Verwandte Artikel zu Little Disasters: A Novel

Little Disasters: A Novel - Softcover

Vaughan, Sarah

 
9781668033524: Little Disasters: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668033526 ISBN 13: 9781668033524
Verlag: Pocket Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

This “thrilling and emotional depiction of family drama, friendship, and trust will have you on the edge of your seat” (CNN) as it explores the complexity of motherhood from the bestselling author of the inspiration behind the hit Netflix series Anatomy of a Scandal.

You think you know her…but look a little closer.

She is a stay-at-home mother-of-three with boundless reserves of patience, energy, and love. After being friends for a decade, this is how Liz sees Jess.

Then one moment changes everything.

Dark thoughts and carefully guarded secrets surface—and Liz is left questioning everything she thought she knew about her friend, and about herself. The truth can’t come soon enough.

Evocative and haunting, Little Disasters is “an important book as well as a brilliant read” (Lucy Foley, New York Times bestselling author).

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Vaughan studied English at Oxford and went on to become a journalist. She spent eleven years at The Guardian as a news reporter and political correspondent before leaving to freelance and write fiction. Her first thriller, Anatomy of a Scandal, was an instant international bestseller, translated into twenty-four languages, and is available to stream on Netflix as a worldwide number one series starring Sienna Miller, Michelle Dockery, and Rupert Friend. Her bestselling novel, Little Disasters, has also been optioned for television, as has Reputation, her fifth novel. Find out more at SarahVaughanAuthor.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: Liz ONE LIZ
FRIDAY, 19 JANUARY, 2018

It is definitely the short straw of hospital medicine. ER in a trauma center on a Friday night in late January; eleven thirty and the waiting areas are rammed. Patients glazed with boredom slump on every available chair, a queue is waiting to be triaged, and we’re nearing the mayhem that descends when the drunks and the lads whose fights have turned a bit nasty roll in: lairy, disruptive, laughing in the face of reason. If the abuse turns physical—walls punched, a nurse shoved, a Sri Lankan doctor spat at—security will have to be called.

A cold January means that the hospital is already busy: filled to 99 percent capacity. ER on the brink of turning away ambulances: almost on red alert. Many patients don’t need to be here: not least those who couldn’t get—or didn’t think to get—a doctor’s appointment and who now realize that a long and uncomfortable weekend stretches ahead of them unless they hotfoot it to the ER in the belief that doing so will make their virus swiftly better. They’re the ones who are the most vocal about the long wait, who hover by the nurses’ station ready to harangue them. The properly sick don’t have the energy to complain.

I wouldn’t go near an ER in a busy trauma center on a Friday night unless my life depended on it. Nothing short of a cardiac arrest, a stroke, a fracture, or a massive hemorrhage would force me through the automatic doors. So why am I here, breathing in the fetid fumes of others’ illnesses; tramping the corridors; peering at the faces of the frustrated, irritated, and those with life-threatening illnesses who wait two, three, four hours—or sometimes more?

Well, I don’t have a choice. This is my job. Senior resident in pediatrics at St. Joseph’s, West London: a major acute general hospital and trauma center at the cutting edge of clinical care. My career hasn’t been meteoric: two babies and two six-month maternity leaves, plus disappearing down a cul-de-sac of research, mean I’m still not a consultant, unlike the men I studied with at med school. But I’m only a year off and then I’ll have reached the giddy peaks of medicine’s hierarchy. Twenty years of study and I’ll finally be there.

I’m not a doctor who works in the ER full-time. I’m here because I’ve been called down from the children’s ward to see a patient. But I’m the sort of doctor on which every hospital depends. Sufficiently senior to make crucial decisions; sufficiently junior to be based in the hospital during long nights and on call weekends. Look at me, in my periwinkle blue scrubs, and you’ll see someone pragmatic, no-nonsense, approachable, empathetic; occasionally a little blunt, according to my teacher husband, but a good person. (I work with sick children and deal with distressed parents, after all.) Physically unremarkable: five foot six, wiry dark brown hair scraped into a ponytail, a permanent crease between my hazel eyes. Negligible makeup, no jewelry except for a thin gold wedding band, worn and scratched. White hospital Crocs: good for running. Easy to wash when splattered with blood.

I’m anonymous, dressed like this. Androgynous, too. No one’s going to assess the size of my hips, a little wider than I’d like thanks to night shifts when I don’t get a break until after ten and rely on vending machine chocolate or canteen chips. No teenage boy’s going to spy my cleavage when I bend over to examine him on a hospital bed. I’m a doctor, this pajama-type uniform says, as does the lanyard round my neck. Hello. I’m Dr. Trenchard. I’m here to do a job, and to do it well.

Wearing scrubs, like any uniform, also bonds you with your colleagues. We’re all in it together: an army working for a greater good we still believe in—the dysfunctional, fracturing, only-just-about-coping-because-of-the-goodwill-and-professionalism-of-its-staff, free-at-the-point-of-need medical system. And if that sounds sentimental or sanctimonious, I’m neither of these things. It’s just that when it’s your daughter’s tenth birthday and you can’t put her to bed because it’s impossible to swap a Friday night shift, and she’s said, piling on the guilt in a way that only your firstborn can: “It’s all right, Mummy. I understand that you need to work.” When this is the background to your fourth late shift in a row, and you’re exhausted and would really like to be in bed, curled around the husband you only grunt at during the week. When that’s what you’re missing and your reality’s very different: when you know your colleagues are racing to a crash call—hearts pumping as they run, shoes squeaking on the shiny floor, curtains whooshing around a bed; that fierce concentration as they crack ribs or apply paddles to shock a patient back into life… When, more prosaically, you haven’t had time for a wee… Well, you have to cling on to some belief in what you’re doing; you have to believe there’s a point in being committed to this sort of career. Because otherwise? You’d give up medicine or immigrate to Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, where the weather, hours, and pay are all far, far better.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I love my job. I believe what I’m doing is important. (What could be more worthwhile than making sick children better?) It’s stimulating; and coming from my background—I’m the child of a single parent who ran a seaside café—I’m immensely proud to have got here at all. But this shift comes at the end of a string of nights preceded by an academic course last weekend and I’m shattered: my brain so befuddled I feel as if I’m seriously jet-lagged. Adrenaline will carry me through the next few hours. It always does. But I need to focus. Just ten more hours: that’s all I need to get through.

I’m thinking all of this as I trot along the shiny corridor from the children’s ward to the ER, my mood not enhanced by the art on the walls: a mixture of seascapes and abstracts in bright primary colors that are supposed to soothe patients and distract them from the unpalatable fact they have to be here. I pass the oncology and radiology departments and think of the lives being fractured, the hopes and dreams evaporating; for some, the lives ending, at this very moment; then shove the thought aside.

I’m on my way to see a patient. Ten months old: fractious, irritable. She’s vomited, according to the ER, though she hasn’t a fever. She may be no more ill than Sam, my eight-year-old, who’s just had a chest infection, though it’s odd to bring in a child who’s not genuinely poorly at this time of night. The junior isn’t happy to discharge and asked me to come down. My heart tips at the thought of a massively complicated case.

Because I could do without another terrifyingly sick child right now. My shift started with a crash call to the delivery suite to resuscitate a newborn: a full-term-plus-thirteen-days-overdue baby, blue, with a slow heartbeat and a cord pulled tight around his neck. I got him back—stimulation, a few breaths—but there was that long moment when you fear that it could all go horribly wrong and the mother who has managed to carry her baby beyond term would be mourning the child she has dreamed of. As every...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Pocket Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668033526
ISBN 13 
9781668033524
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
496
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar