The Surgeon's Convenient Fiancée (Medical Romance) by Rebecca Lang

in the main corridor just outside the head nurse’s office. ‘Of course, we’ll have emergencies—road-traffic accidents and everything else.’
    Deirdre nodded. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. A feeling that she recognized as elation, something rare, seemed to flood over her as she stood there in the familiar surroundings of an operating suite, with the familiar sights and smells, the scent of cleanness.
    There were four of them standing there on a Monday morning, three newly employed registered nurses who were about to undergoa three-week orientation period and the head nurse who was about to hand them over to a tutor for the department who would help them with the actual orientation. To Deirdre’s surprise and gratitude, there was such a shortage of experienced operating room nurses that the head nurse had agreed to let her do her orientation part time, and had given her the days that she wanted to work—Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The fact that these were Shay’s operating days had had something to do with her request.
    A middle-aged woman came up to them and introduced herself. ‘Hi, I’m Caroline Clarke,’ she said, extending a hand to each. ‘Now, you’re Deirdre Warwick.’ She peered at Deirdre’s ID badge which had her photograph on it, pinned to the top pocket of a white lab coat that she wore over a blue scrub suit. ‘And this is Suzy Jacobs, and you are Beth Strom. Right?’
    They all shook hands with her. The three new nurses had introduced themselves in the locker room earlier.
    ‘I’ll leave you now,’ the head nurse said, taking her departure.
    ‘First of all, I’ll show you around the place,’ the tutor said. ‘I know you’ve each been shown around at least once before, but this time we are going to poke into cupboards. I’m going to show you where we keep the emergency instrument trays, like the tracheostomy set, where we keep the defibrillator, the cardiac arrest drugs, the crash cart, and all that sort of stuff. We’re going to look in every cupboard and every drawer. As far as possible, we try to keep each actual operating room identical with the next one, although there are specialized rooms that have extras, of course. Got your notebooks and pens, everyone?’
    ‘Yes,’ they chorused.
    ‘Right. Off we go, then. We’ll go to the stockroom first.’
    The main corridor of the operating suite was busy, in a controlled way, with the comings of patients on stretchers for the first operation of the day, pushed by porters, to be parked outside the rooms where they were to be operated on. There were fifteen operating rooms in Stanton Memorial Hospital, whichwas quite a lot for a relatively small hospital. The time was twenty minutes to eight.
    Deirdre looked around her quickly at the busy scene, all carefully organized and choreographed, like a dance. Half her mind was on what Fleur and Mungo would be doing—being given breakfast by Granny McGregor and gathering together their stuff for school at Jerry’s house. Jerry himself had left on another business trip, thank goodness. He was to be in Hong Kong and China for several weeks, including over Christmas. Deirdre suspected that he had a female travelling companion, which she didn’t want to know about. It was none of her business, anyway. It was just great that he wasn’t around.
    She felt somewhat disorientated, but in a good way, as though she could hardly believe her luck—not in the strange way that had come upon her suddenly when she had been unable to get off the bus. She felt that she needed to tell herself frequently that this was really happening. Sometimes something good did come out of trouble after all, especially when one found the courage from somewhere to ask for help.
    They stood in the large stockroom, looking at the shelves of supplies that they would need every day in the operating rooms, from hypodermic syringes to plastic chest tubes, bladder catheters, latex surgical gloves and dressings, to name but a