CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE DOCTOR’S RULE
Camp One, early 1981
Dr. Amira Haddad had one rule.
Nobody died because they were embarrassed.
She announced it after a technician ignored abdominal pain for two days because the medical unit was busy treating a rover injury.
By the time he reported, his appendix was close to rupture.
Amira examined him, asked how long he had been in pain and listened to an increasingly unconvincing explanation about not wanting to bother anyone.
“You have been walking around with this for two days?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“And what were you waiting for?”
“I thought it would go away.”
“Did it?”
“No.”
“Then we have established something.”
She sent him for preparation and called Shaw.
The colony possessed a surgical room, but calling it a hospital required optimism. The room was crowded with equipment chosen for versatility. There was no blood bank beyond what could be stored, and no specialist to call if something went wrong.
Amira had worked in worse places.
Her medical training had begun in the Soviet Union, but it was her years attached to Soviet Air Force medical units that had taught her how quickly a routine day could turn into an emergency. She had treated aviation injuries, worked with evacuation crews and learned to operate when the equipment available was not the equipment she wanted.
Military medicine had also taught her that senior officers could be remarkably poor patients.
She had never been particularly impressed by rank.
Later, in Beirut, she had discovered that a hospital could function with damaged walls, unreliable electricity and far too many people waiting for surgery. During the civil war*28, she and her husband had worked shifts that seemed to have no beginning or end.
Samir Haddad had been an anaesthetist. He knew when she needed another pair of hands and when she needed someone to tell her to stop working.
He had been killed in late 1978, helping move patients to shelter during shelling near their hospital.
Amira had been operating elsewhere in the building.
She continued working in Beirut for months afterwards.
When an international medical colleague contacted her about a position with the Mars construction mission, she initially dismissed the idea. Lebanon subsequently nominated her, and the UNEPA medical board approved her appointment.
Her surgical experience made her an obvious choice.
Her military medical service made her especially useful to a settlement that had no possibility of evacuation to a larger hospital.
She arrived on Mars in 1980 with the construction contingent, carrying her medical records, a small collection of personal belongings and the name she had chosen when she married Samir.
Now she stood beside an operating table with a technician whose appendix was threatening to rupture.
“He needs surgery,” she told Shaw.
“Can we do it?”
“Yes.”
Shaw looked towards the equipment.
“Do you need anything?”
“Reliable power. Someone to assist me. And I would prefer not to discover halfway through that the steriliser has stopped working.”
“I'll speak to Han.”
“Speak to her now.”
That answer meant something different on Mars.
There was no second hospital, no emergency flight to another city and no specialist arriving in twenty minutes. Everything depended on the people and equipment already inside the settlement.
Amira checked the instruments herself.
One of the clamps did not close properly.
She set it aside.
“Why is this still in the tray?”
The medical technician looked at it.
“It was repaired last week.”
“It was bent last week. That is not the same thing.”
She asked for another and continued preparing.
The operation took two hours.
The power grid remained stable because Han personally sat in the control room and refused every nonessential load request.
Alina complained when agricultural lighting was reduced.
Han pointed towards medical.
“Appendix.”
She turned off another bank herself.
Inside the surgical room, Amira worked steadily. She gave instructions without raising her voice, corrected the assistant's position twice and asked for the patient's readings at regular intervals.
When the operation was finished, she remained beside the table until she was satisfied that the patient was stable.
Only then did she remove her gloves.
“Next time,” she told the medical technician, “send him to me when he starts complaining.”
“He wasn't complaining.”
“Then teach him.”
The technician survived.
Amira visited him the following morning.
He tried to apologise for causing trouble.
“You caused trouble by waiting,” she said. “Coming here was the sensible part.”
She adjusted his medication, checked the wound and ordered him to remain off duty.
“For how long?”
“Until I say otherwise.”
“My supervisor—”
“Can speak to me.”
That afternoon she visited the Mechanical Dome carrying a list.
Li read it.
“Instrument tray. Two clamps. Lamp bracket. Bed rail.”
“Can you make them?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“You know there are medical versions coming from Earth.”
“When?”
“Manifested.”
Amira stared at him.
Li smiled.
“I will make them.”
She showed him the defective clamp.
“I need the replacement to close evenly. And I need to be able to sterilise it without the joint failing.”
Li examined the instrument.
“You've done this before.”
“Many times.”
“In the military?”
“And afterwards.”
He turned the clamp over in his hands.
“I'll make a prototype.”
“Bring it to medical. I'll test it before anyone uses it on a patient.”
Medicine became one of the strongest arguments for manufacturing. A broken medical component could not wait for orbital geometry.
Amira also began organising regular medical inspections for personnel working outside the main habitats. She wanted injuries reported promptly, medical supplies checked before long excursions and every field crew trained to manage an emergency until help arrived.
Some supervisors objected to losing working hours.
She asked them how many hours they expected to lose if one of their people died.
The inspections went ahead.
The medical unit became one of the first places where national rank consistently lost to local necessity.
A colonel waited behind a technician with a more serious injury.
A Soviet officer donated blood to an American mechanic.
A Chinese machinist held a French engineer's hand while Amira reset a dislocated shoulder.
The colonel eventually complained about having been kept waiting.
Amira examined him, prescribed treatment and told him he could return to duty the following day.
“Do you know my rank, Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Then you understand—”
“I understand that the man ahead of you was bleeding.”
He looked at her for a moment.
“You served in the military?”
“I did.”
“Which branch?”
“Air Force medical service.”
That seemed to satisfy him.
It did not change his place in the queue.
Amira kept one photograph in her quarters. It showed her and Samir outside their hospital in Beirut, both in ordinary clothes, standing close together in the afternoon sun.
She had brought very little from Earth. The photograph was one of the things she had made certain not to leave behind.
At the end of a long shift, she sometimes looked at it before turning out the light.
The following morning, she would be back in medical before the first patients arrived.
Nobody wrote policy about the way she ran the department.
Mars had other ways of settling such matters.