CHAPTER TWO

      HELEN didn’t stay long. She found Tom’s presence altogether too disturbing in that little room, and after finishing her tea she made some excuse and fled.

      During the course of that night she spent a great deal of time telling herself that her reaction to him was fifty per cent imagination and fifty per cent the result of her solitary and loveless existence. By the morning she almost believed it, but ten minutes on duty threw a hefty spanner in those works.

      She was just welcoming a very subdued Ron Church to the ward and beginning the process of admitting him when the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and Tom strolled into view, more casually dressed than the previous day in lightweight trousers and a white coat, and doing unspeakable things to her blood-pressure.

      ‘Morning, Sister, morning, Mr Church,’ he murmured, and with a fleeting smile he hitched one leg up and perched on the other side of the bed. ‘How are you feeling today?’ he asked the patient.

      Mr Church sighed heavily. ‘Resigned—scared, a bit.’

      Tom nodded. ‘Yes, it’s all a bit of an unknown quantity, isn’t it? Don’t worry. Let Sister Cooper get all the paperwork out of the way and I’ll come and have a long chat and see if I can set your mind at rest, all right?’

      He moved away, going into the side-ward where Judy Fulcher had spent a fairly uncomfortable night following her burst appendix.

      After Helen had finished with Mr Church she followed Tom in there and found him just covering Judy up again.

      That looks fine,’ he said with a quick lift of his lips, and Judy gave him a wan smile in return.

      ‘I feel awful,’ she said.

      ‘I’m sure. You’ve been brewing this for some time, though, so you’re bound to feel rough for a few days until the antibiotics can get to grips with things. Still, you should be over the worst by now. We’ll get you up later today and get you moving, and that should help to get you on the mend more quickly.’

      She groaned with the thought, and Tom patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take it very slowly. Just a few minutes in a chair at first, and then later perhaps a walk round the bed.’

      They left the room, and he flashed a smile at Helen. ‘Mr Church ready for me?’

      She nodded. ‘Yes, he is. He’s very scared, Tom.’

      ‘I’m sure. I would be, but then I know more than he does. I need to discuss him with you as well—perhaps we can do that first?’

      She took him into the office and Tom explained that they were going to start by building him up a little. He would need blood transfusions to overcome the anaemia caused by prolonged blood loss from his ulcerated bowel before he would be fit enough for surgery. In the meantime he would be starved and his bowel emptied as far as possible to create as clean a field as they could for the operation.

      Initially they would open him up to see if they could establish the extent of the tumour. Then they would remove as much as was necessary, depending on the progress of the growth. If it was too far advanced to hope for a cure, they would perform a palliative operation designed to minimise pain and distress in his remaining months. If they felt there was any hope of saving him, they would perform probably much more radical surgery including the removal of all of the descending colon, the rectum and anus and any affected lymph glands, in the hope that this more drastic approach would remove all the malignant cells.

      Tom, however, was not optimistic.

      ‘It looked too far gone, Helen. We’ll do what we can, but —’ He shook his head. ‘Still, we can only try. Right, I’ll go and have a chat to him.’

      Tom’s pessimism was well founded. When they finally opened Mr Church up on Thursday, they found the cancer had spread too far to hope for a cure, with metastases in the lymph nodes and invasion of surrounding organs, including his liver.

      Ross felt that any surgical intervention should be aimed at causing as little distress as possible, and so they removed part of the descending colon and rectum and rejoined the ends, thus removing any immediate danger of obstruction and leaving the man his dignity for the short time he had left.

      Tom found Helen after he came out of Theatre, and filled her in.

      ‘What a damn shame,’ she said sadly. ‘He’s such a nice man.’

      ‘A least his wife will know what to expect,’ he said enigmatically, and left her, puzzled, while he went to snatch some lunch before his clinic in the afternoon.

      Ross came up during the afternoon and spoke to Mrs Church, and then Helen had the unenviable task of dealing with the shattered woman.

      ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said over and over again. ‘I thought he had piles. I kept telling him not to make such a fuss, and now it turns out he’s dying!’ She pressed her fist against her mouth to stifle the sobs, but to no avail. Helen put her arm round her and let her cry, and after a few minutes she tried to pull herself together. Helen gave her a cup of tea, and Mrs Church was halfway through it before the tears got the better of her again.

      It was nearly five and time for Helen to hand over to her staff nurse for the evening before Mrs Church finally left, and as a consequence Helen had a mountain of paperwork to wrestle with before she could leave.

      She was just coming to the end of it when Ross and Tom came in headed for the coffee-pot.

      ‘How’s Mr Church?’

      ‘Asleep—he was very dopey. Ruth’s specialling him.’

      Ross nodded. ‘I’ll pop in and have a chat before I go home tonight, if he’s awake enough. Otherwise I’ll see him in the morning. What about Judy Fulcher?’

      ‘She’s doing well—her peritonitis is settling and she seems to be responding well to the antibiotics. Alex Carter came and saw her yesterday and confirmed a generalised gynae infection—he wants to keep an eye on her. Seems she’s got gonorrhoea, chlamydia and candida among other things.’

      Tom wrinkled his nose. ‘Delightful. I thought she was married?’

      ‘She is,’ Helen told them. ‘Perhaps her husband brought the bugs home?’

      ‘How