Free His Emergency Fiancée by Kate Hardy Page B

deposits or atheroma formed patchy plaques on the inner lining of the arteries, reducing blood flow and encouraging blood clots to form. The clots resulted in a sudden stoppage of the blood flow to the heart, so tissue in the heart muscle died, causing pain and making the heart pump blood less efficiently.
    She knew Ben wouldn’t have any thrombolytic drugs that would dissolve the blood clot but he’d have analgesics, so they could at least do something to ease the pain. And Ben’d have fluids in the bag, too, so they could put a line in if Marty went into shock. Hopefully the GP would arrive before the ambulance—the quicker Marty had drugs to dissolve the clot, the better his chances of surviving. As it was, his heart was likely to have an arrhythmia. Kirsty bit her lip. If his particular arrhythmia was the one known as ventricular fibrillation, which interfered with the heart’s pumping action, he’d die without drugs or electrical defibrillation to bring his heart rhythm back to normal.
    By the time she got back to the village hall, breathing heavily from her run, Ben had made Marty more comfortable. The bad news was that the GP was away on another call—they had to wait for the ambulance to arrive.
    Kirsty took the analgesics from Ben’s bag. He’d already called for a glass of water, so she gave a dose of the painkillers to Marty. ‘These’ll help the pain,’ she said gently.
    ‘What’s going to happen to my Marty?’ Ellen McAllister asked.
    Ben looked at Kirsty and nodded slightly, signalling that he could cope with Marty on his own, and Kirsty drew Mrs McAllister to one side. ‘He’s had a heart attack, Mrs McAllister,’ she said quietly.
    ‘I told him! I told him! I told him those fags would kill him—that, and all the chocolate he scoffs. I’ve put him on diet after diet, and he sneaks out when my back’s turned for some chips or a choc bar. His car’s full of sweet papers. Oh, Marty!’
    ‘I know. They drive you mad, men,’ Kirsty said, trying to sound reassuring. ‘Never listen to a word you tell them, do they?’
    ‘That they don’t,’ Ellen said feelingly. She bit her lip. ‘He’ll be all right?’
    ‘We’ll know more when the ambulance gets here,’ Kirsty said, ‘because they’ve got a machine that can look at the way his heart’s beating, and they’ll have drugs to get rid of the blood clot that caused his heart attack.’ Drugs she’d hoped they’d have got by now from the GP. Marty just had to hang on.
    ‘Is he going to die?’
    Difficult one. ‘Nearly half of all people who have a heart attack live for more than a year afterwards,’ Kirsty said carefully. Unfortunately, around forty to fifty per cent died within the first three weeks after the heart attack; she could only hope that wasn’t going to be the case here. ‘The ambulance will take him to the coronary care unit, where they can monitor his progress and treat any symptoms.’
    ‘You’re a heart doctor, aren’t you? That’s what Morag said.’
    ‘I’m a general surgeon,’ Kirsty said. ‘But I do have a few heart patients, yes.’
    ‘Will he have to have an operation?’
    ‘Sometimes drugs will do the trick,’ Kirsty said. ‘They’ll help his heart get back into the right rhythm and stop the heart being damaged further. Or they can put a little tube down his blood vessels to widen them—it’s a procedure called angioplasty. What I do when I operate is called coronary artery bypass. That’s where I take lengths of a vein from the leg and sew one end to the aorta—that’s the main artery in the body—and the other end to a point below where the arteries are blocked. That’s why it’s called a bypass—the blood can be pumped through the heart as normal and bypass the blocked artery. While I repair the heart my patient’s connected to a heart lung machine. When I’ve finished, the patient comes off the machine and the blood flows normally again, then I wire the breastbone together and sew