Sarah woke with a start, disorientated. She gazed at Bob on the bed, bathed in the pale green light of the monitor screens, and wondered what could have disturbed her.
He looked so peaceful, lying there. She thought of a hundred other times in their short life together when she had watched him sleep, and could not recall having seen him look so restful She pressed his hand gently, lovingly.
All at once she realised what had roused her. She realised too how closely she was in tune with the working of his body. The touch of his hand was noticeably warmer than it had been an hour earlier. She looked at the heart-rate monitor. The blips of his pulse, while still regular, were moving across the screen at a significantly faster rate than before.
She grabbed the panic button, which hung on the end of a long cable at the head of the bed and pressed it, once, twice, three times. Within seconds the Night Sister came bustling in from her station. 'What is it, Dr Grace?' she whispered.
`His temperature's taken a hike. And look at the pulse! Something's wrong.'
Distrustful of monitors, the white-haired sister lifted Bob's right wrist from the bed, and held it for around twenty seconds. `Don't get yourself in a panic, my dear, but I think I'll ask someone to come up here.'
'Who's going to be around at this time of night?' asked Sarah anxiously.
'Mr Braeburn, the consultant. He's staying on the premises tonight:
'What? Because of-'
Sister looked at her reassuringly. 'Of course not. He has an early start in surgery tomorrow, that's the only reason,' she said, lying in her teeth, but knowing that Sarah would believe her because she wanted to. She hurried back to her station.
In less than five minutes, the door opened and Mr Braeburn slipped into the Unit. He was a tall, thin man with fine surgeon's hands. His hair was so unruly that for a moment or two Sarah had difficulty recognising him as the same person who, still in his theatre clothes, had briefed her that morning on Bob's surgery and on his prospects.
`Hello again, Doctor,' he said. 'Let's have a look at the prize patient, shall we?'
He went quickly and expertly through a string of procedures, checking pulse, heart, breathing, temperature and blood pressure, lifting one of Bob's eyelids and testing his pupil reaction with a pencil torch.
When he was finished, he withdrew to the head of the bed, motioning Sarah to join him.
'It's damn funny. Blood pressure is as it should be, so I'm quite certain that the arterial sutures are holding, and that there's no internal bleeding. He's not in the clear yet, by a long way, but physically he's in good shape for someone who should have been dead when he was brought in here. He's heavily sedated, yet he seems agitated.'
He clutched his chin between thumb and first finger. 'I think I'm going to ask Sister to give him some more sedative, just to slow that heart-rate down a bit. He looks like a man who could handle some extra jungle juice.
She looked up at him. 'But what's causing it? What's raising his pulse?'
Mr Braeburn shrugged. 'Who knows? I wish I knew what's going on inside his head, because the best answer I can give you is that something in there is making him fight the sedative!'