Desert Doctor, Secret Sheikh

‘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 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.