Somewhere Between Here and the Stars

Chapter 2: Reflections

Note: Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, is an international organisation which provides medical aid, most frequently in the form of trained doctors and nurses who volunteer. These people travel to all areas of the world and work in some of the poorest countries in the world, free of charge. For more information, see the MSF website. I have tried to remain as true to this cause in the story as possible, but as an average citizen of the UK I can't be sure that everything is correct. If you find any glaring errors that could be considered offensive, please email me.

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"Carol?"
"Doug??"
"Hi." She could hear the smile in his voice, though distant.
"Hey yourself. How are you?"
"Good, good. It's hot."
"Yeah. How's Adam?"
"He's out tonight. His wife flew out on Tuesday."
"You're all alone?"
"Uh huh."
"Me too."
"Where are the girls?"
"Still asleep. It's 7am."
"Say hi to them for me when they wake up."
"I always do, Doug. They miss you. I miss you."
"Me too, sweetie. Me too."
"Any word on how much longer?"
"Still a month and a half."
"November?"
"I'll be home for Christmas..." He crooned down the phone. Her laugh filtered back to him.
"I can't wait."
"Me either. I gotta go, my card's nearly out."
"Okay. Love you. Come home soon."
"Love you too. Kiss the girls. Bye."
"Bye."

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She hung up the phone. It was cold, and she pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders as she crossed the room to the kitchen and flicked the switch on the kettle. There was a grey mist lying over the lake, obscuring the view she normally had from the window. The kettle boiled and steamed the windows up and she poured the hot water into a mug. It was early still, and she didn't have a shift until that night. The whole day was ahead and she had to shop for food and clothes, take the car into the repair shop, do the washing up from last night, clean the bathroom, and collect her coat from the dry cleaners. So why was it that all she could think about was Doug, working all day in the tropics for no money, missing her almost as much as she missed him.

A squeal from upstairs echoed down the staircase and Carol put down her mug with a sigh. The steps were old and creaked under her feet as she climbed them.
"I'm coming, I'm coming."
November wasn't that far away, she thought. A month and a half is only 6 weeks. She reached into the crib in the nursery, or what she considered the nursery. She'd never really asked Doug which room he thought the girls should have, so she had just put the cribs into a room at the back of the house with a big window so that they could see the lake. Unfortunately, although her intentions had been good, little had changed since then, so the room remained almost completely bare save for the two cribs, a chest of drawers with a changing mat on top, and the occassional stuffed toy littering the floor. She bent to the floor, holding Tess over one hip, to collect the bear that she was clamouring for. Kate watched from her crib, using the wooden bars to haul herself upright. Carol smiled at her. How she hoped that Doug would be home in time to see either of them take their first steps. She'd heard of competetive mothers who wanted their children to develop faster than any other babies, but she wondered if she would be a bad person if she chained Kate down for, say, 6 weeks or so. That thought kept her smiling as she took her daughters down the stairs for breakfast.

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Doug smiled at the old man as he limped out of the small examination room. Absesses were definitely one of the easier afflictions he had dealt with over the past month and a half. Today was his turn to see the more serious cases - which was why he was occupying the exam room - and he was more than happy about it. Because it meant that he got the fan, and Adam was the one who had to walk the line of patients outside in the burning heat. They took turns every other day, but it was still the most hotly contested issue of their placement. Occassionally they bet on it, or forfeit it depending on what game they were playing to while away the long and lonely African evenings. Lonely, despite the fact they were fast becoming close friends. They could be together, playing poker with pebbles from the track outside their building, talking about the cases they had seen that day, or the latest news they'd received from home, and yet the lonlieness in the air was palpable. Adam was married and had four children - Marcus, Adrianne, Lily and Bethanie, as Doug knew by heart now - and although his committment to his work was unshakable, sometimes the rawness with which he missed his family was shocking even to Doug. Doug himself tried to call Carol as often as possible, but the international telephone cards were only delivered to them once every two weeks, and even then they didn't allow much time to talk. He ached for her. It was a different kind of subconscious expression from Adam's. Adam's would be like a sudden opressive weight in the air at night but would remain absent for the majority of the time. Doug always had the aching somewhere just behind his heart, irrespective of the time of day or night, whether he was working or relaxing. The ache was there now, as he looked around to see Adam come into the room through the back door.
"Get outta here, I won this room fair and square!"
"Your poker skills leave a lot to be desired, Doug, you just tapped Lady Luck last night. Anyway, I'm not here to steal your breeze. Look."
He handed Doug a slightly crumpled sheet of fax paper. Doug read it once, and then again.
"A military coup?"
"Yuh-huh. They said even though it's a way north of here, we're close to the capital and could expect to see victims of...well, war potentially in the next few weeks."
Doug studied the fax again, his hands either side of the paper on the gurney.
"What sort of...uh...conditions would the victims be in?"
"Any, Doug. You can get people with shock, people with their limbs hacked off by a blunt machete, you can get kids who have lost their parents, women who've been raped...if it turns into a full-blown war, then it'll just be worse. The good side to that situation, if there can be a good side, is that there'll be more volunteers sent out so we don't take all the burden, and most likely the Red Cross will fly in as well."
Doug scratched his head and stayed silent.
"Of course, that's just the worse situation. The situation may not go any further, so don't worry about it too much."
"Sure."
Doug didn't want to admit to his dedicated mentor that he had been more concerned for his own safety than the job he would be doing.

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Carol buckled the seat belt in her car and turned the ignition, mentally crossing her fingers that the engine would start first time. She'd bitten the bullet a month ago and gone to a used car dealership - trying not to think of her previous experiences - since Doug's house, their house, was too far from the hospital to walk, and there wasn't much of a public transport system to speak of. She'd been pleased with the two door Ford she'd paid for, but it did have a tendency to stall on cold mornings. Today it took two tries before the engine started, and she pulled out of the drive and down the road wondering if she'd definitely told the sitter to leave the drapes open in the nursery. She thought about it and decided that Maddy would remember since she'd sat for the twins at least five times before and never forgotten before. Maddy was sixteen, a bright teenager who lived three doors down and had asked Carol if she'd ever wanted a hand, she, Maddy, was more than happy to help. And she'd been somewhat of a bright light in the fog at that moment, so Carol had taken her up on her offer. Which had proven to have been a good decision.

Carol pulled into a parking lot in the multi-storey lot next to the Portland Heights Hospital, and collected her bag from the backseat before locking the car up. She liked her job at Portland, the board at County had organised a transfer for her so that she'd float between the various intensive care units, and when the occasion demanded it, to the ER. She got to treat almost more patients than she had in the ER at County alone, but although she had job satisfaction, she felt that it wasn't doing her social life many favours. For the first few weeks it had seemed fantastic because she was suddenly meeting so many new people, and she presumed that in time she'd have lots of different compadres in each department. But instead it seemed that whilst everyone was friendly to a degree, each time she floated in, she was treated as if she was trespassing and felt out of place. There were some exceptions, as always: those who completely outwardly resented her existence, and those who appreciated her wherever she was. And she had friends in Marianne (ICU nurse who had endured so many questions from Carol on her first day that Carol was sure that if she didn't hate her now, she never would) and Abe (Pedriatric nurse-practitioner who was insanely proud of his homosexuality and forced Carol to wear a pair of his patented teddy-bear scrubs every time she was on his ward). But the old team atmostphere she had felt at County wasn't here. She missed it, and although Abe and Marianne were great, she didn't feel completely right about inviting them home to watch girly videos and eat popcorn just yet.

Still, today she was working in the ICU where Marianne was on the same shift as her. And the ICU was a good place to work, she felt most confident there since they treated patients who had generally come straight from the ER. She changed into a set of scrubs in the locker room and left her bag in one of the tiny lockers.
"Carol. Nurses' meeting in twenty minutes in the staff room, okay?"
"Sure."
Annabeth Livingstone was one of three head RNs in the department, a mild tempered woman who was friendly to everyone but in a detached manner, her work preceding anything else. Her husband was an accountant on the hospital board and she seemed to have an active social life outside the hospital. She had one son who was 17 and a sister who was a lawyer, and she lived in a big house just outside Seattle. Carol liked her, but more in a respectful way than anything else. She let Annabeth pass and went to the nurses' station to pick up on the patient notes. Two new admissions. One patient still in a coma after a fall on a building site. Another with some sort of viral infection that had yet to be identified. Two victims of the same car crash. The old woman in respiratory distress had recovered and was being tranferred to Internal Medicine at some point the following morning.
"Hey, Carol. Your shift just started?"
"Yeah. I just got here...Nurse Livingstone said we have a meeting soon?"
"Yup. Rather you than me."
"You're off now? And what's the meeting about?"
"Apparently the ER is jammed after some sort of logging accident, and they've got multiple admissions. Looks like YOU'RE going to have a busy night. I am so outta here."
"Oh jeez. Thanks for your support Marianne. I thought you were on this shift tonight?"
"I was, but I switched with Andy because he wants tomorrow off to go fishing, would you believe."
"Fishing? No way!"
"Uh huh. Anyway, I'm getting out of here. I have a hot date that I do NOT want to keep waiting. Goodnight!" She walked out, grinning at Carol over her shoulder as Carol was left shouting, "Date? What date?"

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Doug lay on his bunk and reflected on the day's happenings. Somewhere in his chest he was feeling a mixture of pain, anger, sadness and longing but he couldn't identify it so succinctly. The day had started well - the delivery boy from the head office had come by bringing more supplies, currency, a new fan for the main room and the much-hankered-after phonecards. He and Adam had shared some of the pressed wheat ceral that had been delivered, and then set up the exam rooms and medical supplies for the day ahead. Doug was to patrol those who queued for treatment and vaccinations, Adam was to deal with the tropical diseases he was a specialist in since they had received word that a malaria outbreak was claiming lives in nearby townships.

Halfway through the day, which was another oppresively hot and humid one, Doug was administering a shot to a screaming infant when he noticed a cloud of dust on the horizon that usually signified a truck on its way into the capital, or, he thought dimly, Roadrunner. Surprised by this, since no-one had told them to expect anything today and normally very very few vechiles came down the dust track from the north, Doug stood up to see what it was. The fairly small line of people looking for medical care also turned to look. The dust cloud got closer and closer and Doug recognised an old camoflage jeep at about the same time as the woman and baby in front of him moaned slightly and fell to her knees. Doug looked around sharply, taking her by the elobows and crouching down, studying her for signs of illness, but instead found her to be praying, murmuring desperately and feverishly under her breath. She stopped and grabbed Doug's forearms as he continued to hold her by hers, unsure of what was going on and whether she was sick or not. She looked up and him and started talking quickly, getting louder and louder, tears running down her face as Doug shook his head, unable to understand what she meant that was clearly so important. The baby swatched to her chest was still crying, he too getting louder and louder, and as Doug looked around for his interpretor he found that she had disappeared. He stood up, the woman still on the floor, and looked at the jeep as it continued its approach. His patient grabbed at his feet, rocking backwards and forwards still talking - whether to him or to God he didn't know. Around him more and more of the people in the line started talking in their fast tongue, and Doug could feel the panic spreading as more women started to cry, their children holding tightly to the bright, colourful materials they wore. He felt helpless and completely confused, knowing that they were afraid, afraid of the car that was almost passing them now.

Then suddenly he knew why. As the bullets ripped through four people at the end of the queue, he threw himself to the floor, covering the woman who had begged at his feet for help. He screwed up his eyes as the dust flew and he heard more gunshots and then, barely perceptable, cruel laughter as it hung in the air from the jeep that never slowed. He stayed on the ground, made everyone else stay down low too until he heard the banging of feet on the shiny linolieum floor of the medical centre, and then Adam calling to him. He got up quickly, looking behind him and all around, checking for other vechiles as he started to run towards the fallen bodies further down the line.
"Doug, what happened??" Adam ran close behind him, the shock clear in his eyes but undistinguishable in his demeanor.
"Some...I don't know who they were, some bastards with guns, they just drove past and started shooting."
"At anyone in particular?"
"No, I don't think so, I mean look at this." The rage contorted Doug's face as he struggled to keep a grip and not to get mad with his only friend in the wilderness. "They just fired at anyone." He bent over a young man and felt for a carotid pulse. The blood flowing freely out of his chest in three places, one hole also oozing from his left shoulder, meant that sooner or later there wasn't going to be enough blood to ensure his survival. And both Drs. Ross and Simons knew full well that their treatment facility did not have enough blood, medication, staff or expertise to carry out any life-saving treatment on the body in front of them. Doug looked around to the next slumped heap, a tall, elegant woman who was face down, her hair covering her face as it lay on the rough concrete by the building. He reached for her neck to feel for a pulse also, brushing her hair back to find it. But that wasn't neccessary - the small hole in her head that had leaked red fluid down her pretty face told him he needent bother. He turned away, moving on to where Adam was crouched over an older woman who was, thankfully, making some movement. But the way the lady he had just seen was hunched on the ground made him stop and turn back to look at her again. He bent over, took a quick glance at what was left of the other side of her face, and then pushed his hand, then arm, slowly underneath her thin frame. There is was. He'd been sure of a gut feeling on this.
"Adam! Help me out here, there's a little one trapped."
"I can't, Doug! I need to get this patient inside and bandage these wounds, she's going to need suturing and flying to the nearest hospital."
Frustrated and bitterly angry with the situation he had been placed in, Doug slid his right arm under the body and pushed upwards, using his left arm to move the shoulders back. Wrapped tightly to her chest was a baby, warm but silent. Doug let the body of the mother lean forward on his own shoulder as he tried to lift the child out, undoing the material that bound it. He finally freed the baby and lifted it out, away from the lifeless mother, and felt for a heartbeat. He could feel the flutter run beneath his fingers as he touched the ankle, and then heard soft inhaling as he grasped the infant and ran down the concrete and through the doors of the centre.

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It had been a completely exhausting yet slightly exhilirating shift. They had taken on four patients from the logging accident when they only had room for two, and Carol had been busy all night monitoring vital signs, administering IV drugs, talking to the patient who was altered and disoriented, and fighting with the ER to stop them sending any more victims up. It was when she stopped and realised her shift was over that she suddenly wished that she could just sleep in the on-call room for a few hours like she used to. Before the twins. She toyed with the idea of calling Maddy up and asking her to stick around. It was so, so tempting to fall onto the empty gurney. But she couldn't do it. Maddy was 16 and couldn't be expected to babysit for 36 hours - she had a life of her own, and probably all sorts of exciting plans for the day. Oh to be so young again, no cares or responsibilities...going to the cinema when you felt like it, hanging out with friends at the mall, partying all night...She felt terrible for it, but sometimes she just wished that she was single and childless again.

She drove home and tried not to think of all the things in the world she'd prefer to do the following day - most of all, sleep - than feeding the twins, changing them, taking them out to the supermarket to buy endless bottles of baby food. She knew she was being horribly selfish, but something in her said, "Look how long you've done this without taking some time for yourself". If she could find someone to take the twins for the day...it would be heaven. She could shop tomorrow, if she just had today to sleep, then maybe go and see a movie in the evening. "Goddamnit," she thought. "This is what grandparents are for, and I had to move as far away as I possibly could without leaving the country." If Doug were there...inexplicably, her eyes felt wet. She convinced herself she was just tired as she brushed the tears away and pulled into the driveway of the house. It'd be nice if he had called. Rummaging in her bag to get some cash to pay Maddy, she located her keys and stepped over the threshold.

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Doug keyed in the ID code on the phonecard, waited for the tone, and then dialled his home phone number. It rang five times before he felt relief as Carol picked up.
"Hey."
"Doug?"
"No, it's your secret admirer."
Carol grinned into the receiver and joked back, "Oh, well in that case you'll have to hang up because I'm expecting a call from my fiance."
Doug, never short for words, was stunned for a moment. "Fiance?"
"Yeah, I just...Doug, will you marry me?"
He was knocked speechless for a split second again before replying, "Isn't that my line?"
"Yeah, but you know you already used it once and I screwed it up."
"Carol...you're really not kidding?"
"No, Doug. I want to marry you. I miss you, and that just makes me realise how much I...need you."
"Are you down on one knee?"
"Actually no, but if it turns you on I can be."
"Don't, I don't want to have to turn down your proposition because I'm involved with my right hand."
"Okay," she laughed, suddenly so happy and not tired any more. "How was your day?"
"Ah, it was...well, terrible, but I don't care anymore."
She could hear the smile in his voice, though quiet it warmed her.
"I do want to marry you, Doug. I want the girls to have a mother and father to support them. I want to have a husband. You still haven't answered, you know."
"I know. I just wanted to savour the moment. Of course I'll marry you Carol. If I was there we'd be on our way to Vegas."
"Vegas? Doug!"
It was his turn to laugh. "Kidding."
And suddenly, their line was cut. The operator informed Doug that his card had run out and put the phone down. Doug stood by the hpone for another five minutes, smiling at it. In Washington, Carol sat down on the floor and let herself cry.

©Triggersaurus 2002