Every Last Mother's Child

by William J. Carty, Jr

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  The four LifeSavers had two different destinations. Both of them were to downtown nursing homes. The one carrying Admiral Klond headed for the oldest and most well-known nursing home on the planet. Trenaport Nursing had started out four centuries ago as the fledgling colony’s clinic. As the colony expanded, and the village became a town, then a small city and finally the capital city of the solar system, the nursing home evolved from a clinic to a medical center, then down to a nursing home. In its current configuration it had been a nursing home for nearly 100 years. The current owners had remodeled the building a bit, had updated some systems; but had left the old emergency services entrance intact. Many of their patients came in via an ambulance of some sort. The emergency entrance became the intake department of the three hundred bed nursing home. It was well suited to the purpose of processing patients. This is where Camellia Downs had set up her work stationoffice.

  Camellia was one of Lady Hawthorne’s ladies. Her husband had been the administrator of a large medical center not too far from where she now stood. When they had been first married she had been his office administrator running his office. She had learned how to handle both patients and the medical staff who treated them. A few days ago her husband had simply committed suicide. She had been devastated. He didn’t leave a note; but when she went to get some groceries for her kids she found that the account was empty. She later found out he had owed several hundred thousand crowns in gambling debts. Because of his suicide the life insurance she had expected to help out after his death wasn’t paid to her. She was starting to sort it all out trying to figure out what she would do next when somehow Lady Hawthorne found out about her situation and called her. After their conversation she had piled the kids in the car and had driven out to the Hawthorne estate. Thirty minutes later she was on her way back to Trenaport nNursing with instructions to get the Trenaport Nursing Home ready for evacuation.

  Now as she waited for the first of the ambulances to show up she was weary from the 72 hours she had been on her feet getting this center ready for evacuation. It had been both more and less work than she expected.

  The first obstacle had been the facility’s Manager who had been waiting for her and her team with his lawyer.

  “I am Camellia Downs,” the middle aged woman greeted the party before her, “I have been asked by her majesty to evacuate your residents!”

  “Byron Middleton,” the younger of the two men said, “I am the home’s manager this is my attorney. I am afraid I can’t let you do that. They all have contracts with Trenaport Nursing. I am responsible for their care!”

  “How do you propose to get them to safety?” Camellia had asked.

  “We are renting a liner and will be taking them to Crestwell,” the man said, “Which is specified in our disaster plan.”

  “What is the ship’s name,” Camellia had asked. Thankful, that they had at least started their disaster plan. It would make her job easier. Maybe she wouldn’t have to do much here.

  “We’re still in the process of lining one up,” the other man replied. “A lot of star lift has become suddenly unavailable including our contract carrier’s ships.”

  “Monday,” Camellia rebutted, “Several hospital ships, from the IRS will be in system to evacuate all residents in nursing homes, and hospitals. I am to coordinate the evacuation of your residents and their families to the hospital ships and to the empire.”

  “I am afraid I can’t let you do that,” the other man spoke, “the contracts state that for at least a year, or until such a time as the person’s physician declares the individual to not need skilled nursing care, they are my client’s responsibility. Here’s copy of the contracts.”

  Camellia read the contracts. Not believing what she was reading. It hadn’t been simple. Even using the guidelines she had been briefed to use there had been a problem from the get go. She and her five man team had shown up near sunset on Friday with orders from the Marshal to get this home ready for evacuation. The first problem was that the nursing home owner wasn’t about to hand over her patients. They represented cash, and her only income. She had told Camellia that these people had a contract with her that required them to pay her for their care regardless for the rest of the contract period. Some of the serious patients had one year contracts. Camellia read a couple of the contracts, looked at the pairowner with contempt, and then called the number she had been given. She almost had a heart attack when the phone was answered by the Queen’s Attorney. She explained the situation to the Queen’s Attorney who asked to speak with the nursing home owner. The Queen’s attorney simply and elegantly said, “The Crown has nullified all such contracts you are out of business, and Mrs. Downs is now is in charge of your facility. Good day.”

  What Camellia hadn’t known was that each team leader and the members on the team had been hand pickedhandpicked for their back ground, and their ability to make decisions. They all had experience in patient care and had at one time or another helped to manage a congregate care facility. The Queen’s Attorney had been briefed on each of the team leaders, and had told his law clerk to let the team leaders through to him anywhere he was. His instructions from the Queen, and the Marshals office had been simple. Remove legal road blocks where ever they occurred that prevented the nursing home patients from being evacuated.

  The two men were about to say something, when Camellia said, “You can either help get your charges to safety or you can leave. I don’t care which!”

  Realizing they couldn’t stop what was going to happen. They disgruntledly decided to assist her.

  The first step was to get a census of the nursing home. Camellia needed to know who was in the home, what their conditions were, and how to contact families. Camellia turned that over to Lady Hawthorne, who had hired an artificial intelligence to help make the notifications.

  Once the census was done, their next job was to go to each resident and advise them of what was going on.Their next operation was the triage. Camellia and her team then visited each patient in the nursing home. With the nurse supervisor for each of the wards in tow for each of the six wards each and every one of theAll three hundred of the nursing homes patients. Most of the residents were cognizant and understood what was going on. There were quite a few of the residents were in the nursing home for extended physical or occupational therapy.

  “What about my family?” more than one resident asked.

  “We are contacting your family,” the worker replied, “They will be evacuated with you. They’ll be on the same ship.”

  Other residents were so out of it they had no idea of what was going on. In such cases the team had Lady Hawthorne’s phone bank contact the resident’s family, explained the situation to them and got permission to evacuate them and tell the family where to report for their own evacuation. Quite a few residents were the soul surviving member of their family that was why they were in the nursing home to begin with. Many were so ill that they were being cared for by hospice nurses. Those residents would be the last people to be evacuated from the home. Residents who were able to helped get themselves ready to be evacuated.

  The whole nursing home was in turmoil. The residents were in turmoil, the nursing staff was also in turmoil. They had never practiced the homes evacuation plan, and it wouldn’t have made a difference had they practiced it. The plan called for evacuating the home to other homes in the case of fire or other catastrophic event that took down the nursing home. Slowly order came back to the nursing home. Well almost, the nursing administrator got Camellia aside late on Saturday.

  “Mrs. Downs,” Fred Thorton the nurse administrator for the nursing home motioned for her to come into his office as she passed by. Camellia came into the office bracing herself for the nurse’s next piece of bad news. “Shut the door please.”

  Camellia shut the door now doubly concerned about what the nurse was going to say. He had been a godsend during the event so far. He had called in all his people
and didn’t quibble about paying them even when the owner threw fit over it. His staff had proven that they knew what their job was, taking care of people. They had plenty of help to get everyone ready to go. In addition to packing each resident and their room they had to check each and every resident’s medical records. They couldn’t have done it without this man’s people.

  “Mrs. Downs,” the man said hesitantly, “I need to ask you something and it may have to stay among us.”

  “Oh,” Camellia responded.

  “I have been asked about my staff’s own evacuation,” Thorton stated, “I have been asked by almost all of my people when will they be evacuated.”

  Camellia was quiet for a few minutes before taking out her communicator.

  “Lady Hawthorne,” she said into the device, soon lady Hawthorne’s image floated above the communicator.

  “Delores,” Camellia spoke to the noble woman, “I am sitting with Fred Thorton, the Trenaport Nursing Home’s director of nursing, discussing his staff. Once the home is evacuated his staff will be out of a job and may not be able to find work. What are we to tell his staff?”

  “You are not the only one who’s asking,” the noble woman was saying as she appeared to turn to look at Thorton. “We made a mistake in our planning. We’re just realizing that now. It was brought to our attention that the empire does not have enough nursing staff to care for your residents at their destination. So we’ve decided that your staff and their families will be evacuated as well. Tell them they are to pack one bag for each family member, to bring their meds and their vital papers and be ready to be evacuated. They’ll get their actual embarkation orders sometime tonight or tomorrow. We’re hoping to get them on the same ship as their charges.”

  “Thank you,” Thorton replied, “I’ll get the word out.”

  With that issue dealt with, they continued getting the home ready to be evacuated. They packed up the residents rooms. Some they decided to wait until Monday so as to limit some turmoil. Camellia and Thorton knew that there was no way to avoid some turmoil. Although issues that plagued nursing home residents in the past, there were some new variations of those same issues. Dementia the primary issue! Thought to have been wiped out in the early first century before empire, it had been making a serious come back. Dementia occurred mostly among recovering crazy dust addicts. A serious side effect of the drug was addicts become very mentally unstable from using the powerful drug. Even recovered addicts sometimes still exhibited signs of mental illness. There was one whole ward that was locked down that they hadn’t done much more than see who they were, made sure their records were up to date and who their families were if they were not the only survivors of their family. had to be identified. The team split into three two people teams, who with one hundred patients records each made sure the records were accurate. Most of them were. The crown had in recent years been cracking down on nursing homes. Some had pulled scams of legendary proportions the crown had rewritten large sections of the Human Resources code to prevent fraud from happening. Therefore most of the records were updated and accurate. Where they weren’t it was a simple matter of the latest update not having been added to the records. TThat took most of Saturday and Sunday. Then late Sunday through early morning hours of Monday the team double checked their work. They began started the task of making up the getting people ready to go and mresidents’ embarkation schedule for the ambulances.

  Reversing the criteria they started working up a movement plan. The ambulatory, followed by the serious, followed by critical. The theory being; the more ambulatory could be moved faster than the most serious. The ambulatory needing less attention than the serious would be able to be loaded more quickly and unloaded faster. This was why there were two buses parked just off the ambulance bay.

  It was with some relief when she saw the armored ambulances pull up to the back entrance of the home and she watched as an old women wearing an IRS uniform walk down the ramp to the large vehicle with the traditional red cross on its sides. She didn’t know much about the military; but she knew what the stars on the woman’s collars meant. She was the person in charge.

  “Hello,” the older woman greeted Camellia, “I am Doctor Klond.”

  “Camellia Downs,” The weary noble woman offered her hand.

  The doctor took the offered hand and asked. “What do you have for us?”

  “A lot of bodies,” Camellia said handing the old woman a complete roster of who was going. Michelle looked it over, not surprised that the least serious were going first. It made sense to her. She handed the clip board to Snatch, the shorter of her two body guards, shorter being relevant for the six foot two inch tall marine, “Snatch there’s your loading plan.”

  “Aye-Aye,” He said looking at the people who were lined up in the hallway. A quick check of the name tags on them matched the first couple of names on the list. Satisfied he nodded to the medics. They were all EMTs; none of them were doctors or nurses. They needed people who were used to working quickly with what they had to stabilize a patient; to get him to the hospital where the real work could be done. Several centuries before all of the medics would have been board certified trauma doctors. Soon a line of people on crutches, and anti gravity chairs were moving out the door of the intake center. Those able to carried a small bag of their things with them. Unknown to all of them the crown had made each of them a grant of 10000 crowns for their resettlement expenses once they were released from nursing care. The money came out of emergency relief fund, and the Queen’s personal fortune. The crown had already made arrangements to cover the expense of their treatment on what ever world they would end up on.

  The Queen had simply said “There’s no use in protecting the crown’s treasury, or my personal fortune, what ever these people need they get”.

  The Queen was a billionaire several times over. As the last remaining heir to the MacAlisterMcAlister fortune, the family surname of the royal family, she literally owned most of Trena. Only those portions that had been sold did she not own directly, and even those defaulted to the Crown should there be no heir to receive the property.