Maxence saw the proverbial writing on the wall, so he appropriated a house with a sizable kitchen table for her makeshift clinic. After that, he assisted her where he could, wiped down the table with lye soap between patients, and made sure Dree had lunch when the time came.
People crowded into the “waiting room” area, which was the rest of the small house. Each patient had not only a parent or other caregiver, but also several aunties, uncles, grandparents, or older cousins with them, as the mother should not lack for moral support nor be lonely in her errand.
Such camaraderie and community cohesion were similar to the way of life where he lived in The Congo, and Maxence missed it anew. He missed his people there.
Father Booker prayed with people who requested it and looked after the other children of the mothers who brought their small children to be seen by “Lady Doctor Dree,” as Batsa called her.
When Dree had demurred that she wasn’t a doctor, Batsa had shrugged and said it was easier to translate that than to define the difference between a physician and a nurse practitioner.
Max and Booker triaged patients as best they could, bringing to the front a small girl gasping for breath while telling people with superficial scrapes who just wanted to see Lady Doctor Dree to wait.
In the early afternoon, three young women arrived at the clinic, kicking the door open as they carried in a fourth young woman wrapped in a blue and orange paisley bed sheet. The long black hair of the woman they carried trailed on the floor as they struggled with even her light weight.
One of the women called out, “Doctor! Doctor,” and then a long explanation in the Nepali language.
Batsa hurried over to them and spoke for just a second before he called back to Dree and Maxence, who were over by the table, “Lady Doctor Dree! It’s urgent.”
He urged the young women toward the table with hand motions and short, insistent words as he grabbed the young woman under her shoulders. “Father Booker! You are needed here!”
Father Booker was already on his way to help. He reached the group of women carrying her. Despite their worried protests, he gathered the sheet-wrapped woman up in his arms. Her arms and legs trailed limply as he dashed for the kitchen.
Dree handed the child on the table to his young mother and ran.
Maxence reached across the kitchen table and lifted the young woman from Booker’s arms so they could place her gently on the table. The young woman, barely more than a girl, fluttered her eyelids and rolled her head away from him. He met Father Booker’s frightened gaze as they started to unwrap her from the sheet.
Her friends began yelling at them, slapping their hands away.
Batsa said, “They are saying that they promised her they would preserve her modesty.”
Maxence lifted his hands from the girl’s arm, but he didn’t step back. Giving into protestations of modesty seemed ridiculous when this young woman might be dying right before their eyes.
Dree crowded past Maxence and began shining her penlight at the young woman’s face, pulling down first her eyelid and then her jaw so she could look inside her mouth. “Her skin and gums are so pale. She’s either horrendously anemic or—”
The other women accosted Father Booker, pushing him away from their friend.
Father Booker took his hands away from the girl at the insistence of her friends, and his hands were dark with blood. A drop fell from his fingers and splashed on the bedsheet, turning an orange paisley scarlet. He recoiled, holding his hands out in front of him and striding toward the bucket holding cold water and lye soap.
Dree cast a glance at Father Booker and yelled, “Batsa, tell me what’s going on!”
Batsa had been listening to what the girls were saying. One girl spoke rapid Nepali at him, her dark eyes flashing and her hands floating in the air as she exclaimed.
Batsa said, “Your patient has had a baby, two days past. She is bleeding, and she will not wake up.”
“Where’s the baby?” Dree asked him.
After a quick conversation with the women, Batsa said, “The baby was very small, not any bigger than their hand and fingers. It would not suck, and the mother was bleeding very much. The baby died the first night after it was born.”
Dree flinched forward like she’d been punched, and she blinked before she began tugging at the bedsheets that wrapped the woman. “I have to see what I’m working with. Let’s get the sheets off of her.”
Maxence grabbed the paisley sheet and began to unwind it, but one of her friends grabbed his arm and yanked him backward.
Batsa said, “They are insisting on the woman’s modesty. They have only come because Lady Doctor Dree is a woman.”
Maxence asked, “Otherwise, they would have let her die?”
Batsa said, “That is not for me to say.”
Dree was trying to take the sheet off of the woman, too, but another woman grabbed her arm, throwing glares at Max and Father Booker as she loudly begged Dree.
