Chapters (70)
- COVER PAGE
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- DEDICATION
- PROLOGUE
- PART I BIRTH
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- PART II LIFE
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- PART III DEATH
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- FIFTY
- FIFTY-ONE
- FIFTY-TWO
- FIFTY-THREE
- FIFTY-FOUR
- FIFTY-FIVE
- FIFTY-SIX
- FIFTY-SEVEN
- FIFTY-EIGHT
- FIFTY-NINE
- SIXTY
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As I open my mouth to speak I see the Joker smirk. I freeze.
‘Well, Katarina?’
‘Ah, maybe a bleed, from, ah, the …’ I feel sweat beading on my brow. The room is totally silent. All eyes are on me. ‘Ah, the middle … cerebral …’ I squeak out.
He looks disgusted. ‘And?’
I clear my throat and try to continue, but my voice fails me.
‘Bleed from the middle cerebral artery with midline shift!’ my boss roars. ‘That is a simple scan!’
‘I … I thought that was …’ I stop. Just speak next time, I admonish myself. Trust your instincts.
My instincts are urging me to flee—all the way to the south of France. One way.
Stop being so ridiculous, I tell my instincts. Surgeons don’t run away. They stay inside the operating theatre and just cop it sweet. Toughen up, princess!
‘You need to spend some time looking at more scans, Katarina,’ the Joker says. ‘I’m going to quiz you this afternoon, so you’ll need to actually be prepared rather than relying on me to tell you the answers.’
I sink back into my chair, relief washing over me as he starts to interrogate a registrar on the other side of the room.
No surgical terms are easy, but brain surgery is as bad as it sounds. As we go through more scans, it’s clear that most of the patients on the ward are at risk of crashing. And by crashing I don’t mean a bit of a temperature spike; I mean like a train crashing. As in death. And no doubt, I think to myself sadly, it will happen when the rest of the team is in the operating theatre and I’m alone on the ward.
I can’t handle this, I think, suddenly. I actually cannot handle this.
I mentally kick myself, hard, and force myself to concentrate. ‘You must have seen some decent trauma in the States,’ the Shark is saying to the Joker as the last scan mercifully vanishes from the screen. ‘Good experience.’
The Joker, I soon discover, spent a year in a big-deal hospital in America after completing his PhD at Harvard; that explains the accent—he must be trying to remind us that he’s no longer Australian but an honorary member of the Boston elite. Impressive as this is, it’s clear that he feels he’s taken a step backwards in returning to Australia, and he’s trying to boost himself up by lording it over the more junior members of the team. I’m easily the softest target both because I’m at the bottom rung of the team ladder and because I’m female.
How can I make him like me? Not even like me, but just be marginally less horrible? I wonder as I hear my pager start to beep.
Dr Holliday draws a blank. Ask Kitty Holliday the writer, I imagine Estelle suggesting.