you don’t have any overseas staff here at the moment?’
‘Actually, we do. Not paid staff—volunteers.’
‘Doctors?’
‘We have a group of doctors from Singapore coming in a few months’ time to perform heart surgeries. And at the moment we have three nurses, all from America, helping out.’
‘I was wondering if …’ Aaron cleared his throat. ‘If perhaps Ella Reynolds was working here?’
Dr Seng looked at him in surprise. ‘Ella? Why, yes!’
Ahhhhh. Fate. It had a lot to answer for.
‘I—I’m a friend. Of the family,’ Aaron explained.
‘Then I’m sorry to say you probably won’t see her. She’s not well. She won’t be in for the whole week.’
Aaron knew he should be feeling relieved. He could have a nice easy week of filming, with no cutting comments, no tattoo come-ons, no amused eyebrow-raising.
But … what did ‘not well’ mean? Head cold? Sprained toe? Cancer? Liver failure? Amputation? ‘Not well?’
‘Dengue fever—we’re in the middle of an outbreak, I’m afraid. Maybe a subject for your next documentary, given it’s endemic in at least a hundred countries and infects up to a hundred million people a year.’
Alarm bells. ‘But it doesn’t kill you, right?’
‘It certainly can,’ the doctor said, too easily, clearly not understanding Aaron’s need for reassurance.
Aaron swallowed. ‘But … Ella …’
‘Ella? No, no, no. She isn’t going to die. The faster you’re diagnosed and treated the better, and she diagnosed herself very quickly. It’s more dangerous for children, which Ella is not. And much more dangerous if you’ve had it before, which Ella has not.’
Better. But not quite good enough. ‘So is she in hospital?’
‘Not necessary at this stage. There’s no cure; you just have to nurse the symptoms—take painkillers, keep up the fluids, watch for signs of internal bleeding, which would mean it was dengue haemorrhagic fever—very serious! But Ella knows what she’s doing, and she has a friend staying close by, one of the nurses. And I’ll be monitoring her as well. A shame it hit her on her birthday.’
‘Birthday?’
‘Two days ago. Do you want me to get a message to her?’
‘No, that’s fine,’ Aaron said hurriedly. ‘Maybe I’ll see her before I head home to Sydney.’
‘Then let’s collect Kiri and I’ll have you both taken on a tour of our facilities.’
It quickly became clear that it was Kiri, not Aaron, who was the celebrity in the hospital. He seemed to fascinate people with his Cambodian Australian-ness, and he was equally fascinated in return. He got the hang of the satu—the graceful greeting where you placed your palms together and bowed your head—and looked utterly natural doing it. It soothed Aaron’s conscience, which had been uneasy about bringing him.
They were taken to observe the frenetic outpatient department, which Aaron was stunned to learn saw more than five hundred patients a day in a kind of triage arrangement.
The low acuity unit, where he saw his first malaria patients, a sardine can’s worth of dengue sufferers, and children with assorted other conditions, including TB, pneumonia, malnutrition, HIV/AIDS and meningitis.
The emergency room, where premature babies and critically ill children were treated for sepsis, severe asthma, and on and on and on.
Then the air-conditioned intensive care unit, which offered mechanical ventilation, blood gas analysis and inotropes—not that Aaron had a clue what that meant. It looked like the Starship Enterprise in contrast to the mats laid out for the overflow of dengue sufferers in the fan-cooled hospital corridors.
The tour wrapped up with a walk through the basic but well-used teaching rooms, some of which had been turned into makeshift wards to cope with the dengue rush.
And then, to Aaron’s intense annoyance, his focus snapped straight back to Ella.
Tina and Brand would expect him to check on her, right?
And, okay, he wanted to make sure for himself that she was going to recover as quickly and easily as Dr Seng seemed to think.
One visit to ease his conscience, and he would put Ella Reynolds into his mental lockbox of almost-mistakes and double-padlock the thing.
And so, forty minutes after leaving the hospital, with Kiri safely in Jenny’s care at the hotel, he found himself outside Ella’s guesthouse, coercing her room number from one of the other boarders, and treading up the stairs.
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