LITMIR.BIZ

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the next morning. Had he been worried about how upset she would be that he hadn’t told her?

      Or was it simply the courtesy of a doctor to another member of a patient’s medical team?

      That was probably it.

      Well, it didn’t do any good to think about it now. This call was what Annabelle had been waiting for during the past two weeks. News that this particular baby might have a chance to live and grow.

      She could put aside any discomfort working beside Max might bring. He and Sienna were both top in their field. She halfway wondered if the other doctor would be performing the transplant surgery. But Sienna had turned the case over to Max. Which meant he would be doing it.

      Would he let her in the operating room? She wasn’t a surgical nurse, but she had done a rotation in the surgical suite. And she wanted to be there for Hope, even though the baby would have no idea she was there. And wouldn’t care.

      She reached the hospital and made her way to the staff car park area. From the looks of the empty spaces, people still hadn’t recovered from the virus. Hopefully Max would be able to find enough healthy bodies to be able to perform the surgery in the middle of the night. Well, by the time things were all prepped, it would probably be closer to six o’clock in the morning. Still early, but not so far out that it would be hard to talk people into coming in to assist.

      Hurrying to the main entrance, she was surprised to find Max waiting for her. ‘I thought you’d be in prepping for surgery.’

      ‘We’re still waiting on the medevac to get here with the heart.’

      She walked with him, his long steps eating the distance. ‘Do you know anything about it?’

      ‘It typed right for Hope. The donor was an infant...the victim of a drunk driver. The family signed off just a few hours ago.’

      Signed off. Such an impersonal term for what was a very personal decision. That baby had been someone’s pride and joy. Their life. She’d mourned the foetuses she’d miscarried. But how much more would she ache if she’d held those children in her arms only to have them taken away by a cruel set of circumstances?

      Kind of like the devastation her sister had experienced when she’d tried to adopt. But at least that child was still alive somewhere in the world.

      A telltale prickle behind her eyelids warned her to move her thoughts to something else. Like the way Max had sounded saying Baby Hope’s name.

      Max had always been good at making sure parents knew that he thought of his tiny patients as people, painstakingly remembering even the names of extended family members. It was one of the things she’d truly loved about him. How special he made people feel.

      It was what had drawn her to him when they’d first met. He’d acted as if she were the most beautiful girl in the room. Well, Max had certainly been the best-looking guy she’d ever laid eyes on, and when he’d said her name it had made her—

      ‘Anna? You okay?’

      She scrubbed her eyes with her palms. ‘Still fighting the last bits of sleep, but I’ll be fine.’

      It was a lie. Annabelle was wide awake, but she was not going to tell him that she’d been standing there remembering the way they’d once been together.

      ‘Well, you’d better finish waking up. We have a lot of work to do before that heart arrives.’

      ‘Were you able to assemble a transplant team?’

      He nodded, looking sideways at her as they continued down the brightly painted corridor. Annabelle had always loved the way Teddy’s was so cheerful, almost as if it were a wonderful place for kids to laugh and play rather than a hospital that treated some of the most desperately ill children in the area.

      ‘You’re part of that team.’

      Annabelle stopped in her tracks. She’d hoped he would include her in some way, but to put her on the actual team... That strange prickling sensation grew stronger. ‘Are you serious?’

      ‘I wouldn’t have said it if I weren’t.’

      ‘Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me.’

      ‘I think I do.’ He smiled, no hint of awkwardness in his manner, unlike Annabelle, who could barely look at him without remembering what had happened last night. ‘But I didn’t put you on it out of some sense of pity. I need you. You know Hope better than probably anyone else here at the hospital. I want you monitoring her, letting me know of anything out of the ordinary you see as we get her ready. And I want a sense of how she is when the surgery is finished, and she’s coming out of the anaesthetic.’

      More beautiful words had never been spoken. Max acted as if it were a given that the baby would survive the surgery and actually wake up on the other side. As if there were no question about it. Done for her sake? Or because he really believed it? ‘You’ve probably studied her case as much as I have.’

      ‘I’ve studied it, but you’ve lived it, Anna.’

      She had lived it. Some of it joyful, like when Hope opened those sweet blue eyes of hers and stared into Annabelle’s. Some of them terrifying...like the day before yesterday when she had gone into respiratory failure. Annabelle had thought for sure those were the last moments of the baby’s life. And now this. The sweet sound of hope...for a precious baby who was fighting so hard to live.

      And now she just might get that chance.

      ‘Thank you. For letting me be a part of it.’

      Max started moving again, his steps quicker, more confident. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

      * * *

      ‘Ready for bypass.’

      Max glanced back at the perfusionist seated at the table across from him, its myriad tubing and dials enough to make anyone nervous. But Gary Whitley—an expert in his field, Max had been told—was at the helm, his white goatee hidden beneath the surgical mask. ‘Tell me when.’

      Once they put Baby Hope on the bypass machine, the race with time would begin once again. The sooner the donor heart was in place and beating, the better chance the baby had for a good outcome. The risk for post-perfusion syndrome—the dreaded ‘pump head’—grew the longer a patient was on bypass. Most of the time, the symptoms seemed to resolve after a period of weeks or months, but there were some new studies that suggested the attention and memory problems could be long-reaching for some individuals. Hopefully the baby’s young age would preclude that from happening.

      ‘Let’s start her up.’

      Gary adjusted the instrumentation and looked up just as the centrifugal pumps began whirling, sending the blood through the tubes and over into the oxygenator. ‘On bypass.’

      Max then nodded at Anna, who noted the time. She would keep an eye on the maximum time allowable and notify the team as they arrived at certain critical markers: one-quarter, the halfway mark and the three quarters mark, although he hoped they didn’t cut it that close.

      Using a series of clamps and scalpels, they finished unhooking Hope’s defective heart, and, after checking and double checking the great vessels, they removed the organ from the opening in her chest wall.

      ‘Ready for donor heart.’ The new organ carefully changed hands until it reached Max. He checked it for damage, despite the fact that it had already gone through rigorous testing. He preferred to inspect everything himself...to know exactly what he was dealing with.

      Was that one of the reasons he’d asked Annabelle to be involved in the surgery? Because he knew what to expect when they worked together?

      Yes. But it was also because he knew this patient meant so much to her. Leaving her out after all the time, effort, and—knowing Annabelle—love she’d put into Baby Hope seemed a terrible act. Almost as if he were discarding her once she’d served her purpose.

      That

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