Loe raamatut: «Falling For Her Army Doc / Healed By Their Unexpected Family»

CHAPTER ONE

SHE LOOKED BEAUTIFUL, standing outside in the garden, catching the morning light. He watched her every day about this time. She’d take her walk, sit for a few minutes on the stone retaining wall surrounding the sculpted flowers, then return to the building.

Once, he’d wondered what weighed her down so heavily. She had that look—the one he remembered from many of his patients, and probably even more he didn’t remember. She—Lizzie, she’d told him her name was—always smiled and greeted him politely. But there was something behind that smile.

Of course, who was he to analyze? It had taken a photo he’d found among his things to remind him that he’d been engaged. Funny how his memory of her prior to his accident was blurred. Nancy was a barely recognizable face in a world he didn’t remember much of. And, truthfully, he couldn’t even recall how or why he’d become engaged to her. She didn’t seem his type—too flighty, too intrusive. Too greedy.

Yet Lizzie, out there in the garden, seemed perfect. Beautiful. Smart. In tune with everything around her.

So what wasn’t he getting here? Had he changed so much that the type of woman who’d used to attract him didn’t now? And taking her place was someone…more like Lizzie?

Dr. Mateo Sanchez watched from the hospital window until Lizzie left the garden, then he drew the blinds and went back to bed. He didn’t have a lot of options here, as a patient. Rest, watch the TV, rest some more. Go to therapy. Which somehow he never quite seemed to do.

This was his fourth facility since he’d been shipped from the battlefield to Germany, and nothing was working. Not the therapy. Not his attitude. Not his life. What he wanted to know they wouldn’t tell him. And what he didn’t want to know just seemed to flood back in when he didn’t want it to.

The docs were telling him to be patient, that some memory would return while some would not. But he wanted a timeline, a calendar on his wall where he could tick off the days until he was normal again.

He reached up and felt the tiny scar on his head. Whatever normal was. Right now, he didn’t know. There was nothing for him to hold on to. No one there to ground him. Even Nancy hadn’t stayed around long after she’d discovered he didn’t really know her.

In fact, his first thought had been that she was a nurse, tending him at his bedside. She’d been good when he’d asked for a drink of water, even when he’d asked for another pillow, and she’d taken his criticism when she’d told him she couldn’t give him a pain pill.

This had gone on for a week before she’d finally confessed that she wasn’t his nurse, but his fiancée. And then, in another week, she’d been gone. She wasn’t the type to do nursing care in the long term, she’d said. And unfortunately, all she could see ahead of her was nursing care, a surgeon who could no longer operate, when what she’d wanted was a surgeon who could provide a big home, fancy cars, and everything else he’d promised he’d give her.

So, he knew the what and the when of his accident. What he didn’t know was the annoying part. As a surgeon he needed to know all aspects of his patients’ conditions, even the things that didn’t seem to matter. It was called being thorough. But for him…

“Giving you the answers to your life could imprint false memories,” his neurologist Randy always said, when he asked. And he was right, of course. That was something he did remember. Along with so many of his basic medical skills—the ones he’d learned early on in his career.

The more specific skills, though… Some of them were still there. Probably most of them. But in pulling them out of his memory he hesitated sometimes. Thought he remembered but wasn’t sure of himself.

Wait a minute. Let me consult a textbook before I remove your gall bladder.

Yeah, right. Like that was going to work in surgery.

He looked up and saw Lizzie standing in his doorway, simply observing him. Probably trying to figure out what to do with him.

“Hello,” he said, not sure what to make of this.

She was the house primary care physician—not his doctor, not even a neurologist. Meaning she had no real reason to be here unless he needed a vaccination or something.

“I’ve seen you watch me out in the garden. I was wondering if you’d like to come out with me for a while later…breathe some fresh air, take a walk?”

“Who’s prescribing that?” he asked suspiciously.

“You are—if that’s what you want to do. You’re not a prisoner here, you know. And your doctor said it might be a good idea…that it could help your…” She paused.

“Go ahead and say it. My disposition.”

“I understand from morning staff meetings that you’re quite a handful.”

“Nothing else to do around here,” he said. “So, I might as well improve upon my obnoxious level. It’s getting better. In fact, I think I’ll soon be counted amongst the masters.”

“To what outcome?”

He shrugged. “See, that’s the thing. For me, there are no outcomes.”

“If that’s how you want it. But I’m not your doctor and you’re not my problem. So, take that walk with me or not.”

“And tomorrow? What happens to me tomorrow?”

“Honestly? I’m a one-day-at-a-time girl. Nothing’s ever guaranteed, Mateo. If I get through the day, tomorrow will take care of itself.”

“Well, I like seeing ahead. And now, even behind.”

“To each his own,” she said nonchalantly.

“Which implies what?” he asked, feeling a smile slowly crossing his face. Lizzie was…fun. Straight to the point. And challenging.

“You know exactly what it implies, Mateo. In your effort to see ‘behind,’ as you’re calling it, you’re driving the staff crazy. They’re afraid of you. Not sure what to do with you. And that false smile of yours is beginning to wear thin.”

“Does it annoy you?” he asked.

“It’s beginning to.”

“Then my work here is done,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.

He wanted clothes—real clothes. Not these blue and green things that were passed off as hospital gowns. Those were for sick people. He wasn’t sick. Just damaged. A blood clot on his brain, which had been removed, and a lingering pest called retrograde amnesia. That kind of damage deserved surfer shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, seeing as how he was in Hawaii now.

“And my work has nothing to do with you. I was just trying to be friendly, but you’re too much of a challenge to deal with. And, unfortunately, what should have been a simple yes or no is now preventing me from seeing my patients.”

She sure was pretty.

It was something he’d thought over and over about Lizzie. Long, tarnished copper hair. Curly. Soft too, he imagined. Brown eyes that could be as mischievous as a kitten or shoot daggers, depending on the circumstance. And her smile… It didn’t happen too often, he’d noticed. And when it did, it didn’t light up the proverbial room. But it sure did light up his day.

“And how would I be doing that? I’m here, wearing these lovely clothes, eating your gourmet green slime food, putting up with your hospital’s inane therapy.”

“And by ‘putting up with,’ you mean not showing up for?” She took a few more steps into the room, then went to open the blinds.

“In the scheme of my future life, what will it do for me?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”

“No vagaries here, Lizzie. Be as specific as I have to be every time I answer someone’s orientation questions. ‘Do you remember your name?’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘What’s the date?’ ‘Who’s the current President?’”

“Standard protocol, Mateo. You know that.” She turned back to face him. “But you make everything more difficult than it has to be.”

She brightened his day in a way he’d never expected. “So why me? You’re not my doctor, but you’ve obviously chosen me for some special attention.”

“My dad was a military surgeon, like you were. Let’s just say I’m giving back a little.”

“Did he see combat?”

“Too many times.”

“And it changed him,” Mateo said, suddenly serious.

“It might have—but if it did it was something he never let me see. And he never talked about it.”

“It’s a horrible thing to talk about. The injuries. The ones you can fix…the ones you can’t. In my unit they were rushed in and out so quickly I never really saw anything but whatever it was I had to fix. Maybe that was a blessing.”

He shut his eyes to the endless parade of casualties who were now marching by him. This was a memory he didn’t want, but he was stuck with it. And it was so vivid.

“Were you an only child?” he asked.

Lizzie nodded. “My mom couldn’t stand the military life. She said it was too lonely. So, by the time I was five she was gone, and then it was just my dad and me.”

“Couldn’t have been easy being a single parent under his circumstances. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to drag a kid around with me when I was active. Wouldn’t have been fair to the kid.”

“He never complained. At least, not to me. And what I had…it seemed normal.”

“I complain to everybody.”

In Germany, after his first surgery, it hadn’t occurred to him that his memory loss might be permanent. He’d been too busy dealing with the actual surgery itself to get any more involved than that. That had happened after he’d been transferred to Boston for brain rehab. Then he’d got involved. Only it hadn’t really sunk in the way it should have. But once they’d got him to a facility in California, where the patients had every sort of war-related brain injury, that was when it had occurred to him that he was just another one of the bunch.

How could that be? That was the question he kept asking himself over and over. He had become one of the poor unfortunates he usually treated. A surgeon without his memory. A man without his past.

“You’re a survivor who uses what he has at his disposal to regain the bits and pieces of himself he’s lost. Or at least that’s what you could be if you weren’t such a quitter.”

“A quitter?”

Maybe he was, since going on was so difficult. But did Lizzie understand what it was like to reach for a memory you assumed would be there and come up with nothing? And he was one of the lucky ones. Physically, he was fine, and his surgery had gone well. He’d healed well, too. But he couldn’t get past that one thing that held him back…who was he, really?

Suddenly Mateo was tired. It wasn’t even noon yet and he needed a nap. Or an escape.

“That walk this evening…maybe. If you can get me some real clothes.”

Lizzie chuckled. “I should say you’ll have to wear your hospital pajamas, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“No promises, Lizzie. I don’t make promises I can’t keep, and who knows what side of the pendulum my mood will be swinging on later.”

“Whatever suits you,” she said, then left the room.

Even though he hated to see her go, what he needed was to be left alone—something he’d told them over and over. He needed time to figure out just how big a failure he was, medically speaking. And what kind of disappointment he was to his mother, who’d worked long and hard to get him through medical school. The arthritis now crippling her hands showed that.

There was probably a long list of other people he’d let down, too, but thankfully he couldn’t remember it. Except his own name—right there at the top. He was Dr. Mateo Sanchez—a doctor with retrograde amnesia. And right now that was all he cared to know. Everything else—it didn’t matter.

She was not getting involved. It didn’t usually work. Didn’t make you happy, either. Didn’t do a thing. At least in her case it never had.

Lizzie’s mom had walked out when she was barely five, so no involvement there. And her dad… Well, he’d loved her. But her father had been a military surgeon, and that had taken up most of his time. While he’d always said he wanted to spend more time with her, it hadn’t happened. So no involvement with him, either, for a good part of her life.

Then there had been her husband. Another doctor, but one who wouldn’t accept that she didn’t want to be a surgeon like him. He was a neurosurgeon and, to him, being a primary care physician meant being…lesser. He did surgeries while she did cuts and bruises, he’d always say. Brad had never failed to show his disappointment in her, so she’d failed there, too. Meaning, what was the point?

None, that Lizzie could think of. But that was OK. She got along, designed her life the way she wanted it to be, and lived happily in the middle of it. Living in the middle was good, she decided. It didn’t take you far, but it didn’t let you down, either.

She wondered about Mateo, though. She knew he watched her in the garden every morning. Knew he’d asked questions about her. But the look on his face…there was no confidence there. Something more like fear. Which was why she’d asked him out for a walk this evening. He needed more than the four walls of his hospital room, the same way her father had needed more.

But her father had been on a downward spiral with Alzheimer’s. Mateo was young, healthy, had a lot of years of life ahead of him—except he was getting into the habit of throwing away the days. It was hard seeing that, after watching the way her father had deteriorated.

But to get involved…? They weren’t friends. Weren’t even doctor-patient. Weren’t anything. But she’d been watching the watcher for weeks now, and since she’d be going on holiday shortly what would it hurt to get involved for once? Or, in this case, to take a simple evening walk?

Watching Mateo walk toward her now, she thought he struck her as a man who would have taken charge. His gait was strong, purposeful. And he was a large man—massive muscles on a well-defined body. He’d taken care of himself. You didn’t get that physique by chance. Yet now he was stalled, and that didn’t fit. To look at him was to think he had his life together—it was in the way he carried himself. But there was nothing together about him, not one little piece. And he was sabotaging himself by not trying.

Many of the staff’s morning meetings lately had opened with: “What should we do about Mateo?”

The majority wanted him out of there. Even his own doctor didn’t care. But Lizzie was his advocate because he deserved this chance. Like her dad had, all those times someone had tried to convince her to put him away. That was exactly what they wanted to do with Mateo, and while neurology wasn’t her specialty, she did know that some types of brain trauma took a long time to sort themselves out.

But beds here were at a premium. The waiting list was long, and military veterans always went to the top of the list. There was no guarantee they’d stay there, though, especially if they acted the way Mateo did.

He was never mean. Never outright rude, even though he was always on the edge of it. In fact, he smiled more than anybody she’d ever seen. But he refused to try, and that was ultimately going to get in the way, since there were other veterans who could have his bed and display more cooperation.

The waiting line for each and every bed was eight deep, Janis always reminded her, when she was so often the only one at the meeting table who defended him. His bed could be filled with the snap of her fingers, and that was what she had to impress upon Mateo or he’d be out.

Truthfully, Lizzie was worried about Mateo’s progress. Or rather his lack of it. His time was indeed running out, and there was serious talk of transferring him elsewhere. He knew that, and it didn’t faze him. Not one little bit. Or if it did, he hid it well. Making her wonder why she tried so hard to advocate for a man who didn’t advocate for himself.

“Well, you look good in real clothes,” she said as he walked up to the reception hub where she’d been waiting.

He spun around the way a model on a runway would, then took a bow as a couple of passing nurses applauded him. “It’s good to feel human again.”

“You’re allowed out in the garden any time, Mateo. All you have to do is ask and someone will walk along with you.”

“But today I scored you.” He leaned in toward her and whispered, “Who happens to be the prettiest doctor in this hospital.”

“Save the flattery for someone else, Mateo. All I’m doing is trying to chart a doctor’s note saying you were cooperative for once. So far there aren’t any of those on record.”

Staff were tired of sugar-coating what they said about him and had started opting for snarky comments instead. In their defense, they were a highly dedicated lot who were bound to their jobs by the need to make improvements in patients’ lives—physically and emotionally. And, while Mateo might make them smile, he also frustrated them by pushing them to the limit.

Lizzie nudged a wheelchair in his direction.

“You know I can walk,” he said.

“Of course, you can, but…hospital policy. If I take a patient outside, they must go by wheelchair or else I’ll be in trouble. In other words, comply, or give back the clothes and go to bed.”

“Comply? Easier said than done,” he said, not budging from where he was standing at the nurses’ hub. “Especially when you’re treating me like an invalid.”

In truth, he’d prefer not to step outside—or in his case, be wheeled. There were too many things reminding him of how much he’d forgotten. Most days he wasn’t in the mood to deal with it. Staying in bed, watching TV, playing video games, sleeping…that was about the extent of his life now.

Except Lizzie. She was the bright spot. And she was asking him out…no way he could turn that down.

“Isn’t that how you’re treating yourself?” she asked. “We’ve designed a beautiful program for you here—took days going over it and tweaking it. It’s a nice balance for what you’ve got going on, yet have you ever, just once, referred to it? Daily walks in the garden, for instance? It’s on there, Mateo. And workouts in the gym. But I’ll bet you tossed the program in the trash as soon as you received it.

“Might have. Don’t remember.”

“Saying you’ve forgotten has become an easy excuse because retrograde amnesia is about forgetting things in the past. Not in the future, or even now. What you’re not retaining right now is left over from your brain surgery, but that will improve in time. With some effort. If you let it. Also, if you don’t care about your past you can walk out of here right now—a new man with a clean slate. You’re healthy, and with some caution you’re basically healed. Your destiny at this point is up to you. You can go, if that’s what you want. But I don’t think it is, because I believe you still want help with your memory loss, as well as trying to recall as much as you can about your life.”

“Oh, you mean I want to remember things like how to repair a hernia?”

“It’s all in there,” she said, tapping her own head. “Like you’ve been told. Unless you missed your session that day, procedural things aren’t normally lost. Life things are. And, as you already know, you do still have a little bit of head-banging going on after the surgery. But that’s not even significant at this point. Your attitude is, though.”

“Head-banging would be your professional diagnosis?”

Why the hell did he do this? He didn’t like it, but sometimes the belligerence just slipped out anyway. And Lizzie was only trying to help. He’d heard it whispered that she was the only one standing between him and being sent elsewhere.

“It would be the way you described your headaches when you were first admitted. But you remember that, Mateo. Which means you’re in one of your moods now. You think you can smile your way through it and maybe the staff won’t notice that you’re not working toward a better recovery? Well, I notice. Every little detail.” She smiled back at him. “I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t.”

“So, I’m part of your duty?”

“You’re one of the patients here. That’s all. Whatever I choose to do, like go for a walk with you, is because I understand where you are right now.”

“Do you, Lizzie?” he asked, his voice turning dark. “Do you really? I mean, even if I do retain knowledge of the procedural side of the surgeries I used to perform, would you honestly want a surgeon who comes to do your appendectomy and doesn’t even remember what kind of suture he prefers?”

Lizzie laughed, giving the wheelchair one more push toward him. This time it bumped his knees, so he could no longer ignore it.

“Sometimes I wonder if someone should change your diagnosis to retrograde amnesia with a secondary symptom of being overly dramatic. You’re a challenge, Mateo, that’s for sure. And, just between us, an open appendectomy skin closure works best with an absorbable intradermic stitch. Although if you’re doing the procedure laparoscopically, all it takes is a couple of dissolvable stitches on the inside and skin glue on the outside.”

“And you know this because…?”

“I’ve done a few stitches in my time. That’s part of being a PCP. So quit being so dramatic. It doesn’t score points with me, if that’s what you’re trying to do.”

Well, he might have gaps in his memory, including the kind of women he’d been drawn to, but Lizzie certainly held his attention now. Petite, bouncy. Smart. Serious as hell. And that was the part that didn’t escape him. Lizzie Peterson was a great big bundle of formidable perfection all tied up in a small package.

Maybe that was what intrigued him the most. He couldn’t picture himself with someone like her. Of course, in his recent spotty memory he couldn’t picture himself with anybody, including his former fiancée.

“Not overly dramatic. I’m allergic to flowers, which is why I don’t want to go to the garden.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“Then why, just a few minutes ago, did you want to go out?”

“Maybe I wasn’t allergic a few minutes ago. Maybe it was a sudden onset aversion.”

“Well, it’s your choice, Mateo. Your life is out there somewhere. Maybe it’s not the one you want, but it’s the one you’re going to be stuck with. You can make your own choices with it, but what you do now will affect what you do later on. And there is a ‘later on’ coming up. You can’t keep postponing it indefinitely.”

She started to walk away but turned back for a final word. She smiled when she saw that he was in the wheelchair, ready to go. Why not? he thought. Nothing else was happening in his life. So why not take a stroll in the garden? Or, in his case, a roll.

He gave Lizzie a deliberate scowl, which turned so quickly into a smile it almost caught her off-guard. “Is there any way I can talk you out of the wheelchair?”

“Nope. I play by the hospital rules and you play by my rules. So, here’s the deal. You cooperate.”

“Or what?”

“That’s all there is to it. You cooperate.”

“Isn’t a deal supposed to be two-sided?”

“Maybe your deals are, but mine aren’t. I like getting my way, Mateo. And when I don’t, I’m the one who gets grumpy. Trust me—my grumpy out-grumpys yours any day of the week, so don’t try me.”

He liked Lizzie. Trusted her. Wanted to impress her even though that was a long way from happening. “OK. Well…if that’s all you’re offering.”