Читать книгу Just a Family Doctor - Caroline Anderson - Страница 6

HE DIDN’T ask her out again until the weekend, and she was beginning to wonder if her imagination had read more into their relationship than was warranted.

If you could call it a relationship.

Maybe she’d presumed too much from their slight acquaintance. Maybe Anna was more appealing to him than he’d let on—although there was no sign of anything blossoming there either, she thought, and told herself that the only reason Mark had shown so much interest in her was because he was lonely in Audley and didn’t know anyone else!

So she put it out of her mind, and carried on with her work and tried not to notice when he was around, but it was pointless. Her radar wouldn’t switch off, and she was constantly aware of every breath he took when he was on the ward.

Still, her patients were a good distraction, and she tried to concentrate on them.

Little Claudia Hall was doing all right on her antibiotics, despite feeling sick, and her mother and father had taken over her antibiotic therapy and were giving her the injections through the catheter in her arm. It saved the nursing staff a job, and her parents were already so involved with their daughter’s care that they were utterly reliable.

In any case they were probably more knowledgeable about her condition than many of the staff on the ward, and like so many parents these days, wanted to know everything and not be kept in the dark. Furthermore they explained everything to Claudia, so that she could be in control of her treatment.

As Jayne said, ‘She’s Claudia first, and CF second. All this treatment isn’t for the CF, it’s for Claudia. She has to understand it and condone it and accept it. It’s her body, not yours, not mine. She has to make the choices, and if she’s given some control, it helps her to deal with it.’

However their philosophy could only help so much. One of the hardest things was also one of the simplest, in comparison to the other things she had to endure. Every third day of her gentamycin therapy, she had to have pre- and post-gentamycin blood tests to make sure that her fragile little system was able to cope with the drug.