Desert Doctor, Secret Sheikh. Meredith Webber
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bone beneath it.
‘I’ll cut and clean,’ she said, and heard something of the horror she was feeling in the tightly squeezed-out words.
‘He’ll be all right,’ her colleague said, his voice gentle as if he knew she was upset. ‘It looks far, far worse than it really is. And with me to stitch him up, there’ll barely be a scar.’
‘Surgeon, are you?’ Jen teased, though it was unlikely a specialist would be deployed to somewhere like this camp.
‘And why not?’ he parried, leaving Jen to wonder…
He spoke again, but this time to the patient, the slightly guttural words of the local language rolling off his tongue. The man opened bleary eyes then closed them again, and Kam nodded as if satisfied the drug was working.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, and Jen started at the neck and began to cut away the cloth that was embedded in the wounds, preserving what skin she could but needing to debride it where it was too torn to take a suture. Desert sand encrusted the wounds and the blood-hardened fabric, so the job was slow, but piece by piece she removed the foreign material, leaving a clean wound for Kam to stitch.
From there she moved to the wounds just above his buttocks, so she and Kam weren’t jostling each other as they worked, and slowly, painstakingly, they cleansed and cut and stitched until the man’s back resembled a piece of patchwork, sutures criss-crossing it in all directions.
Jen squatted back on her heels and Kam raised his head, tilting it from side to side, shrugging impressively broad shoulders to relieve tension in his neck. For a minute the green eyes met hers but she couldn’t read whatever message they might hold. Pity? Horror? Regret?
Emotion certainly, and she felt a little more kindly towards him. So many doctors, surgeons in particular—and she was pretty sure he must be one—could remain detached from the work they did, believing it was better for all concerned for them to be emotionally uninvolved.
‘Do you want to swap jobs?’ Jen suggested, as Kam roughly taped a huge dressing to the man’s back then tilted him so he was lying on it. They both watched the patient to see if there was any reaction, but as he remained seemingly asleep, they assumed the pethidine was working and he couldn’t feel the pain of the wounds on his back.
‘You’ve been bent over there for over an hour. I can at least move around,’ Jen added.
He glanced at her again.
‘You like sewing?’ he asked.
‘Not really,’ Jen said, wondering how he could make her feel so uncomfortable. He was, after all, just a colleague.
Problem was, of course, she’d never had a colleague who looked like this one…
Or felt any physical reaction to a man for a long time…
She hauled her attention back to the subject under discussion. ‘But I’ve done most of my hospital work in A and E, so I’ve had plenty of practice.’
She was sounding snappish again and knew it was because it niggled her that this man could get so easily under her skin.
Because she was physically attracted to him?
Balderdash! Of course she wasn’t.
‘I’m sure you’d do as good a job as I, but now I’ve begun I’ll finish it.’
And finish it he did, Jen cutting and cleaning, Kam sewing, until all the deepest wounds on the man’s back, chest and legs were stitched, while the less deep ones were neatly dressed.
Jen, finishing first, checked their patient’s blood pressure and pulse again, then studied the readout with trepidation.
‘His blood pressure’s dropping. I saw you examining him all over earlier—there were no deep wounds we’ve missed?’
Kam shook his head.
‘But there’s extensive bruising to his lower back and abdomen, which suggests he might have been kicked. There could be damage to his spleen or kidneys and internal bleeding, which we won’t find without an X-ray or ultrasound.’
‘Do you have a radio in your car? Do you know enough about the health services available locally to know if we could radio for a helicopter to take him out?’
Kam shook his head.
‘I imagine you drove in, camping out in the desert for one night on the way. That’s not because we—I mean the locals—want to put aid workers to as much hardship as they can, but because of the mountains around here. They have temperamental updraughts and downdraughts that can cause tremendous problems to the rotors on a helicopter, so they don’t fly here. Fixed-wing aircraft are a different matter, they fly higher so aren’t affected, but, of course, there’s no handy airfield for even a light plane to use!’
He studied her as if to gauge her reaction to his explanation, but when he spoke again she realised he’d gone back further than the helicopters.
‘You asked about a radio in my car—yes, I do have one, but so should you. One in the car and one for your office or wherever you want to keep it—they’re listed on the inventory you’re given with your supplies.’
Jen smiled at him.
‘The one in the car disappeared within two days of our arrival and the other one a couple of days after that. You can’t dig a hole and bury radios. No matter how well you wrap them, you can’t seal them completely and they tend to stop working when sand gets into their bits.’
She was smiling at him, but Kam couldn’t return the smile, too angered by the artless conversation. He couldn’t believe that things had got so bad people were stealing from an aid organisation, although he imagined these refugees had so little, he could hardly blame them for the thefts.
But how to fix this? How to redress the balance in his country? Could he and his twin achieve what needed to be done in a lifetime? Arun was working in the city, talking to the people there, seeking information about the government and whether, as their father’s influence slipped, corruption had crept in.
Or had the people elected into positions of power only seen the city as their responsibility, ignoring what was happening in the country, ignorant of this camp on the border?
As he and Arun had been, he reminded himself with a feeling of deep shame. He couldn’t speak for his twin, but nothing—neither work and study programmes, nor his father’s orders to keep his nose out of the ruler’s business—excused the way he, as heir, had allowed neglect to hurt his people. And nothing would stop his drive to fix this hurt.
Nothing!
Their patient groaned and Kam brought his mind sharply back to the job in hand.
‘A drop in blood pressure certainly suggests he’s bleeding somewhere. If you’re short of fluid, we should consider whole blood.’
The woman he’d been surprised to find in this place nodded. He’d known she was here, of course, but he’d expected…
What?
Some dowdy female?
OK, not some dowdy female, but definitely not a beauty like this golden woman was. He checked the dusting of freckles again and even in the dimmer light of the tent saw the colour of them.
‘Sorry?’ Checking out her freckles, he’d seen her lips moving and realised she was talking to him.
‘I was just offering to take some blood from him and test it, then maybe find some volunteers willing to be tested,’ Jen suggested.
‘His friends will surely volunteer. Take some blood. You can test it here? You have a kit?’
She nodded.
‘Good,’ Kam said, pleased his mind was back on the job, though the greater job still awaited him. ‘We’ve got him this far, let’s see if we can finish the job. Internal bleeding will sometimes