Would he ask the questions?
He wasn’t here to get involved, he reminded himself.
What was he here for?
To turn off. To find a place where he could immerse himself so totally in his medicine that everything else would be blocked out.
But the pain on Ginny’s face…
It found a reflection in what he’d been through. There was something…
Who was Richard? A husband? An invalid husband?
He wasn’t here to get involved.
‘I hurt,’ the man on the stretcher moaned, and Fergus sighed.
‘Where do you hurt?’
‘I told you-I smashed my hip.’
Yeah, right. ‘I can’t give you morphine until the alcohol wears off. And I need to do X-rays.’
‘Old doc would’a given me a shot by now.’
‘Yeah, he would have shut you up whatever the cost,’ Ginny flung at him over her shoulder. ‘I can see where he’s coming from. Dr Reynard, keep me away from that morphine.’
Cradle Lake Hospital was not exactly the nub of state-of-the-art technology that Fergus was used to.
It had been built fifty or sixty years ago, a pretty little cottage hospital that looked more like a country homestead than a medical facility. Most of the rooms were single, looking out onto the wide verandas that had views down to the lake on one side or up to the vast mountain ranges of the New South Wales snowfields on the other.
It was a great spot for a hospital. Unfortunately, it had been five years since Cradle Lake had been able to attract a doctor, and in those years the place had become little more than a nursing home. Old people came here to die. Patients needing doctors on call were transferred to somewhere with more facilities.
Nevertheless, Fergus had been stunned by the level of care displayed by what seemed an extraordinarily talented pool of local nurses. Being the only hospital for a hundred miles, the local nurses were called on for everything from snakebite to road trauma. They dealt with medicine at the coalface, and from what he’d learned in his two days here, by the time emergency cases were passed over to specialist care, the emergency would often be over.