Doctored (6 page)

“I’m a great admirer,” he told her with a hand outstretched.  He was a big, bluff man with a bushy beard.  He reminded her of Mr. French from that childhood series she had watched, ‘A Family Affair.’

“I’m thrilled to be working with you,” she told him.  He smiled, but didn’t believe her.  From the accolades she had gotten, he knew they were lucky to have her.

He put his arm across her shoulders as they watched the helpers unpack his large truck of supplies.  “How are you getting on here?  Can we entice you to stay longer?”

“Oh, I love it here.  The work is very challenging,” she hedged.  She wasn’t about to complain about any
thing
, or any
one
.

“This new serum from Harvard is supposed to be good,” he commented, his arm falling from her shoulders.  He changed the subject, sensing that something wasn’t quite right.  They were soon talking the benefits of the various medicines he had brought back with them.  The guards around the truck attested to the importance of their supplies.  They would stay at the compound, their automatic rifles necessary to keep the drugs safe so they could use them in the clinic and not have them stolen to be sold on the black market.

The two doctors talked as the goods were stowed and secured.  Doctor Burton walked up, wiping his hands on a towel, obviously just come from washing up at the sinks.  “Ah, you’ve met,” he said with forced joviality.

Doctor Wilson immediately sensed the tension between the other two doctors.  “Yes, I’ve heard her praises sung from Lefeyette to Mamadu,” he smiled, showing brilliant white teeth against the black of his full beard.

“Ah, yes,” Burton agreed, sounding unconvinced and then immediately talking about the supplies that Wilson had managed to get through.  Deanna wandered away.

“You fool!  Have you managed to insult her already?” Wilson asked, exasperated, as he waited for Cooper to get out of earshot.

“What?  She may be brilliant, but she’s young and inexperienced…” Burton blustered.

“You have no idea how brilliant she is…or how connected.  How do you think I got all these supplies, or the guards?” he was furious and let it show.

“She arranged it?”

“Doctors Without Borders arranged it, on her recommendation.  I was sitting in Lefeyette, trying to arrange one quarter of this amount when someone from that organization approached me.  Apparently, Cooper got a message out and placed an order.  They listen to that young and inexperienced doctor!”  He had asked about the new doctor that he knew would be in Mamadu when and if he got back.  The guards had made sure they got back across this violent land.

“So,” he shrugged, unimpressed.  “She has connections….”

“Yeah, and she used them despite your foolishness.  Let her alone and let her do her job,” he recommended heatedly.  “You don’t know who she knows or what she can do!”  He had his suspicions, but he was going to keep them to himself unless he had them confirmed.

Over the following days, Doctor Burton kept a wary distance, allowing the young woman to do her job.  He had to begrudgingly admit she knew what she was doing, did it well, and with enthusiasm.  He was surprised that she didn’t hesitate to operate when it was necessary.  She knew techniques that he himself could learn from.  One afternoon, he helped her perform a C-Section on a pregnant woman, only numbing her lower half.  She explained that by not putting the woman completely out, they not only saved on anesthesia which could be hard to get, but the mother would be less anxious to hold her newborn.

“Tell her we will have her baby out in five minutes,” she said to the interpreter in French.  The interpreter then spoke in the local dialect to the woman, explaining what the ‘vroulike dokter’ was saying.  It wasn’t the words that calmed the woman, it was Deanna’s self-assurance and the calmness she maintained.  Her sunny disposition frequently had flocks of locals around her, wanting to touch her and her now nearly white-blonde hair.  She was special and they sensed that.  Having Hamishish as a friend spoke volumes to the natives.

She lived up to what she said too, having explained to the mother that a normal birth wasn’t possible since she had AIDS.  By delivering this way, she could have more children and not infect this one with the dreaded disease.  If they could only get her to feed the child formula instead of mother’s milk, it would greatly increase this child’s odds of never contracting the dreaded disease that was so prevalent in this part of Africa.

The women who had been given the life-saving formula, frequently sold it instead of using it.  Breastfeeding was free, but it also passed the mother’s bodily fluid to the child, who then could and would contract the deadly disease.  Less and less babies survived to adulthood and these doctors were working against those odds.  This village was increasing its odds, not at the hands of the doctors, but at the hands of their witch doctor.  Hamishish, the magician, had told them that a great plague had come upon the land and that breastfeeding was no longer allowed, not for at least three generations.  She explained that these white doctors had brought a powder that could save their babies.  The women, superstitious to the core, believed her unfailingly.  More than half of them used the formula that was given to them instead of selling it.  Still, it took time.

In no time, a beautiful baby boy was born to this struggling woman.  Deanna placed it on her chest, lightly wrapped in a beautiful birthing blanket the young woman had prepared for the child.  Quickly, she cut the cord and stitched up the woman, using plenty of antibiotics to prevent a secondary infection.  She was grateful for the recent shipment that Doctor Wilson had brought in that contained plenty of what they needed to be effective.  It might only last a short time: some of it had an expiration date, some inevitably would spoil, be stolen, or used up, but for now they could save this one woman and her baby.  She smiled as she finished cleaning up the woman who was smiling down in wonderment at the perfect baby she had just delivered.

She said something in her language and the interpreter laughed.

“What?” Deanna asked in French.

“She wants to know what your first name is, your Christian name.  She would like to honor you and her baby by giving it a second name.”

Deanna smiled, knowing this was indeed an honor.  It denoted high status to have a child named after you in a lot of cultures.  She knew of several babies in both Africa and in South America that had her name as their first or second.  Sometimes they used Cooper, especially for boys when they learned that it was an acceptable male name, and sometimes they used Deanna, a hard name to get around some of their tongues.  She told the interpreter and explained about the male surname.  The translation made the new mother smile as she repeated the name Cooper back.

Deanna gave orders about their patient and the mother was soon installed in the hospital in a corner they called the maternity ward, away from the other patients.  The cries of babies kept people up, but it was the infectious diseases that worried the doctors the most.

“We should use the meeting house for these cases,” Deanna muttered to Maddie as she checked on her patients, the ones that weren’t infectious.

“What about this building?” Maddie asked.  She had heard Deanna state this before.

“It needs to be cleansed: the windows need to be opened and mosquito netting put on them, air out the place, and have the witch doctor do a cleansing,” she ascertained.

“Surely you don’t believe in all that?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“Medicine can prove a lot of that wrong, but I’ve seen some things that there is no scientific explanation for.  People can believe and they can will themselves better sometimes.  Having a blessing from the locals is all well and good, but, if you don’t accept them and at least accommodate them, places like this will never work,” she answered sadly as she finished.

She was as good as her word.  Having thought about it, argued with Burton about it, she approached Wilson with her idea.  She had the village elders come forward with Hamishish and with an interpreter, although she knew Hamishish and a few of the elders understood French.  She formally asked them to bless the meeting house so they could turn it into a general ward.  The more serious cases were left in the old clinic and were surprised to see Hamishish and others coming into the clinic in full dress, paint on their whole bodies, chanting and with smoke issuing from their smudges.  The combination did more for the patients than any medicine.

Watching cynically, Doctor Burton and others shook their heads at the display, much less the waste of time and effort.  By having two buildings instead of one, they now had to divide their time and efforts.  Some simply didn’t like change, others thought it all foolishness.  Still, Doctor Wilson thought it had some merit and was amused to find an improvement on their never-ending stream of patients.  Word of mouth told of the blessed clinics.  A decrease in cases of death, whether a coincidence or not, helped immeasurably.

CHAPTER SIX

“Do you ever go into Lamish or one of the other smaller towns to get away?” Deanna asked Lakesh.

Leida perked up.  They had been working non-stop for weeks.  She needed some downtime, and while they had assigned days off, they rarely took them since there was really nothing else to do.

Three of them were sitting around the fire—Leida, Maddie, and the doctor—after a long day and a beautiful sunset.  Deanna was poking the fire with a stick when Lakesh walked by.

“Yes, Missy, we go and get supplies,” he answered automatically, and then realizing it was the doctor who had asked, corrected himself with a distinct twang of ‘Doktor.’

“Would there be room for passengers?” she asked as she looked up and smiled at his mistake.

“Yes, Doktor,” he bowed slightly out of respect to her profession.  Having a female doctor was a novelty in this male-dominated country.

“I’d like to go with you next time you go,” she stated to let him know there were no hard feelings and to make herself clear.

“I go tomorrow,” he assured her.

“May I go?” Leida asked.  She desperately wanted to get out of the village for some time away.

“Me too?” Maddie asked.

“We will have to ask Doctor Wilson and let Alex know we will be unavailable,” Deanna answered.

In no time at all, Doctor Wilson gave them the well-deserved time off and Alex was informed in case anything else came up.  The three women were scheduled to leave with Lakesh.  He hadn’t really planned to go the next day, but was accommodating them.  Only Doctor Wilson and Alex knew that the guide hadn’t originally planned to go the next day, but the three women were thrilled to be getting some well-deserved time off and to see some more of the country.

“How did you get involved with Doctors Without Borders?” Maddie asked Deanna over the noise of the engine.

“Ah, they held a seminar/recruitment off-campus at one of the libraries in Boston.  I was curious so I went.  I’d just come back from Switzerland and an intense course on tropical diseases.  I wanted to be where the action was, not where they brought the patients.  I felt I could help them more on site, you know?” she shouted.  Leida, turning around to join in the conversation, nodded.

“How long did you sign up for?” the Australian asked and then hit her chin on the back of the seat from the uneven road.  Rubbing it ruefully, she looked on inquiringly at the young doctor.

“At first they only let me sign up for six months.  They sent me to the Amazon.  God, I loved it despite the bugs, the heat, and the dysentery,” she answered nostalgically.  “I felt I was really doing something.  It was such a challenge!”

“How long ago was that?” Maddie asked, fascinated by the enthusiastic doctor.  She had such adventures to share.  Getting time alone with her was becoming increasingly hard as everyone except for Harlan and Doctor Burton loved her.

“Over two years ago, I don’t know.  The time seems to blend after a while with all the work.  I just want to make a difference, to help them,” she said sadly, remembering the mass of humanity that came through these war-torn areas.  One of the reasons she was heading into Lamish was to send a message herself asking why the other doctors from MSF hadn’t arrived.  She had been in Mamadu too long for them not to have come to get her and send her on to another location.  She also wondered if her other messages had gone astray.  “How about you?” she asked Maddie first and then glanced at Leida to include her in the question.

“I was in New York finishing up my nursing degree, but I wanted more.  I knew that working in New York I’d see everything,” she answered with a tone that implied that gunshots and other emergency calls were not what she wanted.  “I think we probably had the same recruiter.  I wanted to make a difference and learn triage in the field.”

“You wanted to be a triage nurse?”

“Yes and no.  I’m young enough that I have a lot to learn.”

She was impressed with the nurse’s dedication. “What about you?” she asked, including Leida once again.

“I needed to get away.  I’d been in Sydney and they sent me to work in the bush.  I liked it too much and I think they thought I was going off my head.”  She grinned ruefully at her confession.  “I don’t know if I was, but I’m damned good at what I do and I like helping.  Some of this is a bit much,” she gestured at the African countryside they were driving through, but they all knew she meant the people that came through their clinic.  “Making a difference, that’s what is important.”