Tomorrow was going to be the day that Father would retire, and yet he was meeting a patient today that would need many more days of treatment if she was going to recover. On the island of Kiribati, it was common for young women and teenagers to find themselves impregnated. There was a habit of certain families to send their daughters or sons towards the Chinese ships fishing out by the coast, in the hopes that the children would bring back money from whatever service they were asked of. Many children were born from such arrangements, and the locals raised them with no thought that they were anything except their own.
So, it was common for a girl of fourteen to become impregnated in this way, but the wounds that this girl had, well, those were abnormal. She had pink burn marks all over her face and bruises all over her body. One burn mark was almost the shape of a dolphin, curving against the brown of her chin. It was still a fleshy colour, indicating that the burn had happened within the last twelve hours. The bruises were also freshly purple. Considering how expanded she was in the belly, this was someone who had been impregnated some five or six months ago, not someone who had been raped once, then beaten or burned after. This was someone who was going back to the same man, adding wounds on top of wounds, receiving fresh bruises over healed marks.
And Father was meeting her now, on the day before he would be done with his hospital work for good.
The questions could not help but enter Father’s mind.
For how long have you had these wounds? For how many months have you been pregnant? Do you know the person who did this to you? Are you willing to disclose his name? How many times has he done it? When did he burn you? When did he hit you? Have you already started taking medicines for the pain? What are the medicines’ names?
He had practiced for decades, and these were the types of questions any doctor would ask. However, the problem was that he had no real reason to ask these personal questions. He needed to understand the case more broadly in order to treat her, but tomorrow this girl would be seeing a new doctor, and the entire procedure would reset. She’d have to answer the questions all over again. It would probably be emotionally stressful for her, given the extent of her injuries.
So, what was the point of building rapport with a woman who had been admitted on his last day of work and trying to find a solution?
He could at least work on the obvious. He asked for her consent, then began inspecting her.
Whenever he touched one of the bruises, she let out a sharp and anguished gasp or groan. Wondering whether or not some bones were broken, he touched her a little harder than she would have liked. She was clearly in pain, but nothing was broken. Father told the nurse to get some pain medications, and it was clear that she ought to be administered naproxen to abate the swelling because her chart showed that she was allergic to ibuprofen.
He also wondered about the baby. He took out his stethoscope and listened for a heartbeat from her belly. There was one, and it was strong. While the mother was badly beaten, it seemed the father had taken care not to affect the area around the child. Just in case, Father told the nurse to book an ultrasound so that they could assess the baby’s appearance.
As Father ordered this and that from the nurse, the teenager didn’t say anything. On the other side of her bed was a window. She was looking out of it, as if she wished she had a pair of wings that would fly her away. Because the hospital was on a strip of land that held a road, a few cottages, and the width of the entire hospital building, and nothing more, the hospital’s rooms provided a view of the waves no matter the angle of the window. The sky was a piercing blue, the ocean was aquamarine, and the sound of the waves thudding and crashing was the soundtrack that filled their days. Boobies and gulls flew about, landing on the odd car or pile of trash. If one’s ears were willing to listen, they would hear their coos. And a soft, salty sea smell wafted into their room. It was briny but pleasant to the nose, reminding one of the taste of shrimp and crab.
On the other side of their curving strand of land were the barges, out in the water and yet eerily close.
Father did not mean to ask it, but it came out of his mouth.
“Do you still want to go back to him?”
The teen turned away from the view. Something about the question broke her from her ease. She bit the downturn of her lip. She struggled to take proper breaths, she shook her body, and her eyes were filling with rage.
Father pulled the blinds shut. He turned on the lights and hoped a power outage wouldn’t leave them in the dark. The nurse came back. She said the sonogram was booked and that they would wheel her there. Another nurse came, and together they put the teen on a moving bed and left to the floor where the X-rays and scans were done. Father would have joined them, but he wanted to write out his notes for the other doctor. He made detailed descriptions of the various abrasions as well as their placements on the body and their depths. He knew that this would be one of his last reports, so he really took his time and wrote out three to four pages of observations.
He finished, took a deep breath, and let himself feel what he was feeling.
He was going to fail this patient. He had never failed a patient in his life, and he had worked very hard over the decades so as not to fail any patient. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. Perhaps he could tell the administration that he had changed his mind, that he wanted to work on, at least until this patient’s wounds healed and her baby was delivered.
That would take at least four to five months, he estimated. Yes, it would make more sense to ease himself into retirement. He was going into it so suddenly. A lot was going to change. Instead of going to work at these predictable hours, he’d have to drive out to the vegetable venders to buy food for the family, or suddenly encounter his neighbours when they were outside drinking in groups by the cars and engage in small talk with them. All of this was outside of his comfort zone. It wasn’t anything like dealing with patients, talking to them about their problems, and living his life in the mission of giving attention and care to those who were sick or injured.
The problem was that in the context of his mother’s life, four or five months was a lot. Yes, her dementia and Parkinson’s had stabilised in the last month, but only because it had gotten so horrible ever since the start of this year and there was not much more left for her to decline. The only thing left was for her entire body to fall apart, for all her organs to fail, and for her mind to completely fade until she became catatonic. Any and all of that could occur not only in the next month but in the next couple of days, and Father wanted to be at home, holding her hand, if and when it happened.
Father didn’t want to fail this patient, but he also didn’t want to fail his mother. Especially since he certainly was already failing his mother, and she didn’t deserve that given how much she had sacrificed to ensure his success. His feelings for this one patient were nothing compared to the aching he felt each and every minute for not being home with his mother, feeding her, entertaining her, making her happy. Life was going to be hard for this teenage girl, but life was getting harder for everyone in general. The atoll’s land was shrinking due to the rising tides, people were without work and getting addicted to drugs and having irresponsible sex, and there was far too much interdependence on the foreigners who were coming and exploiting the island, leading to an exploitation of the locals. There was a feeling that time on this planet was growing more limited, and Father had to prioritise how he spent it and with whom.
He was going to fail this patient just like he was going to fail all the other patients who would come to the hospital tomorrow onwards, who would never know him, or his failure. That was fine, because Father was going to spend that time with someone not worth failing.
