Neurosurgeon...and Mum! by Kate Hardy Page A

with them. She’d baked with Perdy, just the way she once had with Millie. Enjoyed watching some of the shadows fade from Perdy’s and Tom’s faces.
    She’d got involved.
    Stupid, stupid, stupid.
    And yet how could she possibly have stood by and watched them struggle? Perdy’s little face on Friday night when she’d said that she had no friends, the distress in Tom’s eyes and that lost look on both their faces…No way could Amy have turned her back on them.
    But no way could she let herself get any more deeply involved than this.
    For the last ten years, work had been everything to her, so the wreckage of her career had left a huge hole in her life. It really wasn’t fair to Tom to use him to fill that gap.
    If she could catch him later in the day, before Perdy came home, she’d talk to him about it. Explain to him that this morning had been an aberration for both of them—that neither of them was in a position to do anything about the attraction between them right now, and they were both adults so they should be able to treat each other as if they were colleagues.
    She damped down the flicker of desire, opened the first of Joseph’s casebooks and began to transcribe its contents.
    ‘I really can’t handle any more of the pain, Doctor,’ Mrs Cooper whispered. ‘The drugs just aren’t working.’
    Tom checked her notes. Mrs Cooper had been complaining of severe pain on the right side of her face, in hercheek, teeth and gums. The dentist had taken X-rays and said the pain wasn’t caused by a dental problem, and Joe Rivers had diagnosed trigeminal neuralgia six weeks ago: a condition where the sheath protecting the nerve became damaged, so the lightest touch caused the nerve to send messages of severe pain to the brain.
    ‘I see that Dr Rivers prescribed you some medication,’ he said. The usual first-line treatment was anticonvulsants, originally developed to treat epilepsy but found to be useful in treating trigeminal neuralgia. ‘Can I just check that you have been taking it regularly?’
    She nodded. ‘Dr Rivers told me they didn’t work like painkillers and I had to take them all the time, not just when I felt the pain. He said we’d wait until I was free of the pain for three weeks, and then we’d start to taper it down to the right dose for me. But it just hasn’t worked. And it—’ She broke off, scrabbled in her handbag for a pack of tissues, sneezed into one, and then winced, clearly in pain. ‘This time of year, it’s always bad.’
    ‘Hay fever definitely doesn’t help,’ Tom said sympathetically. The slightest movement, even a gentle breeze, could cause shooting pains for someone with trigeminal neuralgia; the uncontrollable sneezing that went with hay fever must be agonising. ‘I can do something about the hay fever, but I’ll need to refer you to the neurology department for more help. As medication hasn’t worked, they’re likely to suggest surgery to stop the nerve sending pain messages.’
    ‘I don’t want to go into hospital.’ Her eyes widened with fear. ‘I know it’s stupid, but my aunt went in for a hip operation last year and she ended up catching that sickness bug. It set her back for months and now we’ve had to put her in a care home because she can’t manage on her own. Before she went in, she was absolutely fine.’
    ‘I’m sorry your aunt had such a bad experience,’ Tom said gently, ‘but it doesn’t mean that you will. For a start, this is summer, so it’s very unlikely you’ll come into contact with that particular bug. Besides, depending on what kind of surgery they suggest, you might be able to be treated in Outpatients rather than having to stay in for a couple of days.’ Given that Amy was on sabbatical, he knew it wouldn’t be fair of him to ask her to come and have a chat with his patient. Though Mrs Cooper was clearly suffering from her condition and anxious about the possible treatments, and, as her GP, Tom needed to give her as much