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

few.
    Yes, it was good to be back.
    ‘Hello, Caroline,’ a familiar voice said from the doorway, and Deirdre turned quickly to see Shay standing there in his surgical scrubs, looking very attractive. Her heart leapt in recognition as she strove to keep her delight off her face.
    ‘Hi, Shay,’ the tutor greeted him. ‘Meet three new RNs, just starting orientation today. They’re all experienced in OR work.’
    Grinning, he came forward to shake hands, leaving Deirdre to the last. ‘I know Ms Warwick,’ he said. ‘Our paths have crossed.’
    ‘That’s good,’ the tutor remarked, ‘because she could be working with you later on today. Or maybe just observing.’
    ‘Throwing them in at the deep end, huh?’ he said.
    ‘That’s my style,’ she replied.
    ‘See you all later, then,’ he said, smilingat Deirdre, while the other two RNs looked at her.
    ‘How did you meet him?’ one of them whispered to her later when they had moved on out of the stockroom.
    ‘Not in the usual way,’ she said, laughing. ‘He almost ran me down with his car.’
    ‘I wouldn’t mind him running me down.’
    The place became very hectic for a while until those first patients had been wheeled into their respective operating rooms from the main corridor. For the duration of those operations, both long and short, there would be relative quiet in the corridor, until the porters wheeled in the next patients from the wards or the holding areas. Some of the patients were from the day-stay unit, who would only be in the hospital for one day or maybe overnight.
    Just before lunch, the three nurses on orientation found themselves assigned to a different operating room each, for the purposes of observation. As she had hoped and expected, Deirdre found herself in operating room one where Shay was operating on a patient who was having a gut resection for cancer of thecolon. She had ascertained that by looking at the posted list outside before entering the room.
    As Deirdre stood in the background, a mask on her face, her hair covered with the usual disposable paper mob-cap, she knew that Shay would probably not have time to say much to her, he had to concentrate on what he was doing. There was an assistant surgeon and a resident-in-training with him, scrubbed up to help him with the case. That made four in the sterile field by the patient, including the scrub nurse. An anaesthetist stood at the patient’s head.
    Deirdre felt excited, interested and somewhat stressed, trying to take it all in, not wanting to miss anything. Yes, she told herself again, it was good to be back in the familiar surroundings of an operating suite, yet she had got out of the way of being constantly alert, constantly on the ball, as it were. No doubt that would come back very quickly as her confidence rose. That was partly what the orientation period was intended to accomplish. For now, she stood silently watching, careful to keep out of the path of thecirculating nurse, the RN who was in charge of the room and who was running everything outside the sterile field.
    Another thing that she had lost the knack of was being able to close her mind to her own life outside the hospital. A lot of the time she was thinking of Fleur and Mungo, wondering what they were doing, even though she knew the routines of their days in detail. For the first time since taking the job of looking after them, she had not been able to carry a cellphone with her to be available constantly. They knew the number of the department and would be able to find her in a few minutes, but it was not the same as having her own telephone in her pocket. It wasn’t as though they were really young, she told herself, and needed her constantly.
    With a conscious mental effort she dragged her mind away from the domestic scene. She had, of course, known that the transition would not be instant; neither had she expected to be torn in two with quite so much angst. What she was learning in these first hours, what