K’s particular talents had proven to stretch further even than from auto repair to midwifery. K was her medic. That’s how the clinic director had introduced her on day two: “This is your medic, K,” as if Rosie had not already saved a truck, lost a patient, and delivered a baby with the woman. Rosie had not been aware she got or needed a medic or what a medic in a clinic like this one even was per se. It turned out the medic was everything except for what Rosie was. And sometimes she was what Rosie was too. K did injections. She did the vomit and the blood and the feces, which was saying something because there was a lot of all of the above. She did wound-care work and handholding work and being patient with patients work. She did the translating work of explaining prognoses and which drugs to take when and how to clean abrasions and stanch blood and how to rehydrate babies and when to let fevers run their course versus when to seek medical care. She translated English into Thai and Northern Thai and a variety of Thai dialects and Burmese and Karen, and she translated Rosie’s stern and complicated Doctor into kind and reassuring Nurse, instructions clear enough to follow precisely, gentle enough to inspire confidence and calm. Rosie assumed K had gone to nursing school at least, but K could not get into nursing school because K had never finished high school.
K was also her physical therapist and her social worker and her security detail. When a child came into the clinic with her father but then her father died, K knew how to comfort the little girl and find her someplace to stay and something to wear and enroll her in school. When a teacher came in to complain that his leg fit incorrectly so that he could walk, yes, but he could not stand for long periods of time in front of his classroom, K worked with the prosthetics department to fashion him a leg that stood as well as perambulated and with the patient to think about exerting discipline on small children from a seated position. When the injuries one woman claimed came from falling off a water cistern proved instead to have come from a husband incensed to find her pregnant again, K had him removed and found beds for all seven of his children. But K had never been to physical-therapy school or social-work school. K had never even taken a martial-arts class. What K knew, and it was a stunning, encyclopedic amount, she had learned from the doctors who’d come before Rosie, from the doctors who came and stayed for weeks or months or years, from watching, from experience, and from necessity. Rosie found herself asking K’s advice more often than the other way around. Rosie had more formal training, but it wasn’t training for this environment. K knew quite a bit more about worms and snakebites and what, based on your symptoms, probably laid eggs in you than had been covered by the University of Wisconsin’s medical school program. And of course she maintained Sorry Ralph, never mind the fact that her functional, sensitive, callus-free hands were precious as palladium. It took a while, longer than it should have maybe, but Rosie gradually realized the many versions of K layered atop one another like sediment. And like that striated earth, what remained of K after the buffeting of wind and wear and time was solid as rock.
“No X-ray,” K answered cheerfully. After two weeks of working together, K had grown amused by all Rosie requested as if she were asking if the clinic stocked mind readers.
Rosie eased the patient from wheelbarrow to bed. She remembered the night she’d accidentally X-rayed Poppy—well, Claude, almost-Claude, Claude-in-utero—all those years ago in the ER in Wisconsin. Here, she often found that absent being able to see entirely, insides included, it was better to see not at all. Until Thailand, closing her eyes was not a diagnostic technique she’d reverted to much, but it beat going to the grocery store. Especially since there was no grocery store. She held her hand above the patient’s leg to feel how hot it was. She pressed gently with her fingers, feeling for the break, feeling where it was twisted and misaligned. She pictured the X-ray sketched for her by her gently tracing fingers, the ghostly bones reaching for one another as if through time. It was remarkable, really, how well she could see without seeing. Later, she would detect fractures with the far more advanced technologies of a tuning fork and a stethoscope, but she was a couple weeks away from that trick yet. This first one, fortunately and unfortunately, was broken enough she could feel it easily, displaced enough, maybe from the wheelbarrow ride into the clinic rather than the break itself, that the patient was going to need something more than just a cast.
The art of bone setting is not a modern one. Rosie knew this. She knew that once upon a time, broken bones were treated by barbers and blacksmiths, that physicians felt fractures were beneath them. But she also knew why. You sought a blacksmith because you needed someone strong to realign the bone, to overcome the complete freakout the muscles around it were going to have when you started pulling. You sought a barber because you lived in the Middle Ages and were totally screwed.