It Happened One Night
Luckily, it’s late, with little traffic around. Anna realises her mistake almost immediately and swerves across the road, accompanied by a strangled cry from Tolly. For once, the notorious LA traffic is not a problem and she drives fast, breaking speed limits wherever she sees it is free of pedestrians. She screws up once more, finding herself in the wrong lane at an intersection and unable to make the turn, but the sat nav rescues her. Finally, she sees the road sign for North Hangar Avenue. She slows her pace, eyes searching out the guardhouse. There. She makes the turn but doesn’t wait for the guard, driving straight through and hoping he recognises the car. She follows the route Frank took the night before and finally pulls up in front of the garage. Security lights bathe the area in harsh white light. They must have been turned off for the party.
She helps Tolly from the car. His balance is already going and she realises she will never get him up the stairs. She sandwiches him against the wall as she goes through his pockets until her fingers close around his keys. Thankfully, he doesn’t have some fancy code lock. She slides the key in and opens the door. The house is dark and smells faintly of floral cleaner, probably the aftermath of the party. She finds a switch. Together, she and Tolly navigate the hall and enter the big double-height living room. The couch will have to do.
Anna helps him to the sofa. She can see the terror in his face, his eyes wide. Speech may be difficult, but he can still hear. It is time for reassurance. She assumes her calming voice.
“In most cases, this resolves without interference, within twenty-four hours.” Bang goes their drive along the Pacific Highway. “Your speech will be disrupted and your co-ordination will go, but it will be temporary. I will stay with you and monitor you. If I see anything worrying, I will call an ambulance straight away.”
She takes his hand and strokes down his wrist and up again, rather more intimately than she would normally do with a patient. “Tolly, I’m a bloody good doctor. I won’t let any harm come to you.”
His eyes relax a little. And she realises he does trust her. “If you can let go of the worry, it will be best if you sleep. This will get worse before it gets better.”
Again, she strokes his hand. “Now, I need to make a phone call, but I won’t be far away.”
Anna moves to the hallway, turning her body to reduce the chance of being overheard. She tries Bella first, but the call goes to voicemail. She curses her friend but doesn’t leave a message. At one time, she would have sworn she could count on Bella but this trip has altered that opinion. She taps the phone against her palm; it’s late but she really has no alternative. She opens the screen and calls Seth.
He answers after two rings. “Dr Mortimer,” his voice booms from the phone. “Have you got another customer for me already?”
“Afraid so,” she confirms, “but this one is a little tricky. Are you at work?”
“No. They do let me go home occasionally. Even on a Friday night.”
“I’m with a person – a film star – and he needs help.”
“Drugs?”
“No. Nothing like that. I think he has paralytic shellfish poisoning.”
“Oh, that’s different. And reportable. How film starry are we talking?”
“A-star plus.”
“What do you need?”
“I’ve got nothing, so … everything. Stethoscope, blood oxygen monitor with alarm. Whatever you can think of.”
“Address?”
“I’ll send you a pin. There’s security on the gate, so you might need to flash your credentials.”
She goes into the kitchen and opens cupboards until she finds a glass. It will do as a stethoscope until Seth gets to her. Respiratory failure is the biggest problem to watch out for. She returns to her patient and pulls up a footstool to perch beside him. Unbuttoning his shirt, she places the glass upside down on his chest and lowers her ear. His breath sounds are reassuringly normal.
She sets the glass back down and looks around the room. Finally, she spots what she’s seeking – a bin. She tucks it near Tolly’s head. Not everyone experiences nausea and vomiting, but it is not unknown. “Just in case,” she tells him, before sliding his shoes off his feet. “I’m going to remove your belt and shorts, so you are more comfortable.” And so she has faster access if he has diarrhoea. Which reminds her. She pulls out her phone and sends a text. And a bedpan and urine bottle .
To be fair, she could improvise both of these if necessary, but it would be far more comfortable for Tolly to have purpose-made items. Even as late as it is, she is fairly certain she could find most of these items in London and hopes Los Angeles is similar. Then she goes back to removing some of his clothes. As she pulls the buckle on his belt, she can’t help chuckling. “I bet this is not how either of us saw it playing out. After that kiss, me removing your trousers was a distinct possibility, but fate has her tricks, eh?”
She rolls him forwards and her hand slides over his hips, pushing his shorts down until she can pull them off. She continues to explain everything she is doing in the soft, calming voice she uses on her patients. When she has him half-undressed, she pulls him as closely as she can into a recovery position. The sofa, while deep-seated, is not nearly big enough to accommodate Tolly with his limbs spread forwards, so she collects cushions and wedges them behind his body to hold him in position.
The evening is still warm, but it will get cold towards dawn, so she searches for a blanket or throw. The room is devoid of soft, cuddly furnishings. She sighs. She will strip a cover off one of the beds once Seth arrives, but until she has something to monitor her patient, she prefers to stay in earshot.
Pulling up an easy chair, a design statement in cream leather, she sits by Tolly’s head. She stretches out a hand, touching his shoulder, a gesture of reassurance for both of them.
“I’ve got a friend coming – another doctor,” she tells him. “He’s an attending at one of the local hospitals – a consultant. He’s bringing me some tech.” And some top cover. “He’ll probably check you over as well.” She leaves her hand on his shoulder, hoping it gives Tolly as much comfort as it seems to give her.
Anna has no idea how long Seth will be, whether he has most of what she needs at his home, or whether he will have to visit a late-night pharmacy. But sitting quietly with Tolly reminds her just how tired she already is. She dare not fall asleep here, not until she has a blood oxygen monitor. Whilst she has enough practice forcing herself to stay awake during an occasional long, uneventful night duty, it is not usually after a day where she has kayaked half-way around an island. Even the nap on the boat is not enough to keep sleep at bay. Eventually, she realises she will have to keep moving.
She stands and starts wandering around the room, peering into corners, giving a running commentary so Tolly knows she is still there. She stops every so often to listen to his breathing and is pleased to detect no change. She looks at the books on a bookshelf but soon realises they are probably just for show – hardback tomes in earth shades on fashion and cookery. They don’t interest her at all. And she struggles to reconcile the active man she has spent the day with and his book collection. The house must have been rented furnished. On one lamp table, there is a single silver photo frame containing a wedding photo. It appears to be the only item that is demonstrably Tolly’s in the room.
Anna picks it up to study it. It is a family group. Although the faces are too small to distinguish features clearly, she is sure the figure at the end is Tolly. Standing beside him is a woman she doesn’t recognise. She wonders if the woman was pre- or post-Eleanor. The bride must be Tolly’s sister. She is beaming at the camera as if it is the happiest day of her life. Inside Anna, a tiny nugget of jealousy stirs. It is the first time Anna has ever felt the slightest bit of envy for anyone else’s relationship. Not even when Eleanor married Jacob, the two of them clearly infatuated with each other, had Anna felt anything other than amused tolerance.
She holds still, trying to work out what has changed, but she can find nothing. Tolly’s parents must be the couple on the end, his mother’s face half-obscured by a ludicrously big-brimmed hat. Still, she looks glamorous in a floaty sea-foam dress, avoiding the trap of dressing several decades older. Anna peers at the man by her side, a full head of grey hair, his chest slightly puffed out as if on a military parade. This must be Tolly’s father, even though they have dissimilar heights and body shape. She looks for any sign of the split to come between his parents, but their body language speaks to nothing but happy pride.
With a shock, she realises how little she knows about Tolly. This is the only personal item in the room, so it must hold significance for him. Yet she cannot name a single person in the image apart from Tolly. Nor does she know if the woman accompanying him is a friend or an ex. Although in this case, some of the answers could be easily supplied by a few seconds on the internet, the point remains: Eleanor would have known the answers.
She puts the photo down, merely remarking to Tolly, “Your sister looks pretty. The way her husband is looking at her, I suspect you will end up an uncle several times over.”
Crossing the room, she returns to the footstool by the couch. Taking his wrist in her hand, she checks his pulse. “The best thing you could do would be to go to sleep. I promise I will be here, watching over you.” His eyes gaze up at her for a moment. Then his eyelids lower.
She sits by his side, this time choosing to keep herself awake by scrolling through her phone. The news is all depressing, so she switches to social media. Bella has posted pictures of herself in some club after Tolly’s party. She is draped over a succession of guys. Anna is not current with the movie world’s hot new stars, especially as she has never been into comic strips and superheroes. Ironic really, given whom she has spent the day with. She assumes the men are famous. She sighs and hopes James writes LA down as a holiday romance but fears his heart was more seriously engaged.
Her phone sounds. A single word. Outside .
Anna hurries to the door, almost throwing her arms around Seth when she sees him, a carrier bag in each of his hands. She hustles him through the foyer and into the lounge, almost running into the back of him when he stops short as he spots the patient.
He blows out a breath. “You weren’t kidding about celebrity, were you?” He turns to look at her. “If you’d taken him into a public hospital in this state, some bystander would have leapt to a drugs overdose diagnosis in a heartbeat. The story would have been all over social media a second later.”
They move to the front of the sofa. “Okay,” Seth says. “Present.”
Anna summarises, as she would for any patient. “Male, early thirties, experienced onset of peripheral paraesthesia approximately thirty minutes after ingestion of seafood taco from a food van. Other symptoms include ataxia. Possible nausea. No vomiting, no diarrhoea. As far as I can tell, no tachycardia. Breath sounds normal and no shortness of breath.”
“Any history of drug use?”
“Not in the last twelve hours,” she says. She doesn’t think Tolly routinely takes drugs, but this is Hollywood and who knows for sure.
Seth puts his bags down and starts handing her boxes. She unpacks a blood pressure cuff and a pulse oximeter. She puts the supplied batteries in the latter and slides it onto the middle finger of Tolly’s hand. His eyes open and she smiles at him, projecting reassurance. “This is my friend, Seth. You will remember I told you about him. He’s an attending. He’s brought me some equipment.” It takes a few seconds, but she is relieved to see a healthy blood oxygen reading. His pulse is slightly elevated, but nothing concerning.
Again, she slides the batteries into the blood pressure monitor before placing the cuff around Tolly’s upper arm. She reads off the figures to Seth.
“Mildly hypertensive, but nothing too concerning,” he says. “I agree with your diagnosis. I don’t see any reason to move him to the hospital unless his breathing worsens. The crucial time is three to eight hours after ingestion. Good catch, though. Paralytic shellfish poisoning is rare. I’ll report it for you, but let’s hope we don’t see more cases from vans using shellfish from unregulated sources.”
Anna makes sure to reassure Tolly before she leaves him to walk Seth to the door. Once the attending has left, she heads for the kitchen. She needs coffee if she is to get through the night. Now she has the pulse oximeter on her patient’s finger, the alarm will alert her to any change in his oxygen levels.
A bean-to-cup coffee machine squats in a corner of the kitchen. It has dials and buttons galore, but mercifully, someone has already filled it with beans and water, leaving it ready for use. After a couple of false starts, a stream of rich brown liquid begins to trickle into her waiting cup. She sniffs the aroma gratefully, then goes in search of a throw blanket for Tolly while the cup fills.
When she returns to her patient, she finds he has once more slipped into sleep. She sets her coffee down and covers him with the blanket, before settling beside him. It’s going to be a long night.