By My Side. Wendy Jones Lou
to the ordeal he had put that poor boy through. So she squared up her shoulders and lifted her chin.
Mr Elliott was tall and dark; a striking man, whose features, suffused with even a modicum of warmth, might have been quite good looking on anyone else, but on him, they favoured only his gravitas. Unfortunately, in the serious light of her current situation, Kate couldn't help but quake.
She had to be strong. She had to stand up for the weak and the ill, the people who couldn't fight for themselves. It was going to be down to her to make him see how unfeeling he had been.
Grey-blue eyes bore into her as the silence lingered like a guillotine above her head and the trembling inside her began to grow.
"So you think, Nurse…" he said, deliberately peering closer at her uniform to read the name on her badge. "Excuse me, Staff Nurse Heath, that I should be reported for speaking plainly to one of my patients, do you? Maybe you would be kind enough to enlighten me as to why?"
Kate’s jaw clenched. He was patronising her, she was well aware of it, but while the little courage she had left remained, she was going to speak her mind. With the callous words of the surgeon who had recently treated her grandfather so appallingly hurtling to the forefront of her mind, she looked up into his steel-armoured eyes. "It was quite obvious that you were completely out of order in there," she said. "What gave you the right to judge that poor lad? I bet you don't even know the first thing about him; stuck up there in your ivory tower where life is so easy and Armani suits grow on trees. Who’s to say it wasn’t a genuine accident? But you wouldn't think of that, would you? You just laid into him. He was a quivering wreck by the time you’d finished."
Mr Elliott stood, poised in obvious frustration for a moment and then, when his voice finally broke, it was clenched and steady, as if a great force was being needed to keep it so. "And how should I have addressed the situation instead, may I ask?"
By this time Kate was rapidly running out of fire. She knew how to fight when her opponent shouted back, but this cool, calculated analysis had her on the wrong foot. She searched for something further to say, but came up blank.
"What, no sound advice? No words of wisdom?"
Kate bristled and shot him a glare, cursing her brain for letting her down right when she needed it.
"Maybe I had better remind you of your objections. I think the word 'bully' was in there, and from what I can remember you were attempting to incite mutiny on one of my wards. So would you care to elaborate on any of that? You were very free with your opinions a few minutes ago." He looked at her for a moment as her brain struggled hard to find the right words to say. "Maybe you should try running my team, doing my clinics and operating on my patients for a few days and then come back to me. At least then you might have some idea of what you're talking about."
"I wasn't questioning your abilities as a doctor,” she said, suddenly finding the spark she needed and tossing it right back at him, but her conviction was waning.
"Oh? Well, that is a relief." His tone had taken on a sarcastic quality that ignited the dying embers of her rage.
"No, it was your lack of compassion that I was questioning," Kate said. "It's not your right to play judge and jury, deciding who should be worthy of treatment and who should not. Are you absolutely certain he was the one to blame for the crash? It’s just as likely that he wasn’t. In fact we had one, just the other day, where a woman swerved to avoid a cat and crashed head-long into a van coming in the opposite direction."
Elliott's face paled. His stone wall cracked just a little as Kate could see the doubt settling in. For a second she could sense his turmoil and found new strength in his weakness. She looked at him straight in the eyes. "Precisely."
"Do you know what happened to bring him in here?" He asked, pausing for a moment to see if Kate would respond, but she didn’t. "No, you don't, do you? So I say to you, if someone had been a bit harder on that lad a few years ago, then maybe I wouldn't have another patient fighting for her life on ITU right now." He let out a small breath. "Maybe you should keep your nose out of business that does not concern you from now on and go back to… A&E?" He looked at her for confirmation of her department, "and concentrate on your own job. And the next time you try accusing someone of being 'unprofessional', I suggest you make absolutely sure your own behaviour is beyond reproach, or it might end up being you that gets reported for misconduct and not the poor wretch who finds himself on the sharp end of your malicious and ill-founded gossip."
Kate was defeated. Tears threatened to well up but she was damned if she was going to give him the pleasure of seeing it. She looked at the dull grey floor in front of her, Elliott's crisp black leather shoes firmly blocking her way. He hesitated for a moment, his brow crinkling and then he opened the door and stood back, letting her slip away in silence.
Kate’s hands were locked hard at her sides as she escaped the ward and walked as fast as she could, breaking out into the fresh air a few minutes later, in search of a moment's privacy. Away from prying eyes.
~~~
"I know how that feels," Lena mumbled and the woman was relieved to see the girl had been paying attention. Empathy was going to help her now.
~~~
Alone at last, Kate broke down. She leant back against a brick wall, with her palms pressed against the cool hard surface. She closed her eyes and tipped her head to the sky and slowly sank to the ground and wept. All the tension of the past few days had finally come to a head, exploding, quite dramatically, at Mr Elliott.
Footsteps approached and she quickly wiped the tears from her face and pulled herself together. A porter passed by, his thoughts a million miles away from her own. Kate dabbed her eyes with an old tissue she found in her pocket and lifted her chin, ready to face the day again.
In the canteen, she bought a sandwich and two Mars bars and found a quiet corner to sit down in. The first bar disappeared in a matter of seconds. How dare he? she thought as she sat there. Elliott had been the one losing it over one of his patients and he had had the nerve to take it out on her when all she'd done was have the courage to stand up to him. She pulled out her sandwich. He was a bully, but he was a consultant; he would never get his comeuppance. She had half a mind to go right back up to that poor lad and point him in the direction of the complaints procedure.
She wondered at how many times Mr Elliott might have been allowed to get away with this behaviour before. Maybe it was the reason he left his last hospital, she thought. She swigged back her carton of juice and decided to pocket the other bar of chocolate for later, binned the rubbish and then held out her hands. Still trembling.
Mr Elliott had slipped in under the radar when he’d joined the hospital almost six months before. Kate had neither particularly noticed, nor heard much about him, but if a fight had been what he’d wanted that day, then Kate had been in just the right mood to oblige him. She checked her watch. Arrogant bastard, she thought. She took a deep breath, straightened her uniform and walked back down to A&E.
Kate said nothing of the incident to her colleagues that day, if not because she was already questioning her part in it, then for the greater fear that if she began to speak and let go of her control, she might just fall to pieces in the middle of the department. But her reluctance to share did little to quell the undercurrent of anger she felt towards the arrogant, overbearing man, for the rest of that day.
That evening, her housemate, Sophie, realised something was up when she came home from work. She searched round the house only to find Kate in the kitchen, scrubbing the living daylights out of the work surfaces.
"Everything all right?" she asked, looking around quickly for any clues.
The sudden noise made Kate jump. "Grief! Don't do that to me," she said.
"Sorry," Sophie said.
"It was getting dirty in here," Kate told her, not faltering for a moment in her mission.
"You know I think that bit's pretty clean now," Sophie soothed.
Kate continued cleaning, her mind focussed on the task in hand