Sneak Peek
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
“Hey, Doc, check this out!”
Rebecca McIan looked up from making notes on her charts to see Billy Baker, her youngest patient, performing a somewhat wobbly wheelchair spin in the hospital hallway.
She smiled as she pulled on her lab coat and went out to greet him and his mother, who grabbed the push handles of his chair to stop him from attempting another whirl.
“Enough showing off, my boy,” Georgia Baker told him.
“Aw, come on, Mommy,” six-year-old Billy said.
Like his mother he had big brown eyes and blond curly hair, which often deceived people into assuming he was just as angelic.
“I gotta practice if I want to beat Stephen Rainey.” He looked at Rebecca.
“He broke the world record by doing sixty-six wheelchair spins in a minute. I’m going to do sixty-eight. ”
“That’s a very impressive goal,” she told him. “Don’t you get dizzy?”
“Nope.” He grinned widely. “Not ever.”
“Unfortunately that’s true, Doctor.” Georgia leaned over to kiss the top of his Red Sox baseball cap. “This child has tornado brain.” To her son she said, “You can practice your chair spins at home. Now it’s time for your PT.”
Pouting a little, Billy rolled down the hall toward the pediatric therapy room.
His mother followed, talking quietly about the past weekend at home.
As his primary caregiver Mrs. Baker collaborated with Rebecca on her son’s home treatment, which included daily exercises and practicing independent tasks like transferring from his chair to his bed and back again without assistance.
The boy currently spent three mornings a week at Revere Rehabilitation Hospital working on improving his upper body strength.
As the department’s Doctor of Physical Therapy, Rebecca supervised his sessions, assessed his condition and progress, and set new goals.
Thankfully the benign tumor that had caused the boy’s paralysis three years ago had not grown back after surgical removal.
With the ongoing advances in spinal injury treatment, there was a chance that Billy might someday walk again.
A few visitors to the floor passed them, and frowned at Rebecca, who realized why and tugged out her lanyard with her ID card.
Thanks to her young features and thin, boyish build people often mistook her for a pediatric patient, especially when she wore her red curly hair in high ponytails like today.
She also kept her driver’s license handy to prove her age.
“Do you ever get tired of looking like a tween Rita Hayworth?” Georgia asked.
“Thank you for not comparing me to Little Orphan Annie, and yes, every time I get carded for ordering a glass of wine at a restaurant.” She laughed along with her.
“Hey, Debbie’s here,” the boy said as they entered the cheerfully decorated therapy room, which was painted and furnished to look more like a playground for the kids. “Can we do a wheelbarrow race after exercises?”
Rebecca’s PT aide Nancy, who was working with the other patient on her core strengthening, looked up and smiled.
Although racing was usually something they did at the end of the week, Rebecca suspected Billy had ulterior motives for the request. “If we get all our work done, we can.”
After working on Billy’s strength and mobility exercises for an hour, and discussing with Georgia some changes to his home therapy, Rebecca and Nancy placed padded mats from one side of the room to the other.
As Rebecca retrieved their racing equipment box and set up the finish line, Nancy, Debbie, Billy and his mother moved to the other end of the pads and got into position.
Each adult held the paralyzed children’s ankles, while the kids propped themselves up with their hands on the floor.
The slant of their bodies made them vaguely resemble wheelbarrows.
As Rebecca raised a little green flag they kept for just such purposes, both of the children giggled madly.
“Ready,” she called out. “Set. Go!”
Billy used his hands to walk across the padded floor, shooting ahead of Debbie. As his mother trotted to keep up with the boy’s scrambling, Rebecca gave her a thumbs up. A few seconds later Billy crossed the end of the floor mats, taking down the finish line ribbon just one hand ahead of Debbie.
Georgia groaned as she lowered Billy’s legs to the mats. “I cannot keep up with this child. Maybe it’s time for me to start working out.”
“Why didn’t you let me win?” the girl demanded as Nancy helped her up into her wheelchair.
“Sorry, but I’d never do that to you,” Billy assured her. “It’s worse than cheating. Like the doc says, you can’t win unless you work for it. Don’t be mad at me.”
Debbie stuck out her bottom lip until the boy reached out and took hold of her hand. “Okay.” Her cheeks turned pink as she looked up at Nancy. “Can we have our juice and snack now?”
Rebecca nodded to her aide, who ushered the kids out into the hall. Georgia stayed behind, grimacing as she pressed a hand to the small of her back.
“He’s doing better with transfers to chairs and the bed, but I still have to lift him when he plays with his cars on the floor,” she explained. “I’m afraid I don’t always remember how heavy he is now, or to bend my knees.”
“Let me show you an exercise you can do to help with the back pain,” Rebecca offered, patting the therapy table.
Demonstrating the simple knee-to-chest lift and hold that Georgia could do while lying on her back wasn’t part of Rebecca’s responsibilities as Billy’s DPT, of course.
If her department head knew she was treating any adult for free—even a patient’s caregiver—she’d get a lecture and possibly a written reprimand.
None of that mattered to her. Relieving someone’s pain and improving their physical condition meant more to her than the hospital’s rules and insurance billings.
She also did the exercise herself whenever the scar tissue in her back became inflamed, which had been a chronic problem since she was twelve.
“Start with five reps in the morning, afternoon and evening,” Rebecca said. “Add one extra rep every other day until you work up to fifteen minutes of stretching per day in total. You should start to notice some improvement with your back pain within a week.”
“Thanks, Dr. McIan, that really helps,” Georgia said once she rose and stretched. “See you Wednesday, huh?”
After Billy’s mother left Rebecca tidied the room and then went to her office to check her schedule.
A last-minute cancellation meant she had several hours before her next patient arrived, and she’d skipped breakfast, so she decided to grab an early lunch.
With an eye on the cloudy weather, she stuffed a scarf in her bag.
“You should try that deli over on Tremont Street, Doc,” the department secretary said when she signed out. “The Reuben sandwiches are wicked delish.”
“I never dodge a wicked Reuben.” Smiling a little, Rebecca checked her watch. “I’ll be back in two hours, but text me if you need me.”
Passing by the elevators to take the stairs down to the first floor added a little bounce to Rebecca’s step.
She had enough time to have lunch and visit her favorite outdoor book shop, where she hoped to find some new reads.
Since her grandparents had moved to their retirement home in Florida she had been living alone in their old brick house near the hospital, and could do as she pleased with her spare time.
At the moment she was building a small library of erotic romance novels that would have utterly scandalized her grandmother.
Very soon she hoped to work up the courage to be even more daring.
I could check out one of the underground clubs, Rebecca thought. There are some that are just gathering places for people like me.
So far the only true contentment she’d experienced in life came from the vague, blurry memories of her childhood.
Thanks to the love of her bubbly, carefree mother and her big, gruff father, Rebecca had been a very happy kid.
Jessica and Stewart McIan had adored their daughter, and spent every moment they could with her.
Rebecca sometimes wondered if they both subconsciously sensed that the time they’d have together as a family would be cut short in the worst way possible.
Thankfully she didn’t remember anything about the accident that happened when she was twelve, when she and her parents were on their way home from seeing a movie.
The drunk driver who had jumped the median and hit their car head-on had died instantly along with the McIans.
It had taken fire rescue two hours to cut Rebecca, barely alive, out of the wreckage.
When she woke up a week later she saw her grandparents sitting on either side of the hospital bed, both looking pale and exhausted.
Her grandmother had promptly burst into tears while her grandfather had shouted for a nurse.
They didn’t tell her about her injuries until the doctor had examined her and decided she was strong enough to hear the awful news.
“Your back and knees got hurt real bad in the accident, baby.” Jacob McIan clasped her small hand between his. “That’s why you can’t feel nothing down there.”
“Does that mean I can’t walk anymore?” she asked, looking down at her lower body, which she couldn’t move due to the waist-high cast immobilizing her.
“The doc says maybe you can after the operations you need,” her grandfather said, forcing a smile while tears glittered in his eyes. “And if you can’t, then we’ll figure it out together, huh?”
Three months and four surgeries later the big cast had been removed, and Rebecca had been transferred to a pediatric rehabilitation hospital.
By then she had learned of her parents’ deaths, which she tried not to think about unless she was alone and could cry without upsetting anyone else.
Beginning the painful but necessary physical therapy that her doctor hoped would help her walk again also helped.
The year that followed would restore her mobility inch by sweat-soaked inch as the swelling in her spine receded and she learned how to stand and use her new knees to walk.
No one but Rebecca knew how much the experience had changed her in other ways, but that was something she intended to keep private forever.
Nothing to be ashamed of, Becs, her physical therapist Reuben Dane would have said . Everybody’s got secrets.
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