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.
‘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.
Jen, finishing first, checked their patient’s blood pressure and pulse again, then studied the readout with trepidation.
‘His blood pressure’s dropping. I saw you examining him all over earlier—there were no deep wounds we’ve missed?’
Kam shook his head.
‘But there’s extensive bruising to his lower back and abdomen, which suggests he might have been kicked. There could be damage to his spleen or kidneys and internal bleeding, which we won’t find without an X-ray or ultrasound.’
‘Do you have a radio in your car? Do you know enough about the health services available locally to know if we could radio for a helicopter to take him out?’
Kam shook his head.
‘I imagine you drove in, camping out in the desert for one night on the way. That’s not because we—I mean the locals—want to put aid workers to as much hardship as they can, but because of the mountains around here. They have temperamental updraughts and downdraughts that can cause tremendous problems
