Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

I never knew before what it meant to see red. It didn't occur to me that it was more than just an expression.

Monty Mittel, the reporter, went out to take pictures of the biker bar and see if he could figure out whether they were looking after as many people as we are to be taking all those supplies. He saw a bunch of bikers bring two young girls into the bar - crying, being handled roughly, hoods over their faces. I was ready to get a shotgun and go get those girls, and so was Mittel by the look of him - in fact he said as much.

But those wusses running the community centre decided to start defending the centre instead - boarding up the windows and making the place into a fortress. They wrote off those two girls as outside their control.

I expressed my opinion - which was that we needed to go rescue those girls and anyone else the bikers are holding against their will - and was pretty much patted on the head. I left the meeting before they could get me hammering plywood over windows.

This is the part where I'm glad this journal isn't live at the moment. I'm not sure I believe it myself, except that the evidence all says it happened.

I was wandering the corridors, angry and frustrated, debating and discarding ideas for suicidal rescue attempts with every step, and I wasn't watching where I was going. I stepped on a nail. It was about six inches long, about four inches of which were showing through the other side of a two-by-four. I think it went right through my foot. I remember seeing the bloodied point sticking up through the top of my foot.

I admit I panicked a bit. I really had two choices - I could scream, or I could take the nail out and risk bleeding out before I could get to the makeshift hospital. I chose the latter - I wasn't sure anyone would be able to hear me from where I was. Now, a good little medical student would NOT have done that, because taking a sharp object out of a wound makes the bleeding worse. But when you can see a nail sticking out of the top of your foot, you're probably not thinking too hard about whether the nail hit a major artery. You're thinking OW this fucking hurts get this fucking thing out of my foot OW. So that was what I did. Then I took off my shirt to apply pressure to the wound. (Yes, prurient minded readers of the future, I had a tank on underneath.) I am 100% certain that I was bleeding from the top and sole of my foot.

I limped my way to the hospital and asked for Dr. Glover. I hadn't done a shift in there in several days, and there are still people right on the edge of death; he was rather busy and it looked like I hadn't hit an artery. So I sat down and continued applying pressure top and bottom. I stayed like that a good ten minutes, and then took the shirt off the wound to look at it.

I couldn't find the wound. No, it wasn't obscured by scabs of blood, though my foot was very bloody. When I rubbed at the spot where the wound had been, the skin was unbroken. There was no wound.

I looked at the sole of my foot. Same thing there - no wound.

I got up and walked back to my cubicle of a sleeping area, without so much as a limp. Also without my flip-flops, because I'd been wearing one and it was still impaled on the nail. I got changed, put on some sturdier shoes, and went to look for it. I mean, surely I didn't imagine puncturing my foot on a six-inch piece of iron?

But no, there was the flip-flop, the left one, with nearly four inches of nail above it. And I wasn't even limping.

I wandered the corridors a bit longer, still angry over those wimps nailing plywood (and leaving nailed boards lying around willy-nilly, then went to find the reporter. We're going tonight to rescue those girls. I'm going to have to find a way to make sure I take most of the fire, though. I don't want to get him killed. I wonder if a bullet wound would just disappear like that nail wound did?

I'm crazy. I'm going to get myself killed. Who am I to be going into that den of iniquity to rescue anyone? They probably weigh more than I do.

But I'm doing it anyway.

It looks like I'm not going back to UBC to start medical school next week. I wonder if they gave my spot to someone on a waiting list already, thinking I was dead? I wonder what I'll have to do to get another spot once this is all over?

Not that there's any sign of it ending. The military is still manning the roadblocks. They're now made of concrete. Nobody from the community centre has checked to see if we can get through the fields, because the nearest town in those directions is several days' walk, and we really can't spare anyone. And nobody wants to get shot.

The situation is starting to get desperate. The reporter - I suppose I should start using his name - Monty Mittel, then - found a ham radio on a farm, and the operator was still alive. For a while we were getting outside information that way. It seems the pandemic is mostly contained to towns like ours around the globe. Mexico has fallen off the radar entirely, and it's being blamed on the lack of quarantine measures. The situation in the Midwestern States is dire - martial law, vigilantes making sure nobody leaves the quarantined towns, bloodbaths when people get desperate enough to try. Meanwhile, people are being told that everyone in these towns is dead or dying, and they're scared enough to believe it. They're also being told that supplies are being airlifted in on a regular basis. We got our first shipment two nights ago, and it was enough for maybe a third of the people still alive in the town. Since they didn't bother to check with us to find out how many people are alive, they've underestimated to a degree that might kill healthy people via starvation. And we can't tell them, because shortly after we found out all that information, the radio towers were taken down. The ham radio operator now has a range of less than forty miles - not enough to get to the next big town or to reach any of his usual contacts. The shortwave radio messages have changed, too - instead of reporting real news, now they've switched to everything-is-fine-we're-taking-care-of-it crap.

The constable was unwilling to secure all the pallets of dropped supplies for the community centre - he said the holdouts had as much right to them as we did. Mittel was really upset at that. Sarah (Ms. Schiller) pointed out that we weren't sure at the moment if there was hoarding going on, since we'd accessed less than half the pallets that were dropped before they were gone. I volunteered to find out.

They wouldn't let me go alone - the sounds of gunshots in the streets has gotten more frequent with each passing night, and people look at my hundred-pound frame and assume "fainting flower" for some reason - so I took Mittel with me. We planted a pallet in a side street and watched from a deserted house.

Four guys in a pickup truck, two armed with assault rifles, drove up, grabbed the pallet, and drove off. Mittel had his camera and telephoto lens recording the whole thing, and Rath confirmed it: they're members of the biker gang that's been plaguing Regina for years. They never cause trouble here - what's that phrase? Never foul your own nest? - but they're organized crime for sure, and they're armed with weapons that are really difficult to get in Canada. Those two assault rifles could take out most of the hunting weapons we've got at the police station.

What we don't know is whether their need is as desperate as ours, or whether they're stockpiling. We suspect the latter, but the community centre only has about a quarter of the people we estimate are alive in the town, so it's possible they need it as much as we do.

Mittel painted a billboard out near the road blockade, asking for three times the supplies that were dropped. Meanwhile, the harvests are starting to rot in the fields. There's no one to bring them in. The supplies of canned goods and staples to make bread are dwindling. We have enough medical supplies to keep our weakest patients hydrated for a few more days at most, and several have already died for lack of clean sharps. Dr. Glover vetoed the idea of sterilizing old ones - the risk of secondary infections will go up dramatically if we do that - but it may be the lesser of two evils. A few healthy people have started raiding weedy vegetable gardens, but they haven't been tended for the last month and the local deer population is looking very well-fed. A few of the hunters have been out taking care of that. Mmm, venison. But it won't keep us going for long, and Rath is understandably reluctant to release ammunition for hunting when we've got a gang sitting on an arsenal of unknown size just across town. (I've learned that fifty healthy people and twice that many recovering people can get through an entire deer in one meal.)

I have to go. Rath put me in charge of figuring out who among the healthy can be trusted with a gun. Obviously the hunters can, but there must be others, and we need to start training them.

Hopefully I'll be able to update again soon. My life has turned into an apocalyptic adventure movie, but there's no walking away from a burning town on the arm of my newfound love at the end of my version. With any luck, Dr. Glover and I will someday write a world-renowned medical treatise on our experiences during the pandemic. But that seems a long way away somehow.

A lot can happen in 24 hours.

I called the next-door neighbour, Julie. She has four kids and works for the newspaper. She was at the end of her rope caring for them, so I made sure my family was as comfortable as I could make them and went next door with some of my electrolyte solution. She was upstairs with her husband.

It didn't take long for me to figure out that he was dead - probably within the last five or ten minutes. Julie didn't seem to be acknowledging it. I got her to go downstairs and I saw to the kids for a few minutes. I couldn't deal with forcing her to see it. I suppose I'll have to learn to do that at some point, but today I couldn't.

Anyhow, the reporter came by. He'd heard people were gathering at the community centre as a makeshift hospital, and he'd come to drive Julie and her family over there. He did that and came back to tell me what was up. I borrowed Julie's van and took my family over there, too. The librarian, Ms. Schiller, is the main organizational force there. The woman is insanely organized. She's got me working triage, mostly, and sent the reporter off to do a mini-version of the paper and let people know they can come to the community centre.

It seems not quite everyone is sick. It runs to about three out of four people getting sick, which is about four times the infection ratio of the 1919 Spanish flu. The people dying are dying mostly because there's no one around to make sure they get electrolytes. Katarina was put on an IV as soon as she got here, because I hadn't been able to keep enough fluids in her. They're only starting IVs in the most desperate of cases - they're starting to run out. But she looks better even just a few hours later, and she's going to get better care here.

I'm glad Ms. Schiller sent that reporter to work out in the town. He was getting on my nerves. The curse of being short. I made sure he was there when I mentioned to Ms. Schiller that I had a degree in biology and was heading to medical school in the fall.

I have to go. I'm stealing time from sleep to write, and I'm only guaranteed six hours before I'll be back on duty. It'll be the most sleep I've had in days, but still not enough.

Sorry it's been a couple of days, guys. A lot's been going on here.

Katie's sick. She started throwing up yesterday, and this morning my parents wanted to take her to the hospital. I'd been reading a few things online earlier in the day about the pandemic in the cities, and I wasn't about to share that stuff with my parents. They were worried enough already. Anyhow, I convinced them to wait until I'd at least called the hospital to see how the situation was there.

I got a busy signal. A busy signal. Who still gets busy signals? How twentieth century is this place, anyway? But I figured it meant everyone and their brother was trying to call the hospital, so I convinced my parents to keep Katie at home and try to get more Gatorade into her. She's keeping some down, and she got enough tylenol that her fever is down into a more normal range. The gravol's doing nothing, though.

Main Street looks like a ghost town. I went over to the pharmacy because we were almost out of tylenol, and it was locked at two o'clock in the afternoon. Even more worrisome, when I peaked in the window, I realized they'd cleared the locked cabinets behind the counter, rather than just locking them. That is, any medication that absolutely must not be stolen isn't in the store anymore. Pharmacists only do that when they think they won't be back for a while to open up. Meanwhile, the insulin and diabetic supplies were piled on the counter. It's almost as though they're expecting people to break in, and not for shits and giggles - they put out the most obviously necessary supplies in plain sight. I can't think of a single scenario where that would be a good thing.

EDIT: Oh, shit. I seem to have lost connectivity. Stupid one-horse town. I guess I'll save this to my LJ client and try again later.

EDIT II: It's not just LJ or my connectivity that's down. I've called or been called by half a dozen people, and nobody has any connection to the world outside this town, at all. The Army has blocked off the roads into town (does that make us as whiny as Toronto? I hope not) and everyone's being told to stay put. And there is no internet connection. That scares me more than anything.

I think I'll print this entry and start keeping a paper journal.

(Note: modern era game, using D&D fourth-ed rules, GMed jointly by Patrick and Kendra. In-game, I don't know Piet's character yet; last night was a set-up session and I'll be writing several consecutive journals to develop my character.)

Why did I think coming back to Smallsville Saskatchewan for the summer was a good idea? I mean, really - what was I thinking? I could be in Vancouver right now, taking a couple of courses to get ready for med school. I could be in Africa or Indonesia on volunteer work, doing something useful with my life. Instead I listened to my parents.

"You've worked so hard since you went away to school - you need a rest," said my mother. Because it's so incredibly restful to sneak out in advance of the passive-aggressive bickering when the other parent enters the room already occupied by one. "Your sister has really missed you; you should spend some time with her," said my dad. Because we all know Katarina gets exactly what she wants from our parents, in thanks for saving their doomed marriage with her birth. "Your sensei would give you a job for the summer." Mom again, and the only thing she was right about. What Mom doesn't know is that I'm his equal in Aikido now, and his teacher in Kali, the new Art I picked up at UBC. It hasn't even occurred to her to ask what those two black wooden sticks are that I keep in my bag. Then again, she may not have noticed them; after all, no good Canadian girl goes around armed, and if they did, I'm sure Mom would think of "armed" in terms of rounds per minute.

I tried to get together with my high school friends last night. We got there at eight - "Oh, the twins took forever to go to sleep, I couldn't slip away until now" - and they all had to go by ten - "You know, you're so lucky not to have a toddler who will have you up at five-thirty no matter how late you were out the night before!" Three of them, all laughing in unison. Since they graduated high school, their collective trips to Regina or Saskatoon can be counted on one hand. I don't think Mandy has been at all. The farm and the twins keep her too busy.

Ugh. Anyway, the private dorm room I got comes open on August 15th. I'll be there on the 16th. It's only a month away. I survived a refugee camp in Rwanda last summer with Doctors without Borders. I can survive a few more weeks in a sleepy one-horse town where the biggest social justice issue is littering.

EDIT: Guys, I keep a livejournal so people can commiserate with me when I'm whining. Where is everyone? Surely that Guatemalan flu thing hasn't got you all shutting off your computers? It's just a few old folks in hospitals in Toronto, right? It'll blow over like all the others.