them or not.

There was a flurry of activity at the door and Cal was striding through at the head of a stretcher. ‘Alistair, can we swap duties?’ he called across the room, and Georgie intercepted the silent message that crossed the room with his words.

Uh-oh. Alistair was a neurosurgeon. If Cal wanted him, it’d be bad.

It was.

‘Head injury,’ he said briefly. ‘We had to intubate and stabilise her before bringing her in. Mitch has already run her through X-Ray. His notes and slides are here. Georgie …’ She was near enough for him not to have to call her. ‘Can you assist here?’

‘Mr Crest needs X-rays.’

‘I’ll take that over,’ Charles called. He’d just finished a dressing and he wheeled over to take Georgie’s place. He glanced across at Cal’s patient and saw what they all saw. A laceration to the side of her face. Deeply unconscious. ‘Jill,’ he said to their chief nurse, ‘you work with this one, too. That’s all I can spare. Do your best.’

‘She’ll need you all if she’s to pull through,’ Cal said gravely. ‘The notes are there, guys.’

Jill was already wheeling the trolley swiftly into a side examination cubicle where they could assess the patient in relative privacy. Alistair was working as the trolley moved, while Georgie skimmed through Mitch’s notes.

The woman—young, blonde, casually dressed but neat and smart by the look of it—was limp on the trolley, lying in the unnaturally formal pose that told its own story. Her breathing was the forced, rasping sound of intubation. Such breathing always sounded threatening, Georgie thought as she read. As it should. It meant the patient wasn’t breathing on her own.

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