Free Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle by Meredith Webber / Jennifer Taylor

saline for flushing out the wounds, antiseptic for cleaning the skin around them, local anaesthetic andsutures. She found a tray leaning against the cabinet and stacked the things she needed on it, then carried it to the head of the table, setting it down beside the man’s head.
    His skin was grey—probably with pain as well as loss of blood—and she knew they had to work swiftly. But as she unwound the dirty cloth wrapped around his arms and hands she felt nausea rise in her stomach.
    ‘These are defensive wounds,’ she whispered to Jorge. ‘He’s been attacked.’
    ‘Just stitch him up.’ Jorge spoke quietly, calming her with his voice, and she remembered that first and foremost she was a doctor. It wasn’t her business how a patient came to need her skills, only that she must help him. This had been her weakness in Africa, wanting to do more to help the refugees they’d treated there. Yes, they’d been able to improve their lives in small ways and certainly improve their health, but she’d had to learn not to get involved in their struggle to return to their homelands, or to try to understand the reasons they had fled.
    She wrapped a clean cloth around one of the man’s arms and concentrated on the other, swabbing the area around the deep cuts, shuddering as she imagined the axe or machete—what else could make such wounds?—cutting into the man’s flesh.
    ‘I’m giving him a general anaesthetic. It will be more effective as we’d need more locals than we have on hand. This is Lila, one of our nurses. She will watch him.’
    Caroline said hello to the middle-aged woman who was placing a mask over the patient’s mouth and nose ascalmly as if a man minus a part of his foot was an everyday occurrence in the clinic. She had also, to Caroline’s surprise, produced a monitor and was attaching leads to the man’s bare chest so they could read his heart and lung movements as they worked.
    ‘Right to go,’ Jorge said, and Caroline saw him carefully pulling back the skin on the man’s foot, flushing the wound, preparing to cut away more bone so it wouldn’t protrude as the healing skin shrank.
    She knew the horror she was feeling was probably reflected on her face so wasn’t surprised when Jorge’s next reminder was far harsher.
    ‘Go,’ he ordered, and she turned her attention to her own job, flushing the gaping wounds before carefully drawing them together, suturing the skin, aware, as she’d always been in Africa, that supplies were probably limited so she had to space the sutures close enough to hold the skin closed but not so close she wasted precious resources.
    But as she worked, although ninety-nine per cent of her concentration was on her patient, that one per cent sped away, back to a street scene in Africa where, in Jorge’s company, she’d once recoiled from the sight of a badly maimed beggar. She’d tried to explain to Jorge that it wasn’t revulsion that had made her flinch but the helplessness she had felt at the fact that some scars and malformations couldn’t be fixed and how unfortunate it was that so much of a person’s self-worth was tied up in how he or she looked.
    Had Jorge remembered that flinch as he’d lain inhospital in France? Had he imagined she’d flinch from him? Did that explain why he’d pushed her away?
    She finished with the deep wound at the base of the man’s thumb, probing first to see if there might be nerve or tendon damage, wondering at the same time if it had been the memory of her recoil—and his reading of it—that had determined Jorge to send the email.
    ‘All we can do is sew him up,’ Jorge said quietly to her, apparently looking up from his task to see her hesitation. ‘It is likely he will have it cut open again next week. See the other scars he has?’
    So Caroline once again pushed the past back where it belonged and sewed, putting dressings over the wounds as she completed her stitching. She moved around the table and unwrapped the