But she couldn’t look at his face. She needed to focus. This baby needed skills that she possessed.

He certainly did.

When the results of the echocardiograph were in front of her she felt her heart sink. Any thoughts she had of flying out of this place tonight were completely gone.

‘It’s pulmonary stenosis.’

With the stethoscope she’d been able to hear the characteristic heart murmur at the left upper chest. That and the fast heart rate had made her fairly sure what was causing the cyanosis. And now… Her fears were confirmed. There was a huge pressure difference between the right ventricle and the pulmonary artery. Blood flowing in one direction and unable to escape fast enough in the other. Recipe for catastrophe.

‘We can’t risk transfer to Brisbane,’ Cal said slowly-reluctantly. ‘We’ll lose him.’

‘What’s happening?’ Mike asked. He’d come in and watched as they worked, but he’d been on the sidelines. Another nurse was there now-a woman in her thirties who’d been introduced as Jill Shaw, the director of nursing. Jill was wheeling the baby back under the nursery lights, with instructions to keep warming, keep monitoring breathing, while the three of them were left staring at the results.

‘We operate,’ Gina said, staring down at her fingers as if there were some sort of easy answer to be read there. There wasn’t. They really needed a paediatric cardiologist, but the nearest available would be in Brisbane and to transfer the baby…

They would have had to if she hadn’t been here. They’d have been forced to. Cal was an excellent general surgeon, she thought, and his additional physician training made him a wonderful all-rounder in this place where multi-skills were vital. She knew that. Cal’s skills were one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place.

But the operation for pulmonary stenosis on such a tiny child…

The heart valve they’d be working on-the pulmonary valve-was thin, even in adults. Composed of three coverlets, like leaflets, it opened in the direction of the blood flow. With pulmonary stenosis those leaflets were blocked or malformed in some way. In the baby’s case it was a major blockage. His heart was being forced to work far too hard to force blood through.