Her Secret Valentine's Baby by Harroway J. C

Author:Harroway, J. C. [Harroway, J. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008937003
Amazon: B0C8GT2MY1
Goodreads: 179252510
Publisher: Mills & Boon Medical
Published: 2024-01-18T08:00:00+00:00

* * *

The following evening, Sadie was about to leave the emergency department after admitting her final patient of the day, a seven-year-old with suspected appendicitis, when an A and E nurse called her to assess a newly arrived emergency.

‘Nine-month-old with possible foreign body ingestion in Resus,’ the nurse said, handing Sadie the ambulance summary.

Sadie hurried into the resuscitation room, where the most serious cases presenting to the emergency department were assessed. Choking was one of the hazards designed to terrify all parents, so Sadie’s heart went out to the concerned pair as she introduced herself.

Sam, the baby, was grizzling and drooling, a distinct high-pitched sound, known as stridor, coming from his throat on every inhaled breath.

‘I think there may be an object stuck in Sam’s throat,’ she explained after taking a brief history from the parents, who hadn’t seen the baby swallow anything.

Sadie reached for her stethoscope and listened to the boy’s lungs and looked inside his mouth.

‘It could be lodged either at the top of his trachea or his oesophagus, the tube to his stomach.’ She kept her voice even, while urgency pounded through her blood.

‘Most swallowed objects pass through the gut without intervention,’ she continued, ‘but I don’t think this one is going to pass on its own. It’s stuck there, and is affecting Sam’s breathing. So I’m going to run some tests.’

While the worried parents tried to soothe Sam, Sadie ordered an urgent chest X-ray and paged the on-call surgical registrar. If the object wasn’t removed quickly, it could cause tissue damage and, in return, scarring, leaving baby Sam with lifelong complications.

‘I’m going to ask my surgical colleagues to take a look at Sam,’ she explained to the parents, her mind turning to Milly, who was only a few months younger than this baby. ‘It may be that he requires a small procedure under sedation to look into the throat and remove whatever is lodged there.’

Sam’s parents appeared understandably horrified. Sadie left them with the ED nurse, who was trying with infinite patience to encourage Sam to wear an oxygen nasal cannula.

She was examining the chest X-ray when Roman walked in.

‘What have we got?’ he asked, shooting her that smile that shot her pulse through the roof.

He paused beside her, peering over her shoulder at the screen, the hint of his cologne tickling her senses. Unfair memories bombarded her: the scent of his skin, the delirious passion of his kisses, the feel of his body moving inside hers.

Her entire body reacted with goosebumps; she was so pleased to see him.

‘Ah, foreign object?’ he said, as if completely unmoved by Sadie’s proximity, whereas she was engulfed in flames at his casual closeness. ‘Some sort of plastic block, I’d guess.’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ she agreed, leaning away for self-preservation. ‘Shouldn’t you have left by now? You were on call last night.’

She noted the fatigue around his eyes, the dishevelled mop of his hair, his crumpled scrubs. Was he hiding out from his personal life at work? He’d once admitted workaholic tendencies.

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