Desert Doctor, Secret Sheikh

by Meredith Webber

  ‘You don’t want these people who have lost everything to have some comfort and a proper place where they can be treated while they are ill?’ she demanded.

  ‘I would love them to have comfortable homes and a hospital as well, but back where they belong—back where they grew up and where their families have roamed for generations. Back in the places of their hearts! Here, surely, if we build something resembling a permanent camp, they will feel even more lost, displaced and stateless. It’s like saying to them, “Give up all hope because the war will never end in your country so you’ll just have to sit here on the edge of ours and live on whatever charity can provide.” I doubt there are people anywhere in the world who could accept that, let alone these fiercely proud desert inhabitants.’

  ‘Well, you obviously know best,’ Jen said, turning away from him towards the big tent and adding under her breath, ‘Or think you do!’

  An anger she couldn’t understand was simmering deep inside her, although she didn’t know what had caused it—surely not this man pointing out something she should have known herself? And surely not the passion that had crept into his words as if he truly understood, and possibly felt, these people’s yearnings for their home?

  No, passion was to be admired, but there was something about the man himself that stirred her anger, an air of—could it possibly be arrogance?

  Kam turned away to speak to a man walking past and Jen took the opportunity to check him out again.

  A number of doctors, like a number of professionals in any field, were arrogant, but they usually weren’t dressed in well-worn jeans and tattered T-shirts. They were more the three-piece-suit brigade.

  She sighed. She hated generalising and here she was doing it about a stranger—and about other members of her profession.

  And why was she thinking of him as a man—noting his looks and manner—when she hadn’t thought that way about a man since the accident—hadn’t ever expected to think about a man that way again?

  She reached the opening at the front of the tent, and turned to wait for him to catch up, while once again a sense of danger assailed her.

  ‘This is where we work and where I live. You can have a look in here then I’ll find someone to show you around the camp so you can get your bearings.’

  He looked as if he was about to argue, but in the end did no more than nod and follow her into the tent.

  She led the way, still holding Rosana on her hip, trying to see the place that was clinic, hospital and home through his eyes. Various bits of it were partitioned off by bright woven rugs she’d bought from the traders who came regularly to the camp, determined to get whatever money they could from the desperate refugees.

  In the clinic corner, the morning ritual of TB testing was going on, men, women and children all coughing obligingly into tiny plastic cups, while one of Jen’s local helpers spread the sputum onto a slide and labelled it with the patient’s name.

  ‘As you probably know, the refugees are mostly mountain people,’ she explained to her visitor, ‘driven out by the warring tribes across the border, and by starvation because with the war going on they can’t plant their crops or take their livestock to good pastures.’

  Her guest—or should she start thinking of him as her colleague?—nodded.

  ‘I imagine in these overcrowded conditions diseases like TB can spread quickly, and with complications like AIDS in some cases, your first priority must be to complete this eradication programme.’

  Maybe she could think of him as a colleague.

  It would certainly be easier than thinking of him as a man…

  ‘Except that things happen, of course, to get us off track,’ she explained. ‘A child gets too close to a fire and is burned, a woman goes into labour—naturally we have to tend them. In these people’s eyes—and in reality, I suppose—we’re a medical team, so they come to us for help.’

  And though still wary of him—of the person, not the doctor, she decided—she gave him the welcome she should have offered in the first place.

  ‘For that reason it’s great to have you on board. You can do the normal medical stuff and we’ll get on with the TB programme.’

  ‘TB treatment involves a period of nine months.’ He interrupted her so firmly she took a step back. ‘You intend being here that long?’

  He spoke with a hint of sceptical suspicion that fired the simmering embers of the anger she didn’t understand to glowing life.

  ‘What do you think? That I’m playing at being a volunteer? That I came here for some kind of thrill, or maybe kudos—so people would see what a wonderful person I am?’

  She scowled at him.

  ‘Of course I’m here for the duration of the testing and treatment, although it might not be a full nine months, but then again, with more people coming into the camp all the time, it might be longer than that.’

  He was obviously unaffected by scowls, or scorn, or anger. He waited until she’d finished speaking, then asked, ‘Why not a full nine months?’

  ‘Because we’ve cut treatment time to six months through a selection of different medication,’ she told him, tilting her chin so she could look him in the eyes. ‘Once someone is on the programme it’s mainly a matter of supervision to make sure they take their medication. Isolation would be good, if there was somewhere we could send those with the disease, but then again, to take these people from the few family they have left would add to their problems. We treat the physical things as we can, but the mental burden they carry—the sadness—we can do nothing for that.’

  The visitor stared at her as if she’d suddenly begun to speak in tongues.

  ‘And you care?’ he asked.

  Jen stared at him in disbelief.

  ‘Of course I care. Why wouldn’t I care? I presume you’re here because you care, too, or is this some ruse? Are you some kind of government spy sent here to see what’s happening in the camp, or an Aid for All spy, checking I’m not selling the TB drugs on the side? Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘I’ve told you why I’m here,’ he replied, all cool arrogance again. Maybe it was the voice—so very English.

  Rich English.

  Was his father a foreign oil baron that Kam had grown up here? Or, in spite of that English voice, did the blood of a long line of desert warriors run through his veins? She’d learnt enough of the local people to know they were a proud race.

  Although the questions kept popping up in her head, or maybe because of them, Jen ignored him, setting Rosana down on a mat on the floor and nodding to one of the women helping with the TB testing to keep an eye on the child. She was about to show him the layout of the tent when she became aware of approaching excitement, the shrieks and wails and general hysteria coming closer and closer.

  Stepping past her visitor, she was heading out of the tent when he pulled her back, pushing her behind him and telling her to stay there.

  As if she would! She moved up to his shoulder so they exited the tent together, and saw the excited crowd, a body held between a number of men, women shrieking lament behind them.

  ‘He was thrown over the fence. Men on horses threw him. It is Lia’s husband. They have beaten him with whips.’

  Mahmoud, one of many men in the camp who spoke a little English, explained this as the group moved closer, and as Jen stepped to one side and waved to the men carrying the patient to bring him inside, she heard her visitor cursing quietly beside her.

  But cursing didn’t help. She led the men behind a partition in the tent and indicated they should put their burden down on a plastic-covered mattress on the floor. Then she knelt beside the man and saw the blood-soaked, tattered remnants of his gown, in places sticking to his skin, on others torn right off. They turned him on his side, as the wounds were on the front and the back of his chest and on his calves. Jen found a couple of cushions she could prop behind his knees to keep him in that position.

  The man was moaning piteously, but when the stranger spoke to him in his
own language he found the strength to answer.

  Jen, meanwhile, was wondering where to begin.

  ‘Pain relief before we start to examine him, I think.’ Her colleague answered her unspoken question, kneeling on the other side of the man but looking across him at Jen. ‘What do you have?’

  Jen did a quick mental scan of her precious drugs.

  ‘I’ve a small supply of pethidine but we should run it through fluid in an IV for it to work faster.’

  Fluid—she had so little in the way of fluid replacement, a couple of bags of isotonic saline solution and a couple of bags of five percent dextrose in water, which was also isotonic. The man had bled a lot and both would help restore plasma levels and though she hated using up what few supplies she had, she knew she would.

  Was she frowning that her colleague, who’d been taking stock of the patient’s injuries, now turned his attention to her?

  ‘You do have some fluid?’ he asked, and she nodded and stood up, asking one her assistants, Aisha, to bring a basin of water and cloths to bathe the man, before heading for the little partitioned-off section of the tent that was her bedroom and digging into the sand in one corner where she’d buried this treasure.

  ‘You bury it?’

  She turned to see Kam standing near the rug she’d hung to provide a little privacy to this area, and now he was frowning, although she was the one disturbed to have him in her space.

  ‘To keep it safe from thieves.’

  He shook his head and walked away.

  Tubing, cannulas and catheters were buried in another part of the area she looked on as her room, and she dug them up and dusted sand off the plastic bags in which she’d buried them.

  ‘I don’t have much IV fluid replacement,’ she said, when she joined him by the patient. She was angry with herself for sounding apologetic, but he merely shook his head, though he frowned again as he saw the sand dropping from the bundle she was unwrapping.

  If frowns were any indication, he was one angry man…

  ‘And what you have you must hide? Isn’t that overdoing things? Do you feel you can’t trust these people? How can you help them if distrust is in the air all the time?’

  Anger sharpened the demands.

  ‘I don’t hide things from the people in the camp,’ Jen told him, defending the refugees, although she knew some of them might steal from need. ‘But raiders come from time to time. Even if they don’t need medicines themselves, they can sell them. It’s one of the reasons drug-resistant TB has spread so widely. People steal the medicine, sell it to unsuspecting locals in the souk, and never tell the buyers they need to take far more than one box of tablets in order to be cured.’

  She knelt beside the patient, opening the small trunk that held their most used medical needs, like antiseptic and swabs and small sutures. She found what she needed and first bathed the man’s left hand then swabbed it, before bringing up a vein and inserting a cannula into it.

  Marij, Jen’s other assistant, had passed a blood-pressure cuff and small monitor to Kam, who was now checking the man’s BP and pulse, while Marij and Aisha were cutting off the tattered remnants of the man’s robe, leaving pieces that were stuck to open wounds, which would be removed later.

  Jen set up a drip, pulling a wooden box that had once contained TB drugs close to the man so she could sit the bag of fluid on it, then she broke open the ampoule of pethidine, drew the contents into a syringe and injected it into the fluid, adjusting the flow so their patient would receive it slowly over a prolonged period of time.

  But as more and more of the man’s clothing was cut away and Jen saw the depth of some of the wounds, she began to wonder if they would be able to help him.

  ‘How could anyone do this to someone else?’ she whispered, awed by the ferocity of the attack.

  ‘They must have taken him for a thief or, worse, a spy,’ Kam said, his voice grim.

  ‘But—’

  Once glance at his stern, set face stopped further protest and she reminded herself she was there to help, not to judge. She concentrated on their patient.

  ‘I suppose we can only do what we can,’ she said, thinking how little that might be—what if there were internal wounds they wouldn’t know about until too late? Although now she had someone with whom she could work, maybe they could save this patient.

  The visitor nodded.

  ‘I know you’re a TB clinic but would you have surgical instruments? I think if we can debride some of the damaged skin, there’ll be less likelihood of infection.’

  Jen thought of the odds and ends of instruments she’d acquired over the last three years, now packed in among her underwear in the battered suitcase in her makeshift bedroom.

  ‘I’ll get what I have,’ she said, but as she rose to her feet she wondered why Kam Rahman didn’t have all this equipment himself. If he was from Aid for All and coming here to run a medical clinic in conjunction with the TB clinic, surely he’d have brought supplies and equipment with him.

  She glanced his way but the badge he’d shown her was now tucked inside the T-shirt. Later she’d take a closer look at the logo on his vehicle—better by far than thinking about digging under the T-shirt for his ID…

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHY was she suspicious of him? Because he was far too good-looking to be an aid worker? Did she have preconceived ideas that they all had to be long-haired and wear sandals and not speak like an English prince? As she considered these questions, she stacked all the instruments, sterilised by boiling and now wrapped in paper, on a battered metal tray and carried it out to put it beside the stranger, then suggested Marij empty the bowls of water and bring fresh.

  ‘That’s some collection,’ Kam said, as Jen unwrapped her treasured instruments and set them on the tray where they could both reach them.

  ‘Three years of humble begging,’ she joked, but from the way his lips tightened he didn’t think it was at all funny.

  Which it probably wasn’t but, then, there wasn’t much to laugh about here, so the man had better loosen up and get used to feeble humour or he’d frown his way into a deep depression.

  ‘Sutures?’ he asked.

  They were in the chest with the dressings—and fortunately she had plenty of them, mainly because they were the first things people pressed on her back at home when she visited hospitals or surgeries, asking for donations.

  ‘Now, how are we going to work this? Do you want to cut and swab and I’ll stitch or would you prefer to stitch?’

  Jen stared in horror at the damage that had been done, not only to the man’s back but to his chest as well. In places the lash, or whatever had been used, had bitten so deeply into his flesh she could see the grey-white 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 a
nd 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.