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Behind Taency consultant working to resuscitate their patient, a forty-year-oldhisThemother A stroke And now heart failure

Family history It tore people apart, wrecked wonderful relationships, destroyed childhoods Made a one and fallen for Taest mistake of his life

Conor needed to go help theon the stroke patient Only then could he quieten his hly skilled staff working on the guy Instead, he tried to ignore the wo comments into the computer file of his last patient

But as the wo hisroo screa as she’d clung to him The tears that had lasted days The hours when she hadn’t talked, had barely known him

The buzzer from the a solid to concentrate on, so thoughts Da them up If only they knew

‘Fractured bones at the elbow resulting in a torn artery and heavy loss of blood’ The advance paramedic handed over the patient work sheet to Conor

A quick scan and he said to the thirty-four-year-old woman, ‘I’m Conor, your doctor for the next little while Can you tell me what happened?’

‘I was painting my house and fell off the ladder’

‘Right, then let’s get you into the departe’ He took one side of the stretcher and, together with the ambulance officer, pushed his patient towards Resus There Kelli and another nurse aiting

‘On the count of three’ And they shifted the woman across to the bed

‘Need Radiology and the lab here, and Orthopaedics on the phone,’ Conor ordered as he began exale Carefully re the cardboard cast the ambulance crew had put in place to save extra ently probed the elbow joint

And still that woh loud and clear from around the corner

Ignore her

Conor asked his patient, ‘Did you hit your head when you fell?’

‘Y

es, on the back, but it can’t have been too hard I didn’t black out,’ she wheezed through gritted teeth as pain jarred her

‘We’ll get an X-ray to be doubly sure’

Someone handed him the phone ‘Orthopaedics on the line’

Hehis back so his words wouldn’t be heard by his patient ‘I’y to coinglymus and others to the hue There’s heavy blood loss from a torn artery’

‘I’ll be down as soon as I’ve put Theatre on standby,’ the specialist told him

Returning to his patient, he inforether’

She nodded ‘Figured ason?’

Another family whose day had been tipped sideways But not as badly as the couple in the next unit The sobs were quietening do and Conor could hear his counterpart talking to the wo that her husband had been successfully revived

‘Until next time,’ the woman cried

Until next time The words he’d carried around in his head since the day of his heart attack Until next time The reason for his panic attacks That ‘next time’ hovered on the periphery of his mind Most days it played nice Occasionally, like last week, when life had been in turripped his chest and sent him into a tailspin

‘Conor? This your patient?’ The radiology technician had arrived

He shook away the dark clouds in his head ‘Yes I need as e’

Conor put everything into focusing on his patient and not on the litany of doo around his head But the moment the orderly wheeled her away the fears and er, louder than before

He aimed for the counter and a computer to update the woman’s notes And locked eyes with Tamara as she stepped out of Resus One Her face was drawn and that sadness in her eyes had grown heavier His chest tightened ‘Tam?’

‘We saved hi recovery ahead of hi in the near future are remote’