My Kind of Christmas (Virgin River #20)(25)

Angie, acting on sheer impulse, wiggled out of Patrick’s arms and ran toward the vehicle just as a woman got out of the passenger’s side of the truck. She was holding a very large child wrapped in a blanket—a blanket on which there was a considerable amount of blood. A bloodstained towel covered most of the child’s face.

On instinct, Angie went toward them. At precisely that moment, Mel and Dr. Michaels burst through the crowd, running toward them.

“Frank?” Mel asked. “Lorraine?”

“It’s Megan! She slipped—there was ice on the porch and a nail sticking out of the porch post got her right on the forehead. It’s bleeding bad.”

“Come inside. Frank, you come, too. Let’s have the doctor look at it.”

Angie turned to Patrick very briefly, holding up her hand toward him. That was her only gesture before following the man, woman, child and practitioners into the clinic.

It felt odd to her. First of all, no one questioned her presence there, as though she was already an assistant of some kind. Second, Mel began barking orders at her as if she had been trained in this clinic. “I’ll need a sterile pack of four-by-four gauze, sterile water, not saline. Cameron? Want an antibiotic?”

“I don’t think we need an IV, but I’ll go with cephalexin, broad spectrum IM. She had a tetanus shot last summer but give me some Valium and lidocaine. I’ll get a suture kit.”

“Can you get that together, Angie?” Mel asked, handing her the keys to the drug cabinet. “I’ll take care of the syringes.”

“Yes. Please check my work, make sure I have the right things.”

“Absolutely.”

Angie got out the gauze and water and then went after the drugs, but what really had her attention was the fact that the little girl didn’t make a sound.

“I’m going to put pressure on the wound, Megan,” Mel said gently, softy. “Just for a little while.”

Angie had only seen a little bit of this injury, the blood on her face, but the child was so silent. She shook like a leaf, however—either terrified or in shock. And Mel was dabbing at her face and forehead with gauze. “Easy, Meg, it’s not bad,” Mel was murmuring.

“Let’s get this cold, bloody blanket out of here,” Mel said, leaving a thick padded gauze over half of Megan’s face. She reached into the cupboard behind her and produced a clean, warm blanket. To Angie, she said, “Roll Megan toward you, then toward me—gently, now.”

They wrapped her up in a fresh blanket while her parents waited as close to the treatment room door as possible. Then Cameron was back, pushing his way in close, pushing Angie away. His suture kit sat on the counter behind him and he looked at Megan’s pupils with a flashlight, asked her to follow his finger with her eyes, asked her a couple of simple questions like her birthday, her brothers’ names.

“Is it terrible, Doctor?” Megan asked, her voice quivering on the edge of tears.

“It’s not, sweetheart,” Cameron said. “It’s going to be fine.”

In the first year of medical school, a med student had very little, if any, clinical experience. In fact, the only experience Angie had came from following around an instructor in a clinic. Without that little bit of experience, she would have no idea what a four-by-four was or how to select drugs from the locked cabinet. And while the injury was a bloody mess, especially on the face of a little girl, it didn’t overwhelm Angie. She knew even the smallest head wounds could bleed like the devil.

By the time Cameron had opened up his suture kit, the wound had been cleaned and much of the blood wiped away. That’s when Angie had her first real look at the little girl’s face and tried not to gasp. The laceration on her forehead didn’t appear too serious, but the sweet thing already had a horrific scar on her face, already healed. It looked as though she’d been cut from the corner of her mouth almost to her eye; her mouth lifted on one side and her lower lid of her right eye drooped, exposing pink tissue. The scar was thicker in some places than others—it was vicious. Disfiguring.

The little treatment room was very crowded and growing quite warm. Cameron was working carefully but quickly on the laceration, cleaning and washing with lidocaine. “I think we can take care of this here, Megan,” Cameron said. “It’s going to need some stitches, but it’s small. It won’t hurt. I’ll numb it. And because of the size and location at your hairline, I wouldn’t fear a bad scar.” Then he looked over at Lorraine. “Is that all right with you, Lorraine?”

Although the woman twisted her hands, she nodded.

“I don’t think she has a concussion,” he went on. “I’m going to ask you to keep an eye on her tonight—I’ll give you some instructions before you take her home.”

Mel drew a syringe of something while Cameron donned sterile gloves. Then he leaned over her and said, “Tiny little mosquito bite, Meg, that’s all. I bet you don’t even have a headache tomorrow.”

Angie leaned so close to watch Cameron suture that Mel smiled and Cameron looked over his shoulder at her as if to say, Do you mind? When the stitches were in and a bandage covered the wound, Mel pulled Angie out of the room.

“Cameron’s going to ask Megan to just lie still for a while. He’ll examine her again before sending her home with her parents. I’m going to write in her chart.”