The Doctor's Unexpected Family: (Inspirational Romance) (Port Provident: Hurricane Hope)

The Doctor’s Unexpected Family

Port Provident: Hurricane Hope

by

Kristen Ethridge

Copyright © 2015 Kristen Ethridge

All Rights Reserved

No part of this work may be copied, printed, digitally transmitted, or used in any manner without the expressed written consent of the author.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to actual persons or events are purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Epilogue

About the Author

Chapter One

“I heard someone needs a doctor here?” Dr. Pete Shipley stopped the first person he saw. He’d received an urgent call about five minutes ago and had grabbed his things and come as fast as he could. The caller said only that Gloria needed him to come help. They’d quickly hung up before Pete had a chance to ask any questions.

He had no idea what he was walking into.

“Oh, back there in the corner by the parking lot. There’s a pretty big crowd. You can’t miss it.” The teenage boy pointed to the left, off in the distance.

Pete hesitated. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d get anywhere near where he was needed. There didn’t seem to be any kind of clear path. Scratch that. There didn’t seem to be any kind of path at all. He’d heard about the tent city that had popped up behind the elementary school in the middle of Port Provident as people began to return from evacuations necessitated by Hurricane Hope’s recent landfall. Many of them crossed the causeway with anticipation, only to find that their homes were no longer suitable to live in, and there was nowhere to go.

Most of the hotels in Port Provident had at least some level of damage, which drastically limited the number of available rooms. What rooms there were had been taken over by officials, disaster recovery specialists, and contractors. You had to know someone to get a hotel room in Port Provident in the wake of Hurricane Hope—and you had to have a bank account that could handle the cost because all the insurance and federal disaster hotel coverage hadn’t fully kicked in yet. Most of the people in the lowest-lying neighborhoods, like the working-class
La Missión
neighborhood, didn’t have any of those options.

And so, hundreds of tents and trailers and tarps had come together to form a makeshift community on the edge of the Texas coast. Pete surveyed the scene in front of him, certain he’d seen something like this before.

He had. Last summer on a medical mission trip to a refugee camp in the middle of Africa, he’d seen a refugee camp and the experience would stay with him forever. He’d seen people hard hit first by the brutality of their fellow man and then further kicked by a deadly virus that thrived in the heat and the lack of hygiene and proper nutrition. He couldn’t forget it.

Pete closed his eyes for a brief moment, took a deep breath into his lungs, and said a short prayer that the conditions which exacerbated the situation he’d seen in central Africa would not silently stalk in at this refugee camp in his own backyard.

He made his way to the group of people clustered around a beach chair set up in front of a boxy, green two-room tent.

“Gloria,” he said, spotting the nurse-midwife who’d been a colleague of his before the wind and waves of Hurricane Hope had destroyed the Provident Women’s Health and Birth Center where he’d served as Medical Director.  “What’s going on?”

“It’s Angela Ruiz, the city councilwoman. Do you know her?” Gloria held Angela’s hand as she sat, half-slumped in the chair.

Pete shook his head, then pulled his stethoscope out of a blue nylon bag.

“She was talking with some men who had brought a big utility-type truck full of items donated from by a church outside of Dallas, and then she just slumped to the ground. We got Angela moved here to the chair, and someone sent the truck over to see Angela’s nephew, the pastor
at La Iglesia de la Luz del Mundo
. I’m just glad I was here bringing food that my parents cooked for some of their friends who are staying here.”

Pete checked Angela’s vitals and started trying to put two-and-two together. As he took a visual inventory of bodily signs like pupil dilation and rate of respiration, a few other things caught his eye. She had long, brown hair that had been swept back in a messy ponytail. Like everyone else nearby, a sheen of perspiration was clearly visible at the edge of her hairline. Her skin was an olive tone and there was a hint on her cheeks of too much time spent in the recent sun.

“Please help my mama. She’s di-betic.” A little girl with raven-black, stick-straight pigtails hovered so close to the chair that she could have been fastened there with adhesive.

“This is your mom?” Pete squatted down low, trying to meet the little girl’s eyes as he spoke. He flattened two fingers against the side of the woman’s wrist and tried to keep track of her pulse. “I’m going to take care of her.”

If the woman was diabetic, that pretty much took all the guesswork out of trying to diagnose her. “Type one or type two?”

She lifted one finger about halfway. It trembled a little bit and her whole arm slouched under the weight of a small, simple exertion.

“Angela, listen to me. Where’s your Glucagon? Where’s your monitor? Do you have any glucose tablets in your purse or anything?” He tried to keep his voice steady. He didn’t want to upset the little girl any more than she already was. But at the same time, he had a sinking feeling about how successful Angela Ruiz could be at managing insulin-dependent diabetes in a place that could best be described as a tent city.

She feebly shook her head and tried to answer as best she could. “No tablets. I don’t have any Glucagon here. My levels are all off because my monitor got wet during the storm and I don’t think it’s reading right, and I’m almost out of insulin, anyway. What I do have is at my office. I go there and take it these days.”

“So you don’t have any insulin here? And you’re almost out? What type of insulin are you taking? What’s the dosage?”

She shook her head subtly, then gave the details of her prescription.

He kept two fingers on her pulse and then shouted to be heard over the gathering crowd. “I need juice or even a soda or something. Right now. Gloria, I think I have a glucose monitor in my blue bag. Can you grab it for me? I need to know exactly what we’re dealing with here. And can someone bring a soda over here?”

Pete was almost positive he was going to get a confirmation of hypoglycemia. The only fairly effective treatment he had even a remote chance of finding in a cluster of refugee tents was a can of soda. If someone could find him one now, he could start helping her raise her sugar levels as soon as he had the monitor’s results back.

Gloria pulled the gray plastic monitor from the bag and another bystander ran to an ice chesta few tents away. “If the clinic had been open, I’d have been comfortable handling this myself. But my monitor was not in the box of supplies I brought with me during the storm, so it’s ruined. Pretty much like most of the tools of my trade. I’m glad you have one with you.”

He pricked Angela’s finger quickly and stuck the test strip in the machine. He waited for the beep and then saw exactly what he knew he’d see. Thankfully, a lady handed him a red can of soda just at that moment.

“Yep, your blood glucose level is right at 70. That’s very low.” He popped the can of soda open and handed it to her. “Drink up, a little less than half that can. Then we’ll give you about fifteen minutes and test you again.”

The little girl reached for her mother’s hand and tugged. “You okay, Mama?”

“Come here,
mija
.” The councilwoman adjusted her position in the small chair and motioned for her daughter to climb in her lap.

Pete thought that was a bad idea—her balance was likely to be affected from the low blood sugar, and another body in that wobbly chair would likely be the precursor to a tumble on the ground for both of them. And then he’d have another medical issue on his hands. He started to say something, then stopped.

The fear slipped from the little girl’s eyes as she snuggled her head under her mother’s chin. A few strokes across the crown of her head, and she’d completely relaxed. There was no medicine like a mother’s love.

Gloria tugged at Pete’s sleeve. “Hey, I can sit here with Angela for a few minutes, if you don’t mind going to that tent over there and checking on Marisa Sanchez. I’m pretty sure it’s dehydration, but again, I don’t have so much as a stethoscope with me. Do you think you could just give her a look and see what you think she should do?”

Pete thought of the trash bags at the clinic waiting to be hauled out to the curb. They weren’t really going anywhere—just the makeshift debris collection area that he’d nicknamed “Mt. Dumpster”  at the back of the abandoned waterpark toward the middle of the island. He didn’t really have anything to go back for. And once he was finished with the lonely task of taking to the curb the last the trash that had been the heart and soul of the birth center his aunt and uncle founded fifteen years ago, then Pete would go home—a place that was just as lonely. He’d been in Port Provident for almost five years now, and still had almost as few connections to the place today as he did the first time he drove over the causeway linking Provident Island to the Texas mainland.

“Sure, Gloria. I can go take a look. Where is she?”

Gloria pointed to a dark green tent, covered by a black tarp. “That’s her husband standing out front. Just tell him who you are and that I sent you over.”

It was no surprise to him that Gloria seemingly knew everyone. As isolated as he sometimes felt in Port Provident, Gloria was connected. She’d grown up in Port Provident, her parents owned a popular local restaurant near the beach, and a few years ago her sister, Gracie, had married a member of the island’s oldest and best-known families. Even in the midst of all the craziness that Hurricane Hope had rained down on Port Provident, Gloria had reconnected with her high school sweetheart on the night the storm made landfall and was now in the first weeks of a re-blooming relationship.

If he was honest, Pete envied that. His high school sweetheart wasn’t coming back into his life, at least not on this side of Heaven. When Anna—who later became his fiancée—lost her battle with cancer, Pete had made some changes in his life.