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
