Sorry! I intended to get this up sooner, life just gets in the way. Sorry! R&R please!
With Ron settled in marginally comfortable, she reported the status to Dr. James and was given another assignment. It was time to start working down in the clinic. When she got down to the ground floor, she took a quick left and ducked into a smaller, more discreet elevator. It took her down a floor, a new addition in the last couple of years.
She stepped out into the maternity clinic, and she prided herself in not choking up when she saw the girl not much older than Mel on an examination table through an open door. Everybody looked rather busy, but the receptionist, between arguing with someone over the desk and settling the frantic rantings of a sobbing mother to be, pointed to an exam room and managed to say, "Miss Eloise."
Tanya turned toward the exam room, slipped in quietly as the woman she assumed to be Miss Eloise explained something to the patient she was with. Miss Eloise was about fifty, her hair was loose and spilling over her shoulders in a mix of deep brown and gray. But it was the patient that had Tanya taking a double take. She was only a couple of years older than Mel, and more scared than what should have been possible. And Tanya didn't have to be told the girl was all alone, she just knew.
Silently the girl got up and left, never taking her eyes off of the ground. Miss Eloise turned and looked at her with the same soft eyes she'd used on the young expecting mother. They were the color of aged whiskey and as wise as an old owl. "You must be Miss Tanya. Welcome to the Maternity clinic. Most of our patients here are alone, for what ever reason. They don't come here to be judged but to get the support their families should give them."
"Why don't they, then?" Tanya walked around and sat on a stool, while Miss Eloise sat in the other one.
"More often than not, the girls get pregnant out of wedlock and their families are harsher than they should be. And it's a shame for them because those are some great girls. So they have no where else to turn but here. But we do get the rare case where husband, boyfriend, or mother come in with them." Miss Eloise remembered something and jotted it down on a chart before looking at her again. "To be honest, most of our work is out of the hospital. All the doctors on this floor are midwives. We get owls two to four times a week. A team of three to five, depending on the circumstances, the workload here in the ward, and how understaffed we are. Sometimes we go to Egypt, we've been to France on several occasions, but for all the Wizard Hospitals there are in the world, we're the only one with a Maternity clinic so we're swamped with work.
It was such a relief when Dr. James offered us his female interns. You'd be surprised what a blessing two or three fresh faces are on a busy day like this. More and more patients come in and our doctors burn out rapidly, I'm afraid." Eloise swept her eyes over her new midwife. "You look competent enough."
Tanya just smiled, Miss Eloise reminded her of her mother, before she'd gotten sick. Rambling on and on but always coming back to the point. "I will be glad if I can help even a little, but I'm afraid I don't know anything about pregnancy or birth."
"Now don't let a little thing like that stop you," Eloise went to the door, called out to the nurse in a kind of jargon Tanya didn't understand. "Well, come on, girl." She shut the door. " Let's see how fast you catch on."
Five hours later, just as her shift was just reaching the three quarters mark, all she wanted to do was go to sleep and never wake up. Who could know there'd be so much to learn about the stages of a female body and the child it carried. And she was just sitting down on a bench outside Ron's door when a nurse came out and looked at her with horrified eyes. "You need to come see this, now."
Tanya stood quickly, the sound of shaking caught her ears, she knew that sound anywhere. It sounded like the seizures her mother used to have. "Get Dr. James, quickly."
Tanya went in, saw the convulsions and the doctor that was in there to do a routine check was doing her best to hold him down. It was Dr. Thomson from the meeting earlier that morning. But she barely acknowledged the doctor and her frantic combination of charms and orders. He looked like a fish out of water, and it sent her back to that bedroom when she was thirteen, coming home from a friends house to find her mother like that. But she had thought she'd be ready to handle it again, no, this was worse some how. It was horrifying. Everything was moving around her but it seemed like she was frozen, his lips were going from pink to bluish.
"Doctor Lily!" Doctor Thomson kicked her gently with her foot, still desperately trying to stable him. "Hold him down, or I'll never be able to administer a sleeping draft."
"Sleeping draft?" She moved to pin down Ron's arms. "Won't he still have trouble breathing?"
She came back with a vial, held Ron's nose and poured it down quickly. He sputtered, but nature had him swallowing it anyway. "His body is only reacting to the convulsions." Even as she spoke, Ron's body stilled and his breathing steadied. "Stay for an hour, at least, give him more of this if he has another attack."
"Right." Tanya took the vial from her, sat down in a chair beside the bed. She reached to hold his hand in hers. When two drops fell off her face and into her lap, she stared down at them. She hadn't realized she'd been crying. She wiped them away quickly, feeling foolish. She wasn't supposed to cry for him, she hardly knew him. And she knew that was bullshit, she felt something for him, whatever it was.
"How is he?" Dr. James's voice had her jerking away from Ron. What was she doing? She wasn't supposed to get all emotional over a patient, especially on her very first case. She was supposed to be proving herself to him.
She stood and looked at him as he stood in the doorway. "He's stable for now, but I can't figure out what I missed. There's no sign now that anything is wrong except that wound on his arm."
"What does he do for a living?" Dr. James knew. When the name rang a bell, he had a nurse do some digging. But he wanted to know if she knew. More importantly, he wanted to see just how close she was to her patient.
"He's an Auror." She thought back, remembering how cool and collected he had seemed while everything was going on at the school. "He works under his best friend, Mister Harry Potter. They were just a couple of years before me in school."
"Can you be objective?" He looked at Ron, not quite ready to enter the room. It was going to be a problem, but he couldn't see any other choice.
"I can try." She didn't know what to think. Honesty was the biggest thing for her, but could it also risk her patient, and this test?
"Good. You're going to be getting some quality time with him until we know what's going on."
He took a chart from the door, wrote something down. "The moment there's a private suite open, we're moving you in there. We don't know if it's contagious and you're the only one so far who's been exposed. Until we know what we're dealing with, we can't risk getting the rest of the floor sick."
"You're putting me under quarantine with him?" She swallowed hard. A small private suite, just the two of them. Then it hit her. Whatever was wrong with Ron was wrong with her. That seizure could have killed Ron, which made her believe that it could kill her too. God, she didn't want to die. If she did, she'd shove all the blame on Ron. Which, of course, wouldn't make her feel any better.
"This will not count as your test, I should have made sure the patient was safe enough before I shoved him off on you." He stepped a little closer to her. "I know this is one more tough situation you have to worry about, but it's probably nothing, just precaution."
She nodded, shut her eyes. "When?"
"Two or three hours." He rested a hand on her shoulder. "We'll figure this out."
"I hope so." She sat back down next to Ron and buried her face in her hands out of surrender. "I certainly hope so."