The Doctor's Courageous Bride

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“So to lessen our workload, we hunt our patients down when we can, just to make sure we don’t get them back in here in another few months in the condition most of these men are in.” He gestured to the men in the ward and most of them responded with a friendly wave.

“Sometimes the condition doesn’t recur, though,” Solange said. “Sometimes TB doesn’t come back.”

“Sometimes, but rarely. If we could keep them here the whole time…” He shrugged. “But you don’t treat TB that way any more.”

“Dr Paul!” a middle-aged woman shouted as she ran down the short hallway toward them. “She came in with the baby already on the way out. And it’s not waiting to get born, except the cord’s coming first.”

“What?” Paul snapped, spinning around to Gigon Giroir, one of his trained nurses.

“The baby is not waiting, but the cord is beatin’ it out. She’s prolapsing, Doctor, and it’s not looking good ’cos she’s having some hard, fast contractions.”

Paul and Solange exchanged knowing glances before they ran down the hall, following Gigon, who ran so fast she looked like a sprinter heading for the finish line. “Start an IV,” Paul shouted after her. “Get set up for a Caesarean section and go find Dr Mordecai.”

“Do you deliver babies often?” Solange called.

“No, they go to the village midwife if it’s a normal delivery. We just get the bad ones.”

Solange followed Paul into the small procedure room, where a very pregnant woman was moaning on the examination table. Gigon was already slipping an IV catheter into the mother-to-be, whispering soothing words…words that seemed to have some effect since the mother wasn’t screaming at the top of her lungs.

A nursing aide cracked the valve of a green oxygen cylinder to blow off any settling dust, then hooked rubber tubing to it in preparation of placing a mask over the patient’s face.

The initial hiss of the oxygen blast startled the patient, who struggled tried to sit up, but Solange stepped up to her side and laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder to keep her down while the aide fastened the mask over her face then scurried around the bed to pile pillows under the pregnant woman’s bottom. That made it easier to keep the umbilicus from tangling around the baby’s neck.

“Where’s Isabella?” Paul called to Gigon. Dr Isabella Mordecai was an experienced surgeon who had chosen to practice infectious disease medicine over surgery. “I’d much rather she did the surgery than me.”

“She’s got someone down there on the active ward, spittin’ up blood something awful,” Gigon said. “She’ll get here when she can. Dr Allain just got one of the patients ready to pull some teeth, and Dr Wally is in town, doing the follow-up on dosing this afternoon. So it’s up to you.” She glanced over at Solange. “Unless that one’s a doctor who can do it.”

Paul glanced over at Solange, too, as he wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around the expectant mother’s arm and started to pump the rubber bulb. “So, can you do a C-section?” he asked her. “Not that I’d put you in the position of doing it if you didn’t want to. But I’m not exactly a sterling example of a surgeon, and if you’d…” Instead of finishing, he stuck the stethoscope into his ears and inflated the blood-pressure cuff, then nodded seconds later as the hiss of deflating air showed the woman’s blood pressure to be normal.

“I can do it,” Solange said, tightening her mask. It had been a while since she’d done it in practice, but she’d had a whole year in which she’d studied up on procedures she might have gone a bit rusty on. C-sections were included in that. So she was ready. “Do you have some kind of anesthetic?”