The Family Doctor. Bobby Hutchinson

Oh, and, Marvin, try the rehab ward again. They must have commodes we could use.”

      Technicians drawing blood cultures and taking stool samples bumped into one another as they hurried from one sufferer to the next while doctors searched for veins and nurses hung more and more IVs of Ringer’s Lactate.

      As if elderly Shriners with gastroenteritis weren’t enough, the ER would have to be short staffed. It was late June, and many of the medical staff were already on holiday, while others had succumbed to a particularly vicious strain of bronchial flu currently doing the rounds.

      Leslie questioned still another suffering Shriner who’d attended the annual banquet the day before, filling in information as she listened carefully to the all-too-familiar recounting of symptoms. She slotted him in the lineup for treatment. It was days like this, she muttered under her breath, that reminded her she was fifty-three years old, twenty-two pounds overweight, and had bunions.

      “Excuse me, nurse? Leslie? Leslie, I need an X ray on this ankle, and I need it immediately.”

      The imperious and irritable male voice got Leslie’s full attention because it belonged to Dr. Antony O’Connor, St. Joe’s chief of staff.

      Leslie usually saw his tall, vigorous figure striding down hallways, vanishing into some meeting room or another. She knew him well enough to exchange a polite good-morning, and she’d attended staff meetings where he was present, but she certainly wasn’t on intimate terms with him.

      Not that she and her friend Kate Lewis hadn’t wickedly speculated about O’Connor and intimacy. Leslie surmised there wasn’t a red-blooded heterosexual female at St. Joe’s who hadn’t had lascivious thoughts about Tony O’Connor. Physically, at least, he was a prime specimen.

      This morning, however, he wasn’t looking as hunky as usual. He was seated in a wheelchair in her admitting area, one hugely swollen bare ankle propped high on the chair’s footrest, with a good six inches of well-shaped hairy calf peeking out from under the cuff of his gray trousers.

      The volunteer pushing O’Connor was an elderly man named Harold, whom Leslie knew well. Harold rolled his rheumy eyes at the ceiling and made a face, warning Leslie that his passenger wasn’t in the best of moods.

      Maintaining the same tranquil expression she’d perfected from seventeen years of dealing with every variety of calamity the universe could devise, Leslie hurried over to the wheelchair, but her serenity was a facade. All the ER needed this morning to top the utter chaos was this—St. Joe’s chief of staff requiring medical attention.

      “What’s happened to you, Tony?” She was pleased that her voice didn’t betray any of her inner tumult.

      “Fractured ankle—I’d think that was pretty obvious,” he snapped in a querulous tone, jabbing a finger in the direction of his swollen foot. “Call the radiologist. I need an X ray just to confirm that the damn thing’s broken. And then get hold of Jensen—he’ll deal with it from there.”

      Leslie’s heart sank. She knew from long and painful experience that a doctor with an injury was like a bear with a sore tooth—unreasonable, irascible, impossible to deal with and ready to maul the first person in his path.

      “First let’s get you into an examining room.” Which, Leslie knew, would take a miracle. All the examining rooms were overflowing with vomiting Shriners. But at that moment an orderly whisked a stretcher out of number three, and Leslie breathed a prayer of thanks and hurriedly wheeled O’Connor in. The room stank, so she located a can of air freshener and sprayed it around in liberal doses.

      He made a disgusted sound, but she ignored it. In her books, freshener was preferable to the alternative.

      “Now, what happened exactly?” Leslie put the can down and poised her pen above a clipboard. Usually this information was taken by a clerk, but she didn’t have to glance in that direction to know that a long line of moaning Shriners and a few poor unfortunate walk-ins were waiting for the harassed clerks to get to them. It wouldn’t do at all to send O’Connor over to sit in line and wait his turn.

      “How did the accident occur, Tony?”

      “Candy wrapper,” O’Connor growled, his face flushing. “I slipped on the foil from a stupid roll of candies. Damn thing was on the floor in the lobby. What’s with the cleaning staff, leaving junk like that lying around?”

      “You slipped on a candy wrapper?” She was simply confirming information, but he glared at her from angry brown eyes as if she’d said something insulting.

      “Yes, nurse, as ridiculous as it sounds, that’s exactly what I did.” His tone was not only sarcastic but strident. “And now I’d appreciate it if you’d call the radiologist immediately. I have another meeting, which I’m already late for.”

      Leslie struggled with the impulse, developed over her years as a triage nurse, to inform O’Connor that bullying would get him nowhere, and he was going to have to wait his turn. Good sense overcame impetuosity, however, as she reminded herself that this guy was the Big Kahuna, and she and her mother enjoyed living well on what Leslie earned at St. Joe’s.

      She knew that Antony O’Connor had been chief of staff for only four months. Leslie had seen him around before that, of course; he had a busy family practice and admitting privileges at St. Joe’s.

      During these last four months, however, he’d established a formidable reputation. The general consensus was that he was meticulous, impatient, critical of anything he deemed unnecessary, and willing to go to extreme lengths to correct whatever he saw as a waste of the medical center’s time and money. It was rumored that his iron fist bore no sign of a velvet glove. He had energy to burn and had maintained a busy general practice after his appointment as chief, seeing his patients in the afternoon and spending his mornings at St. Joe’s. Leslie knew he had a great rep as a GP. She didn’t know him well enough to guess whether or not he had a sense of humor, though. She suspected not.

      The wisest thing she could do, she decided, was to summon one of the doctors and let him or her deal with O’Connor.

      After she finished this damned medical history. Pen poised over the clipboard, she began again.

      “Have you been a patient here before, Tony?”

      “Of course not.” His tone was beyond edgy. “You know who I am, Leslie. Surely you’d know if I’d been seen in Emerg.”

      “Not necessarily.” She didn’t exactly spend twenty-four hours a day here. Although this morning it felt as if she had already, and she was only three hours into her shift.

      “Age?”

      “Forty-three.”

      “What medications are you on?”

      “None. Well, I did take four Tylenol to ease the pain after I did this, but nothing on a regular basis.”

      “And what time did the accident occur?”

      “Seven-fifteen. I was on my way to an early meeting.”

      It was now nine-thirty. The time lapse accounted for the extreme swelling evident in his ankle.

      “So you walked on it right away?”

      “Yeah, of course I did. It didn’t get really painful and start swelling until afterward.”

      “You didn’t try icing it?”

      “There wasn’t ice available.”

      Leslie thought that was a crock, but she didn’t say so.

      “Allergies?”

      “Eggs. Look, is this really necessary? All this stuff is on record with the hospital already.”

      “In your personnel file, perhaps, but not here in Emerg.” She kept her voice impersonal. “Next of kin?”

      “Next of kin? I’ve got a broken ankle, not a broken neck. Damn it all, this is ridiculous.” His brow furrowed