The nurse and I exchange looks. I have no idea what’s going on with my friend, but I know it isn’t good. My stomach churns anxiously.

‘When you say the paging system was down,’ I ask the nurse quietly, ‘do you mean over the whole hospital?’

He nods.

‘Even the code blue team?’ Surely not, I think. The way the system works, the intensive care code blue team receive the page before anyone else. Their paging system is the one thing in a hospital that always works—even a hospital as underresourced as Wingabby.

‘Even them,’ he says grimly. ‘They didn’t arrive until one of the other nurses ran to get them. They were dealing with a sick guy on level six, so it took her ages to find them.’

‘What other doctors were here?’ I demand. ‘Who was here with Estelle?’

I glance over at her, huddled in the corner of the bathroom. She’s an intern, like me. We’re not trained to manage life-threatening emergencies by ourselves, let alone an emergency involving a child. Holy Innocents has no paediatrics ward, so we barely know how to deal with measles.

I almost hope he doesn’t answer, because I have a sinking feeling I know what he’s going to say.

‘It was just Estelle,’ he says, looking increasingly uncomfortable. ‘Well, her and me.’

‘So, you’re like a paediatric nurse, right? You’ve seen a resus? You kind of know what to do?’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m just an agency nurse.’ He sounds apologetic. ‘Someone called in sick, and they were desperate. Normally I’m on the orthopaedic ward.’

What a fucking shit show, I think.

Estelle stirs, and I walk back into the bathroom. Very gently, I put my hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t react this time.

‘It was just me,’ she says, tears spilling down her cheeks.

Behind me, the nurse says, ‘I rang the flight doctor, because we just didn’t know where the team was. Estelle had to intubate the little boy by herself … They gave us instructions over the phone.’

I feel my eyes widen. ‘You intubated a three-year-old? But we don’t know how to do that!’

Sticking a tube down the airway of an adult is no mean feat; it’s something we’ve only ever practised on plastic models. To intubate a dying child by yourself … It takes specialist paediatric anaesthetists years of training to master it, and still they sometimes fail. And here was Estelle, at two o’clock in the morning, forced to do it on her own, in a hospital in the middle of nowhere. I shudder.