The Children's Doctor and the Single Mum. Lilian Darcy

know all too well what’s waiting for you at home.’ Tammy grinned. ‘I have five kids myself.’ She was working as she spoke, deftly untaping the sides of the nappy, gently lifting the little legs and bottom.

      ‘Then you understand!’ Mrs Thornton said with feeling.

      The nappy felt very light. You became pretty skilled at estimating urinary output by the weight in your hand. Dry, versus slightly wet, versus nicely soaked. This one felt dry.

      ‘When did you last change him?’ she asked his mother.

      ‘Oh, it would be a couple of hours ago. What’s the time now?’

      ‘Almost seven-thirty.’

      ‘That late! In that case, it’s about four hours since I changed him.’

      ‘Was he very wet then?’

      ‘The nurse weighed the nappy. Just a few mils, she said. I think she wrote it down.’ She didn’t ask if the low output could be a problem, but Tammy could see she’d gone on the alert.

      ‘Let’s get you into a new one, little man,’ she murmured to the baby, wondering if this could be the source of Mrs Thornton’s nebulous worry. He shouldn’t be dehydrated. There was no obvious distension in his lower abdomen. And newborns often didn’t pee very much at first.

      Still… She took his temperature, although he wasn’t due for it, and found that it had gone up a few points—38.1 degrees Celsius. He was officially febrile now, and fever in a premmie newborn wasn’t something you ignored.

      She found Dr Burchell at the far end of the unit, studying the notes of a baby girl with a serious heart defect, and told him, ‘I’m not sure if this earns me that coffee you mentioned…’

      ‘Good coffee, right? Freshly brewed, in a china cup.’

      ‘That’s the one… Could there be a kidney problem? He doesn’t seem to be putting out much urine.’

      ‘Newborns don’t.’ Dr Burchell’s mind was clearly still on the heart baby, whose blood gases were getting worse.

      The tiny girl needed surgery, Tammy knew, but she really wasn’t strong enough. They’d wanted to get her weight up higher, but it was going in the opposite direction, and her little body was exhausting itself getting that tiny, damaged heart to work.

      ‘He’s five days old,’ Tammy persisted, even though she understood Dr Burchell’s tight face and the frustrated way he paged through the notes and looked at the heart baby. He wanted to focus on the more serious case. ‘He’s started feeding. And his temp’s over 38.’

      OK, she had his attention now. Hopefully he wouldn’t ask how much over 38 degrees. His grey eyes—a deep, liquid grey—fixed themselves on her cap, narrowing with something that was probably annoyance, and she wondered if bits of her hair were making an unauthorised escape bid. They often did.

      ‘You’re thinking there’s a partial blockage, and he’s having urinary reflux?’ he asked. Grey eyes, but possibly with some chips of green in a different light, Tammy mentally revised.

      ‘Giving him an infection, yes, that’s what I’m wondering.’

      He was already looking back down at the heart baby. ‘Look, we’ll do an ultrasound. Rule it out.’

      Rule it out.

      His faith in her diagnostic skills clearly wasn’t high. It didn’t look as if she was getting that coffee any time soon.

      ‘Thanks, um, Tammy,’ he added.

      ‘No worries,’ she told him cheerfully, and went back to her charges, prepared to think no more about it.

      Eleanor had returned from her break and was gently urging Mrs Thornton to have a relaxing shower. Little Cameron’s next nappy would probably weigh twice as much as a dry one, and Tammy would feel like an idiot for her rash diagnosis.

      Yeah, that would be good.

      She had a nagging suspicion that the kilos on her butt, the zeros in her bank account and the five kids at home might not be quite enough to keep her safe from a man like Laird Burchell. Tall, broad-shouldered, lovely neck, not a hint of a receding hairline, intelligent and caring and capable…and then there were those deep, perceptive eyes.

      He was—if you had time to take notice of such things—gorgeous. If he decided she was an idiot, therefore, so much the better.