A Doctor's Christmas Family

by Meredith Webber

  ‘So you’re only using IV for those too weak to swallow?’

  ‘Or those dehydrating faster than we can replace fluids by mouth. All the patients on this floor are able to eat—though they’re not particularly interested in food. The four in the ICU are on total parenteral nutrition.’

  TPN—nutrients essential for life administered straight into the blood so the digestive system was bypassed altogether. Good practice with severe dengue cases, where internal bleeding often started in the digestive tract.

  Esther was considering this as she walked into the room, while her eyes scanned the four patients lying docilely in their beds. Depression was another symptom of dengue, and she wondered if it was a measure of how sick they felt or the depression that made them lie so listlessly.

  There was a child over by the window, a young boy, and he raised a weak hand and waved to Esther. She crossed the room towards him.

  ‘You’re lucky to be near the window, because when you sit up you must be able to see the ocean,’ she said to him.

  ‘We live near the ocean, only it’s not really the ocean, just a bit of it called the Coral Sea. Are you a new nurse?’

  His voice was weak, but Esther sensed he was happy talking to her. Being up here with other dengue cases, he was cut off from other children and probably eager for company.

  ‘No, I’m Esther, a new doctor, here to help Dr Jackson.’

  ‘Bill’s nice,’ the boy said, and Esther smiled to herself. Two months in Australia must have broken down Bill’s attitude to shortening of names. He had only accepted her calling him Bill after she’d told him she couldn’t possibly kiss an intimidating man called William, but all his friends and colleagues, no doubt brainwashed by the regular visits Gwyneth made to his home in a suburb of Atlanta, had stuck with William.

  ‘He is,’ Esther agreed, adding silently, Too nice.

  She was studying the boy as she talked to him, seeing the flush of fever and the rapid rise and fall of his chest.

  ‘How long have you been sick?’ she asked.

  ‘Since yesterday,’ he said. ‘The day before my throat was sore and my back hurt, and my head a little bit, but Mum was sick and I didn’t want to bother her.’

  The pace with which the symptoms had progressed worried Esther, but something else had struck her in the conversation. Promising the boy she’d be back soon, she left the room.

  ‘I thought all women and children had been evacuated from the city,’ she said to Bill, who was bent over the desk reading a file, oblivious to the flirty looks the nurse was giving him.

  Oh, no! No way, Esther! You cannot possibly be jealous and possessive about an ex-husband!

  ‘Most of them,’ Bill was saying, while Esther ordered her emotions back into line. ‘Young Ryan there belongs to an Aboriginal family who live on the outskirts of town in one of the least affected areas. It’s beyond city limits and doesn’t come under the administrator’s jurisdiction so the locals there weren’t ordered to evacuate. Though they were encouraged to go because the fewer people here, the less stress is put on what facilities remain in use.’

  ‘And these people opted not to go?’

  ‘Refused,’ Bill said. ‘I think they were fearful about ending up in a big city down south where they not only knew no one, but would have to cope with things like a different public transport system. Fortunately, theirs was a public housing development so the building inspections during construction of the houses were very stringent and though there was minor damage to most of the homes, all were still habitable.’

  He paused, and Esther guessed what he was thinking.

  ‘And now, if there are a number of dengue cases from that area, you don’t want people moving out? Better to keep it contained?’

  His tired face was lifted by the smile.

  ‘Cleft stick, isn’t it?’ he said, while Esther reminded herself it was best if she didn’t make him smile. Far better if she kept arguing. ‘Yes, if there’s a carrier in the group, we don’t want him or her travelling somewhere else and starting another outbreak, but on the other hand, we might prevent other people from the area getting it if we move all the inhabitants out—that way any already infected mosquitoes would have no one to bite.’

  ‘But move them to where? It would have to be somewhere they could be totally isolated in case they’re already incubating the disease.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Bill smiled again. ‘It’s why I needed an epidemiologist. Your job—apart from reorganising the hospital and bringing the wrath of the CEO down on my neck—is to track down the source and stop the spread. Meeting the patients is just the first step.’

  ‘What help will I have?’ This was a ‘concentrating on work in order to negate the smiles’ question. ‘My boss said that was organised.’

  ‘The army’s providing you with a vehicle and driver. Army personnel are already spraying all wetland areas for mosquitoes. Hugo helped them out in one way, stripping the leaves off trees that were left standing, but Aedes, our carrier, usually lives in rubbish and containers around houses, so water in and under fallen debris is a perfect breeding ground for him—or her, as the female causes all the problems. Realistically, until all the debris is removed, which could be weeks, we’re in trouble.’

  ‘The new patient is in Room Four.’

  The flirty nurse reminded them of why they were here, and Bill nodded to her, picked up a file, then took Esther’s elbow to guide her to the room.

  It was a gesture of politeness, one he used with all women, young and old, but Esther’s skin thought it was special and reacted accordingly. Boy, was this going to be a tormented few weeks! How could she work closely with Bill again when even an impersonal touch like this electrified her senses?

  ‘The man we’ve just admitted—the resident down in A and E is alert for anyone with suspicious symptoms—is the uncle of the youth you’ve met already.’

  Bill opened a door to a room at the far end of the ward and held it for Esther to enter. A tall, thin man with skin like polished cedar wood was sitting up, with no tubes or monitoring equipment keeping him tethered to the bed.

  ‘I told the other doc I didn’t need to be in hospital,’ he said. ‘Just needed a pill. I ain’t that sick. Just a headache and I keep shiverin’. Bloody army, takin’ over the town, orderin’ people around.’

  Bill ignored the protest, introducing himself and Esther.

  ‘I’m glad you’re not sick enough to need to be in hospital but I’m glad you’re here for my sake,’ Esther told him, moving to the far side of the bed while Bill checked the man’s blood pressure. ‘I’m here to see if we can stop this sickness spreading, and to do that I need to know where it’s come from. Is it OK if I ask you some questions?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Better you than the Yank,’ he said, nodding his head towards Bill. ‘Friends who’ve been up here visitin’ tell me he’s hard to understand. Funny how we all speak English different!’

  Esther smiled her response. She’d often had trouble catching some of the things Bill said in his drawling Southern accent, though she’d always thought his speaking voice so beautiful she’d enjoyed listening to it the way someone else would enjoy a musical concert.

  ‘So, when did you start feeling sick?’

  Bill asked the question, while Esther fished in her pocket for the small notebook and tiny pencil she always carried with her.

  ‘Yesterday,’ the man replied, while Esther, glancing at the name-plate above the bed, wrote his name, Harold Jenkins, in her notebook.

  Bill was examining the man’s feet, presumably in search of the rash which usually appeared, though often not until the second phase of the disease.

  The rash was there, and on his hands, now Esther looked more closely. It would probably spread all over his body, the itch of it making him feel worse than the fever.

  ‘You didn’t feel sick a few days earlier—maybe a week ago?’ Bill asked.

  Harold rolled his eyes to the cei
ling, no doubt to aid his thought processes.

  ‘When did Hugo hit?’ he asked.

  ‘Ten days ago,’ Bill told him.

  ‘Yeah, well, I felt crook that day. Sore legs and back but I put it down to lumping furniture around, eh. The siren was already blarin’ out the cyclone warning so I didn’t bother much, just cleared the yard of things that’d blow away, then went down the street to help some oldies who wouldn’t have the sense to get in outta the rain.’

  ‘And the next day?’ Bill prompted, while Esther wrote a reminder to herself in the notebook.

  ‘I was real crook next day, gotta sore throat and realised it must be summer flu. All the family was safe and there wasn’t anythin’ much I could do outside with the rain still pelting down, so I went to bed for a few days—nearly a week. Felt lousy.’

  It was an almost classic progression of the disease, Esther realised. First the flu-like symptoms of pain, fever and a sore throat then recovery for a day or two before the second phase moved in. And with it the rash.

  ‘You didn’t think to come to the hospital the first time you were sick?’ she asked, and the man gave her a disbelieving look.

  ‘The city’d been blown away, there’re dead an’ injured people everywhere, and you think I’d go to the hospital with a bit of flu?’

  ‘No, I understand,’ Esther told him. ‘I wasn’t thinking. It must have been terrible.’

  But she was still puzzled. He’d probably felt far worse in the first phase of the disease, and not sought treatment, but now he was here.

  ‘And this time? What made you come in this afternoon?’

  She smiled at Bill, glad he’d asked the question, but his attention was focussed on Harold—which was possibly just as well.

  ‘Me mate’s died, hasn’t he?’ Harold answered. ‘Had the rash like this…’ he raised a foot for their inspection ‘…all over his body, then the bugger upped and died. The army bloke that’s sprayin’—he saw the rash and drove me in.’

  ‘Of course,’ Bill said, while Esther, scenting information, moved closer to the bed.

  ‘Your mate who died, did he live near you?’

  ‘Only next door, but that don’t mean much ’cos his wife, she didn’t even get sick.’

  ‘Just two of thirteen known patients have been women,’ Bill told her, ‘though I haven’t been able to make anything of that. I’ve really been too busy trying to find some way to treat the severe cases to be tracing the source.’

  Esther’s mind raced with conjecture, the thrill of the hunt, of tracking down a deadly enemy in the form of this virus, rising in her blood like the fever the virus caused.

  ‘That’s strange when South American outbreaks show a higher incidence of women—or girls. A lot of previous outbreaks have affected children more than adults, haven’t they?’

  Bill nodded. ‘And we’re the opposite. It’s one of the reasons I’m worried. There are too many differences here, Esther. Adults not children, men more than women, and the speed at which the disease progresses to DHF.’

  ‘I’ve so many questions—you’re obviously too busy to be answering them,’ she said to Bill. ‘Would the CEO still be here? Or someone on the admin staff I could talk to about patient records and maps of the area? I need—’

  Bill held up his hand and smiled at her—another tired smile, but its effect was undiminished by the exhaustion.

  ‘It’s nearly seven but the CEO is probably still here, though he’s not who you need for patient records or maps.’

  ‘I’ll need his authority to get what I want from other people, though, and we need to see him about setting up a proper isolation ward.’

  ‘Do we?’ Bill asked, a teasing humour lingering in the words.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Esther retorted, refusing to be swayed from her belief by the effect of his teasing.

  ‘Then you’d better come with me while I talk to him,’ Bill said. ‘Just let me finish something first.’

  He led the way to a small room Esther guessed was the ward office of whatever doctor was on duty here. Against the wall was a large map, obviously of Jamestown, and clustered in one corner of it a number of bright red pins. She didn’t need to look at the desk to know there’d be stacks of patient files. Embarrassment flooded through her.

  ‘First and foremost I’m a scientist,’ Bill reminded her, as he stuck another pin in the map—Harold’s pin, apparently.

  ‘I know that!’ she snapped. ‘I just didn’t think you’d have had time, with all the severely ill patients you’ve been handling, to have done much research work. No wonder you look terrible. You’ve been doing this when you finish with your hands-on work—you’re not looking after yourself at all. And what’s supposed to happen when you collapse? Who takes over then?’

  Anger she couldn’t explain boiled and bubbled inside her, spilling out in words that couldn’t be contained. Not that Bill seemed perturbed by her tirade. He was looking at her with a strange expression—puzzled?—on his face.

  ‘Do I, Esther? Do I look terrible to you?’ he said, apparently latching onto the least important part of her tirade. ‘That’s strange, because you look so beautiful to me. More beautiful than my mental images of you. More beautiful than my memories. Aren’t memories supposed to enhance beauty?’

  She was thinking about the question—well, to be honest, she was feeling a warm glow at the praise, then thinking about the question—so his movement took her by surprise, and by the time she recovered he was kissing close, then kissing her, hard and long, demanding a response she had to steel herself not to give him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BUT how could she steel herself to resist while her blood throbbed with remembered passion, and her nerves tingled with needs too long denied? Steel wasn’t enough, anyway. If she was a woman of steel, then Bill was kryptonite, destroying the source of her strength—weakening her with his taste, his smell, the feel of his skin, the solidity of his body.

  He’d married Marcie.

  And he had a child.

  Don’t respond.

  Don’t—

  She put her hands on his chest and pushed away, wiping furiously at her mouth—as if that would help remove the taste and feel of Bill. Some hope when it was already imprinted into every fibre of her being!

  ‘Don’t you dare do that,’ she stormed, taking refuge in anger. ‘Don’t you dare!’

  He stared at her for a moment, his tired blue eyes unfocussed as if he was still in some kind of dream, then he said, ‘No. No, I won’t. Why don’t you stay here? You can look at the map and files or talk to the patients. I’ll collect you when I finish upstairs.’

  Esther watched him walk away, disappointment swamping the anger as effectively as a fireman’s hose swept across a summer grass fire. Useless to tell herself she didn’t want him kissing her again when her body was feeling more alive than it had for years and her arms ached to hold him.

  And useless also to tell herself he might not mean it—the part about not doing it again. When Bill said he wouldn’t do something again, he meant it. A man of his word, her Bill.

  Only he wasn’t her Bill any more…

  Had he ever been? Didn’t the fact that he’d married Marcie—and not all that long after she herself had left, if you considered the baby who looked about nine months old—prove he had always been Marcie’s Bill, and she, Esther, had been nothing more than a minor aberration?

  She turned towards the map, realising why he’d asked the research institute for help. He had done what he could from here, but didn’t have time to get out into the field to do the follow-up work—seeing the landscape, talking to the people who didn’t get sick. Even the paperwork would have proved too much for him to tackle alone, as the relationship between all the affected patients had to be teased out, and diagrams drawn up to see if a picture of infection emerged.

  The red pins on the map were definitely clustered in one area, though here and there throughout the city stray pins stood out like drops of
blood from a nosebleed.

  Those were the people she should tackle first, but how to know who they were?

  She moved closer, and noticed Bill had printed, in tiny letters, a number beside each pin. She forgot her irritation and smiled at his professional efficiency. Apparently he’d numbered the patients in the order in which they’d been admitted, so she could tell at a glance the dots not in the cluster were early cases, four, seven and eight. This in itself was reassuring. There must be at least thirty pins in the map and later numbers among the isolated pins would have suggested an outward spread of the virus and the potential of whoever was left in the depopulated city being at risk.

  So, Bill had done this preliminary work. What did she have to do first? She sat down at the desk and pushed the files to one side, making enough space to put her arms on the desk so her head could rest on her arms. The emotional upheaval of the past few hours had sucked the remaining energy out of her body so she’d just think in that position for a little while.

  Saturation radio and television warnings to everyone in the city to make sure they wore protective clothing and an effective mosquito repellent. Had that been done? Was the local authority issuing repellent? She’d have to check.

  Bill would know.

  Bill!

  Why had no one invented an effective repellent for love? Something to spray on the skin to stop the tiny sensors in every cell reacting to the presence of the object of desire? A tablet to take as an antidote, to prevent stomach-somersaulting and heart-leaping when said object came into view? Maybe an inoculation against it ever happening again—object specific—a vaccination to prevent her from ever loving Bill again?

  No, it wasn’t again—it was still! Something to stop her still loving Bill…

  She was sleeping so soundly he hated waking her. For more reasons than that she must have needed the sleep to be able to do it in such an uncomfortable position.