St Matthew's Passion: A Medical Romance (17 page)

It was a face that, for the first time since Melissa had met him, was at peace.

The peace, perhaps, of one who had come to the end of his life, and was accepting death with resignation.

Melissa swept ropes of wet matted hair out of her face and pressed her fist against her teeth, choking back a sob.

She pleaded with him silently.

Don’t, Fin.

Please don’t die
.

And, although she knew it was impossible, she aimed a thought at him that perhaps he might in some odd telepathic way register.

I love you.

It was only when both paramedics glanced round sharply at her that Melissa realised she’d spoken out loud.

Chapter Eleven

Melissa almost grabbed the films out of Professor Penney’s hands. He’d come ambling down the corridor perusing them, having just collected them in person from the radiology department.

They were the images from Fin’s MRI scan, the ones that would give an idea of the condition of his brain structure.

The professor handed them over and Melissa rammed them up into the viewing box, alongside each other. She flicked the switch to illuminate them.

Beside her Prof Penney peered at them through his glasses. The radiologist had already telephoned through the result but Melissa and the professor, who as trauma surgeons were both skilled at interpreting scans of this type, wanted to see for themselves.

Fin had already undergone an X-ray of his head, an early investigation that had been performed soon after he’d been wheeled into the ‘majors’ room at the Accident & Emergency department. The bleeding from his head was the result of a scalp wound, a ragged laceration that proved relatively easy to suture closed once it had been cleaned and the tiny blood vessels had been tied off. Melissa had wanted to see to the wound herself but once again had been pushed to one side by the A&E consultant, who’d done the suturing.

The X-ray revealed no fracture of the skull. Fin was lucky. The boat’s railing had struck him on the crown of the head, where the bone was dense. A few inches lower and to the side, on the thin plate of the temple, and the bone would have been shattered.

The absence of a bony fracture was only a small piece of good news, however. A bleed might have occurred inside the head as a result of the impact, between the skull and the brain. Worse, there might be a haemorrhage within the brain itself. Fin might end up partially or wholly paralysed, or without the power of speech or swallowing. He might never recover, but rather live on in a PVS, a persistent vegetative state, kept breathing artificially with a ventilator and kept nourished by an assortment of infusions, conscious but utterly unable to communicate with those around him, to interact with the outside world in any way.

Or - and to Melissa this was the worst possibility, worse even than the notion of Fin’s living the rest of his life shut into himself - he might die.

Melissa had forced these morbid thoughts out of her head like a gardener scything through knots of malignant weeds, but every time they’d grown back with frightening speed. Realising she was wasting her time, Melissa had focused on the practical. She had sent the order for the MRI scan herself, and while the arrangements were being made for Fin to be transported up to the scanner she’d recognised that she herself needed at least a minimum of attention if she were to stay upright in the hours ahead. So she’d allowed herself to be examined by one of the A&E registrars, and had then gone upstairs to the staff bathrooms and subjected herself to a scalding shower, realising only when she was towelling herself off afterwards just how numbingly, inhumanly cold she had been for the last hour.

Warmed, and in clothes someone had found for her that fitted approximately, she wandered the corridors of the hospital, finding it unfamiliar for the first time since she’d arrived, until she saw Professor Penney emerging from the radiology room with the results of Fin’s scan.

They studied the pictures in silence. The films showed sequential ‘slices’ of Fin’s head, horizontal snapshots of different planes through his brain.

There were no tell-tale areas of whitening, no indications of fluid accumulating where it didn’t belong.

Nor were any of the structures distorted, as though some mass were pushing them sideways.

Melissa and the professor gazed at the pictures for a full five minutes without exchanging a word. Occasionally they stepped around one another to get a better view of the pictures at the other end of the viewing box, or moved closer to put their noses almost against the screen to make sure of something that wasn’t clear from further away.

At last she glanced sideways at Professor Penney. He returned her look.

Melissa was the first to speak. ‘Nothing there.’

He raised his eyebrows and gave a small nod, but the relief in his face was plain, and mirrored hers.

It meant a non-specific brain injury, then, Melissa thought as she headed back towards the lifts that would take her to the Intensive Care Unit where Fin had been moved after the scan. He was unconscious, was still unresponsive to pain. A gloomy sign. And the neurosurgeon who’d examined him shortly after they’d reached the hospital had commented on the slight blurring of Fin’s optic discs, meaning oedema around the brain. He was being infused with steroids in an attempt to reduce the swelling. There was no tell-tale sign on the MRI scan of oedema, no crowding out of the dips between the convolutions of the brain, but all that meant was that the swelling wasn’t massive or immediately life threatening. The next twenty-four hours would be critical; but even if the intracranial pressure was successfully lowered, there was no telling how long Fin would remain unconscious.

Or if he’d ever wake up.

Melissa stepped into the ICU and was struck as always by the unique atmosphere of the place: a layer of tranquillity undershot by a dynamic of suppressed tension and foreboding. It was at once far calmer and quieter than most other, more ‘normal’ wards, and closer to the phenomenon of sudden death. By its very nature it had a limited number of beds, catering as it did for the most critically ill patients in the hospital. The staff bustled quietly, their footsteps and murmured voices accompanied by the rhythmic beeping of countless monitors and the clunky hiss of ventilation machines.

The nurse at the front desk looked up and nodded when she recognised Melissa. The staff on the ICU knew Melissa was a close colleague of Mr Finmore-Gage’s. To them it was perfectly natural that she’d come up to visit him, sit by his bed.

Fin was in one of the bays at the far end of the room, a nurse adjusting the flow through his intravenous line, the ICU registrar, Melissa’s counterpart, consulting a medication chart at the end of the bed. As she approached Melissa had a sudden moment of panic. Were they preparing to turn the life-support off? But the central line remained in place, snaking up to Fin’s neck where it had been inserted into the internal jugular vein and was held in place with tape, and the ventilator hissed and pumped, sending air into Fin’s lungs through the tube in his windpipe.

Melissa knew the registrar, who greeted her with a tired smile and brought her up to date with the management so far. Oxygen sats were satisfactory, as were other vital signs. Diuretic medications had been added to the steroids in order to promote the draining of excess fluid from Fin’s body and thereby from his brain. The usual precautions were in place to protect him from the risk of bedsores which tended to arise in immobile patients more quickly than most people realised: the ICU bed was a special model with a gently vibrating mattress.

Now all anyone could do, apart from watching the monitors, was wait. And hope.

The registrar and the nurse moved on to another patient and Melissa pulled up one of the low armchairs at the side of the bed. Seated, she was at eye level with Fin’s supine form. Melissa realised this was the first time she’d actually had a chance to study his face. Even after their frenzied encounter in his office, they hadn’t examined each other in the normal way two people would after making love.

Feeling almost guilty, like a voyeur, Melissa let her gaze take in his face from the side. Even under the circumstances, the ugly breathing apparatus that was keeping him alive protruding from his mouth, Fin was beautiful. The profile was classical, a sculptor’s ideal, with its straight nose, ever so slightly uptilted at the very end, its prominent cheekbones made more so in repose. His skin was paler than usual but as always virtually unlined apart from two faint parallel creases on his forehead, the stamp of a man who spent much of his life thinking, who was deadly serious about the values that were important to him. To Melissa’s astonishment, she noticed his eyelashes for the first time. Usually his striking eyes drew attention away from them. Now, thickly black, almost sooty, they were as still as death.

Melissa choked, and quickly turned it into a cough in case anybody in the ICU noticed. For a moment she’d forgotten to breathe. She had had a vision of the future. A bittersweet, richly detailed one, like a lengthy film that had been compressed into the space of a few seconds but every frame of which was engrained with absolute clarity on her memory.

In this vision, several years had passed. Fin had died, and Melissa was an eminent consultant in her field, an internationally acclaimed professor of trauma surgery. She was head of the department at St Matthew’s, travelled to New York and Beijing and Sydney to share her knowledge and her skills with the world, and had pioneered several revolutionary techniques which had had an immense impact on the relief of suffering across the world. She’d achieved everything she had set out to do since entering medical school, and more besides. She was fulfilled, after a fashion. Content, to a degree. She was also desperately, irredeemably sad. The sorrow had worked its way into her blood, her marrow, her DNA. It was a fundamental part of her, and extricating herself from it would be as impossible as turning back time.

In this vision, Fin was with her. Not as something mystical like a ghost, or an angel, but rather as a part of her just as much as the sadness she felt, something that had worked its way into the very cells in her body. Her eyes saw through his, his hands guided her when she was operating and even during such mundane tasks as driving and writing and gesturing during a lecture. His face, his handsome, reassuring, irreplaceable features, was the first thing she saw in her mind’s eye on waking each morning, and the last thing she saw every night.

In this vision, Melissa was alone. She had never married, never had children. Marriage and a family were impossible while Fin was with her. And he’d be with her always, until the day she died and beyond. She wouldn’t want it, couldn’t imagine it, any other way. There’d never be anybody else she could contemplate being with.

The vision was as crystalline, as revelatory, as the one Melissa had experienced at medical school, once she’d understood that trauma surgery was the particular career that had chosen her. She’d understood then that her life was to take a certain direction, and that to attempt to veer from that path would be as futile as trying to stop a juggernaut. Then, though, the understanding had been accompanied by a colossal flare of excitement, by an explosion of purpose within her that had set fire to her ambition and resulted in a blazing streak of success that had brought her to St Matthew’s. This time, on the other hand, the vision of her future was soaked in melancholy, in a resigned acceptance that her life was to be one of high achievement, but only in the intellectual and practical sphere. Emotionally, deep sadness and regret were to be her lot.

Fin
, she thought, wanting to close her eyes yet unwilling to take them off his pallid, mesmerising face for even a second.
Why haven’t we known each other? We’re destined to be together, so why did we keep apart, while it was possible for us to be together? Before it was too late?

Across the bed from Melissa, Fin’s cardiac monitor began to sound, the beeping gradually increasing in frequency and volume.

She rose from the chair, a knife of ice spearing her heart.

The rate on the monitor had shot up to one hundred and four beats per minute.

The doctor and two nurses hurried over and moved swiftly around Fin, pushing Melissa firmly back, taking charge. She watched the doctor peel back Fin’s upper lids and sweep a pen torch across his pupils, saw the nurses check the attachments of the monitoring equipment, examine the infusion set that led into the central venous line.

This is it
, Melissa thought numbly.
You’re going, Fin. Leaving me.

Unable to face any more, Melissa turned and stumbled a few steps away, when the sound registered in her consciousness.

The rhythm from the cardiac monitor had slowed.

Fin’s heartbeat had become steadier, less urgent.

Melissa turned back, barely daring to hope.

The registrar ran a hand through his hair, rolled his eyes at Melissa in relief. ‘False alarm.’

One of the nurses caught her eye, gave her a tiny smile.

She knows
, thought Melissa.

This time she didn’t sit down after the staff had gone away, but instead stood beside the bed, gazing down at Fin. His face retained its serenity, as if the flurry of the last few minutes hadn’t happened.

And suddenly Melissa understood the vision she’d had for what it was. It had been profound in its truth - she’d never have any man but Fin in her life - but not necessarily accurate in its details. Melissa was destined to die without ever knowing any man again but Fin.