Doc Rock (Burra Creek Romance #3)

1. Mai

Mai

At two fifty-five am, the harsh sound of her phone ripped Dr Maisie Jones from a deep, dreamless sleep, and she was out of bed before she even realised what woke her. Grabbing her pink-rimmed glasses from her bedside table, she shoved them on and answered the call.

As the Junior Doctor spoke, she pulled on her pink scrubs and dashed out of the house.

By three in the morning, Mai was driving to Kookaburra Creek Base Hospital to look after a baby born eight weeks premature via emergency caesarean section.

At the hospital, Mai found her Registrar, Tanya, doing her best to hold the baby on CPAP, a facemask that gave a little bit of positive pressure into the baby's lungs to help him breathe.

But one look at the poor little thing—who was blue around the edges with saturations far lower than they should be—told her they needed to intubate the baby now to get him stabilised.

When she'd first started paediatric training, babies as small as this one terrified her, but now, if you weighed more than four kilograms, you were huge.

"Tanya. We're going to intubate this baby. He needs surfactant," Mai said to the young doctor standing beside her.

"What do you want me to do?' Tanya sounded relieved that she no longer had to make decisions for the tiny little boy.

"You've done great so far. You put a cannula in, and I'll prepare for intubation." Mai gave the junior doctor an encouraging smile.

"Okay, boss," Tanya said and set about her assigned task.

"Miriam," Mai said to the nurse in charge of the night shift, "We're going to intubate this young man. Please can I have a size-zero blade and a two-point-five uncuffed tube.

"No problem." The nurse gestured to the equipment she'd already laid out.

Mai opened the drawer of the intubation trolley and retrieved the drugs she needed. "Do we have a weight?" she addressed the nurse again.

"Yes. He's one point eight kilograms."

"What was the gestation?" Mai wracked her tired brain. They'd told her, but sometimes, in the middle of the night, information fell straight out of her head.

"Thirty-two weeks," Miriam supplied.

"Okay. And you said it was an abruption?"

"Yeah," Tanya confirmed. "Mum presented with pain to birthing suite. The baby was in distress, so they went to theatre."

Mai nodded. An abruption, where the placenta separated while the baby was still inside, was a medical emergency. This little man was lucky his parents didn't live too far from the hospital and went there when his mum experienced pain.

"Access in," Tanya said as she flushed the cannula she had just inserted into one of the baby's minuscule blue veins.

"Does this little man have a name?" Mai enquired as she checked her equipment one last time before they began the intubation.

"No. The parents haven't chosen one yet," Tanya said.

"Is Dad around?" Mai asked.

Tanya shook her head. "No, he's still in theatre with Mum. She was hysterical, so he couldn't leave her to come with us."

Mai gently touched the baby's face. "Don't worry, little man, we'll look after you."

They worked efficiently to secure the baby's airway and administered the surfactant. Mai huffed a sigh of relief when he started to pink up, and his saturations improved.

Hopefully, his only problem would be his immature lungs, as at thirty-two weeks, he wasn't ready to breathe for himself. If they'd had any warning of his imminent birth, they would have given his mum steroids to help his lungs develop, and then maybe he wouldn't need ventilating now.

Once Mai was satisfied her newest and youngest patient was stable, she let exhaustion seep back in, rubbing her eyes blearily. Nights like this made her feel old, even though she was only thirty-eight.

"I'm going to sleep in the on-call room for a couple of hours before we start rounds in the morning," she said wearily.

"No worries," Tanya replied, looking much happier now that the baby was improving.

Mai pushed her glasses up her nose and walked tiredly out of the neonatal intensive care unit—or NICU for short—and into the on-call room next door.

Her gaze caught on the mirror, and she grinned wryly at the big bags under her eyes and the curly blonde bob that now resembled a bird's nest.

For a moment, she could see the young woman she was before medical school. The woman she was for six years while she toured with the band Midnight Thunder, playing lead guitar and writing music.

Back then, she dyed her hair black and straightened it so it hung to her shoulder blades. She never wore her glasses. Instead, she wore contact lenses with purple irises that hid her natural blue ones, and she applied heavy black eyeliner, giving her a raccoon-like look.

Anyone who knew her then would struggle to recognise her after her metamorphosis from the young rock chick, who only dressed in black, to the mature doctor, whose favourite colour was pink.

Sometimes, when she was bone-tired from lack of sleep, Mai wondered what her life would be like if she'd stayed with Midnight Thunder.

And even though she was the one who ran away and hid from the band and music, she still found that her fingers itched if she hadn't picked up her guitar for a few days, as music for her was a compulsion as necessary as breathing.

It had been remarkably easy to disappear.

She’d let the black hair dye grow out and never straightened it again.

The surname that they'd known her by, Harrington, wasn't her legal last name, as Darren, the man she called Dad—the man that everyone in her life assumed was her biological father—was actually her stepdad.

Her legal surname, Jones, came from the man who only stuck around long enough to sign the birth certificate.

Her mum, Yvonne and Stepdad had been her biggest fans.

They'd supported her when she deferred medical school to see where things went with the band.

They drove her all over the country, Darren acting as an unpaid roadie for an entire summer when Midnight Thunder went on their first tour, and they watched with pride when she signed her name on their first big record deal.

They treated Ford, Scotty and Joel, the other band members, like their long-lost sons. They fed them, housed them, travelled with them and cheered the loudest for them.

Mai's mum was the only one she confided in about the panic attacks she started to suffer from once the audience grew, and the screaming crowd of fans clamouring for her attention became overwhelming.

Her mum supported her, providing a shoulder to cry on when it was too much, and she stood on the side of the stage whenever Mai needed the extra presence to help steady her.

It was raining the night she lost both her parents. They drove to the concert as it was only twenty kilometres from home, the concert that they hadn't been planning on attending, but Mai called them in a panic, her breathing erratic and pulse racing.

After the show, the police arrived at the bar where the band were celebrating. They told her the road was wet from the torrential rain, and the car slipped.

Mai sobbed until her voice was gone, and still she cried. She couldn't remember much of the next few months. She tried to perform again with Midnight Thunder, but without her mum and dad's steadying presence, she couldn't do it.

So one day, she packed a bag of clothes and walked out the door. She left everything else behind. Her guitar, her identity and her heart.

She contacted the medical school that allowed her to defer, and they invited her to re-interview and offered her a place for the next year.

Medical school was tough. She kept to herself, making no friends. All she did was study and work any job she could get to make ends meet. But she didn't feel the need to socialise, as she had lived a lifetime of socialisation in her six years with the band.

It was only since she’d settled in Burra Creek for her consultant job that she tentatively began to make some friends.

She got chatting to Sadie, the head of the anaesthetic department in theatre one day, and before she quite knew what had happened, she was the newest member of their pub quiz team.

And Sadie, Clara—another anaesthetist—and Hel—an Emergency consultant—had declared her as part of their group.

As the years passed, she watched from afar as her old band, Midnight Thunder, went from strength to strength.

She saw them become the biggest band in Australia, then soon after, conquer the world.

They produced hit after hit, and sold out stadium after stadium, as they travelled to the four corners of the globe.

It was only in the early hours of the morning that she ever wondered what life would have been like if she'd stayed with the band. If she hadn't run from him, Graham Ford, her first love and the lead singer of Midnight Thunder.

Mai struck the pose she had been famous for and stared into the mirror. The angry eyes and downward tilt of her chin didn't match the woman she was now, Dr Maisie Jones, Neonatologist, even if they had fit with the person she was back then, Sie Harrington, the Rock Star.

Laughing softly at herself, she flopped down on the bed in the dingy on-call room.

This was precisely where she was meant to be.