72 Hours

You got me rocking

Mary sat rocking in the chair in the Casualty waiting room. Her left hand really really hurt.

Anna rubbed her back. "It shouldn't be to long. The ward clerk said it was a quiet night and the doctor will see you shortly.".

After what seemed forever her name was called and Mary followed the nurse to a cubicle.

A young doctor came in looking at a clipboard. Mary looked up for an instance into the most amazing blues eyes and then her hand started to throb again and she looked down again at it. She heard the name Crawley and the doctor asking her what he could do for her. Later she could not say exactly why she did it, it may have been the pain and anxiety about her thumb, but she snapped at him "It's Lady Crawley".

"I am sorry Your Ladyship, I will make a note of that on the chart" the doctor made a note and then said "Now if I could see your hand".

The doctor gently unwrapped the towel. John had put one of her sanitary napkins on the wound and wrapped it very tightly with some new pantyhose. The doctor cut off this makeshift bandage,

"Whomever did this for you did a very good job of first aid"

John would be pleased to hear that. "John said he had to deal with a lot of wounds in the army."

"Did he wash the wound before he wrapped it?"

Yes, he used some bottled water, he said it was the most sterile thing around"

"The army taught him well. Now how did you manage to do this?" This was a deep cut in the fleshy part of her palm just below her thumb. It ended just where her thumb started. "A little further and you wouldn't have been able to hitchhike anymore".

"I was trying to get the foil off a bottle of wine. I couldn't get under it to peel it off so I got a paring knife and ..."

"Holding the neck of the bottle in your left hand you took the paring knife in your right hand and tried to scrap the foil up the neck and then the blade slipped."

"Yes" Mary felt guilty admitting doing something so stupid.

"Chateauneuf du Pape claims another victim. It happens all the time, otherwise I would be out of a job. And then where would we be?" he smiled at her.

"Now I am going to spray your wound with the same magic stuff they use on footy players to freeze your hand so I can clean the wound further and then stitch it up."

The doctor asked what type of business she was in. When she asked the relevance of that he smiled at her and said if they talked about something other than her hand time would pass a lot faster. They could talk about any topic she wanted, other than religion, politics or football, her choice if she wanted, but she had put down businesswoman as her occupation and he was curious. So she told him about her company, Downton Arms Ltd., how she found land to build blocks of flats on, high end flats mind you. How she was proud that her company had won awards for energy conservation and architecturally integrating the buildings into the existing neighbourhoods. As she talked he worked on her hand, but even so she felt that she had his complete attention. He asked intelligent questions and quickly found the two biggest holes in her narrative: her relative youth and the vast amounts of money that must be required. The first she explained away by telling him how she had decided university would be a waste of time and she had gone to work with her grandfather and he had later helped her start up her own business. She answered the second by just saying she had private investors. One that is, her grandfather, one of the richest men in the United States outside the oil tycoons and the computer barons, but he did not have to know that.

And then he was finished. She felt disappointed, she could have talked to him for hours. She looked at the wound, it was neatly stitched up with tiny little stitches.

He held her hand and manipulated her fingers and her thumb. "There, that should do it. Keep it clean. You can wash normally, just don't scrub it. Come back in two weeks and we will take out the stitches. In the meantime if it causes you any problems come back and see us. I will just get you a script for some antibiotics" and he got up and went to the nursing station.

While he was gone Mary looked at the clipboard. He had printed 'LADY' over the spaces for Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms and then 'CBT'. She hurriedly looked away when he returned.

He gave her the script and a small sample pack of antibiotics to get her through the night. "When was your last tetanus shot?" She shook her head and he continued "then in that case I will have Nurse Friendly give you one. She'll be right with you. I'm not going to give you any painkillers. If need be take a couple of Tylenol. Any questions?"

"No, thank you for your help Dr." and then she saw his name tag "Crawley".

"Now that's a coincidence we could have talked about instead of the property development business." he smiled at her. "Goodnight Lady Crawley" and he was gone.

Mary sat there for only a few minutes before Nurse Friendly came to give her the shot.

"Dr. Crawley..." Mary began.

"Are you related?" asked the nurse.

"No, not that I know of, I was just ..."

"Smitten are you. He is certainly something isn't he. First the eyes get your attention. Then the voice captures you. There's liquid gold in that voice. And he finishes you off with that smile. Well join the crowd, all the single female staff here and half the married ones are in love with him. And pretty much every female patient, from toddler to crone, married or not, who comes in the door. But forget it, you don't have any better chance than the rest of us."

"Oh?" Mary was fascinated.

"He is pure professionalism. No fraternization with staff or patients for him. We call him Doc Galahad he is so pure."

"Maybe he is in a ..."

"Not that anyone knows. As far as we know he isn't married, living with anyone, seeing anyone,

dating anyone, and he certainly doesn't show up on anyone's gaydar."

Nurse Friendly appraised Mary. "I can tell that he likes you"

"Oh?"

"He spent most of his dinner hour putting in those tiny little stitches so you wouldn't have much of a scar. Doc Heep would have sprayed some super glue on it and sent you on your way after making a pass at you. Now when did he tell you to come back to get those stitches out?".

"In two weeks".

Nurse Friendly consulted something on her computer. "Now if you were to come here in exactly fifteen days say at 11:00 am, which is about the quietest time it is ever going to be around here, you could get those stitches pulled. When that last stitch is pulled you're not a patient anymore are you? And he gets off at noon, lunchtime if you get my drift."

"Thank you very much" Mary entered the date and time on her iphone. "One more thing, on my chart he wrote 'CBT'..."

The nurse scowled at her. "If I tell you, will you promise not to make a complaint against him?"

"I promise"

"It's code for 'Could Be Trouble'".

Trouble indeed, Mary thought, the good doctor might find out that there's trouble and then there's trouble. She smiled to herself.

As she walked to meet Anna and John in the waiting room Mary realized that she had not asked what his first name was. 'M' stood for what? Michael? Mark? Matthew?

A/N: do not believe the truth of any medical matters referred to in this story. They are all fiction. If you have a medical problem consult a professional.