Overboard

Emily might have been the only fourteen-year-old in the world who could change the sheets of a hospital bed with the patient still in it. She had done it more times than she cared to remember. "I didn't come to help," Emily said, refusing the stack of folded sheets that her mother held out to her. "I just came to see if you and James would be home for dinner tonight." She glanced around the clinic. "Where's your loyal candy striper? Madjid is good at beds now." "We don't use the term 'candy striper' here, Em. I wish you'd be polite to him, at least." Olivia wiped sweat from her forehead onto the sleeve of her white lab coat. "Anyway, Madjid's looking for a repairman to fix the air conditioner." "What's the point? It never works," Emily griped. The humidity was stifling, as it always was in Indonesia, and today there was an odor in the clinic that pinched at the back of her nose and throat. She breathed through her mouth to dull the scent. "Please, Emily . . . the bed? I'd really appreciate it . . ." Olivia said, holding up the sheets again. Emily took them from her with a sigh. Olivia nodded toward a cot with a sleeping boy no more than five years old. "It's Yaso's bed, over there. Thanks, honey." The boy's gown had fallen to the side, and Emily saw that his leg was in a cast up to the hip. Farther down the row of beds there was a dark, still little girl with an intravenous tube snaking from her arm up a pole to a plastic bag filled with clear fluid. She was glistening with sweat. "Little Rabina's having a rough day," Olivia said over her shoulder. "Otherwise I'd do it." Little Rabina, Emily grumbled to herself. Rabina didn't seem all that bad today. Olivia had been hovering over the seven-year-old for the past two weeks, ever since the girl's parents had brought her in with a ruptured appendix. The family was from a small village twenty miles south and they had allowed the dukun, the local healer, to use his folk potions and prayers to treat her, but she never got well. Emily's father, James, had saved Rabina's life with an emergency operation. Still, Emily thought, Rabina was being stubbornly slow about her recovery. Emily went over to the cot that needed changing. When she got there she discovered the source of the odor in the clinic. The boy had relieved himself on the bed in his sleep, and his urine had the acrid smell of antibiotics. His gown was soaked in the front. The sheets and pad were soaked beneath him. "Great," she said with a huff. She put the sheets on a chair next to his cot and went to the nurses' station to get a new gown and a wet washcloth. The trick to making a bed with the patient still in it is to make it one half at a time. Emily turned the little boy onto his right side and untucked the old sheet and pad, rolling them up against his back. Then she made half of the bed with the new sheet and pad, neatly rolling up the excess and laying it alongside the roll of dirty linens. Next she turned him onto his left side so that he was lying on the clean sheets, slid the dirty linens off the bed, unrolled the second half of the clean linens, and made the rest of the bed. Finally, after being turned twice, Yaso began to stir. Emily eased him onto his back and straightened the damp gown in front, knowing that even the youngest patients could be modest. Yaso opened his eyes, so she tried to raise the head of the cot a notch or two, but the mechanism was stuck. She yanked it hard, and it slid into place with a jolt. "You're very strong," Yaso saFama, Elizabeth is the author of 'Overboard', published 2005 under ISBN 9780553494365 and ISBN 0553494368.