The Doctor's Unexpected Family

“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, 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’d seen a refugee camp and the experience would stay with him forever.

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 the woman’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 a 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. And considering all the conditions in front of him, 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 chest, a 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 in your bag."

Pete found the equipment he was looking for in his bag. He pricked her 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 his 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 at the back of the abandoned waterpark toward the middle of the island that he'd nicknamed "Mt. Dumpster." 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 nearly 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 her sister, Gracie, had married a member of the island’s oldest and best-known families a few years ago. 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.

One was coming to Port Provident to take over the clinic for his aunt and uncle.

The other was to put all the dreams he’d had for the future aside. He’d once thought he was that white-picket-fence-and-two-point-five-kids kind of guy. But without Anna, reminders of that dream were more like nightmares. And in a town like Port Provident, with block after block of historic Victorian homes, there were a lot of picket fences—and the ache that came with seeing them hadn’t faded with time, as Pete had hoped.

It was time to move on. He was closing the clinic for good and had already applied to join the Mercy Medical Mission team full-time. He wanted to go to a place where he could both remove himself from reminders of Anna and finally use his medical skills to help heal people who had no access to the quality of care he was used to as a doctor in the western medical system.

He was so close to a new beginning. But since he still had at least a few weeks in Port Provident, he had time to do Gloria and her friends a favor.

“How is she?” Pete stopped in front of a skinny young man in his early twenties. “I’m Dr. Pete Shipley. Gloria Rodriguez sent me over.”

“She’s doing ok, I think. She gets a little dizzy when she sits up. She tells me she’s fine, but I can see it in her eyes.”

The young man shot a quick glance into the tent. Pete followed the direction of the young man’s eyes and saw an equally young woman lying on an air mattress with pillows propped all around her. She was also clearly in an advanced state of pregnancy. He ducked through the cut-out that served as the door to the tent, then motioned at Pete to follow him.

“Marisa, this is Dr. Pete Shipley. Gloria asked him to come check you out. He’s going to make sure you’re ok.”

Pete put his hand out to shake, but the girl only gave a stubborn glance at him, then focused her eyes back on Angela and the young man who’d squeezed into the fabric dome behind them.

“I’m fine. Quit making a big fuss over me.”

There was no mistaking the tone in her voice. But her breathing also looked a little shallow, and Pete felt like her bravado was covering up a maternal fear that something was indeed very, very wrong.

“Marisa, could I just ask you a few questions? You’re right, this is probably nothing, but I’d really like to make sure of that—and I’m sure your friends and family would too. It won’t take but a few minutes.” Pete dropped down and squatted at the corner of the air mattress as he spoke, in an attempt to get at eye level with his recalcitrant patient.

Her lips pressed together so hard that they began to blanch. They also looked dry and scaly. The skin under her eyes was sunken and gray as well. Pete started adding the signs together, putting his observations on a mental checklist.

“Can we just talk for a second?” Pete tried again after he got no response. Before he’d taken over the birth center for his aunt and uncle, Pete had spent several years as an emergency room physician, where he’d encountered just about every personality type under the sun.

Stubborn women were practically a specialty of his.

Marisa bit her lip, then nodded briefly. “But he needs to leave.”

The tilt of her head left no doubt as to who she meant.

“Ok, Marisa, I’ll just stand right outside.” Her husband turned pointed outside, then ducked back through the tent’s door.

Alone with his patient, Pete decided not to waste any more time on pleasantries. He didn’t know when Marisa would declare the interview over. She clearly was not in a mood to chat or be fussed over.

“How much have you had to drink today?”

Pete opened the blue bag he’d placed on the floor in front of him and rummaged for his stethoscope, then he put it on and placed the flat disc over Marisa’s heart as he waited for her answer.

“I don’t know. Some orange juice this morning and a soda at lunch.”

“And that’s it? No water? Nothing else?” Her heart rate was a little fast, but nothing far out of the ordinary.

The young mother-to-be shook her head.

Pete put the stethoscope back and pulled out a small white box, a portable fetal Doppler, and a tube of gel.

“This’ll be cold, so brace yourself.” He squirted a little dollop of blue goop on her rounded abdomen, then began to slide the Doppler’s little ultrasound attachment around. “Ok, and what have you had to eat?”

She closed her eyes as the whoosh-whoosh of the baby's heartbeat came through the small plastic speaker. "One of those little boxes of fruit-flavored cereal this morning, and some peanut butter crackers and a bag of sour cream and onion chips at lunch."

Pete didn’t like what he was hearing. “That’s all you’ve had to eat and drink all day?”

“It’s all we’ve got. They don’t have room service here.”

Pete raised his eyebrows. She had him there. This parking lot was a disorganized mess. He clicked off the Doppler, then pulled out a towel and wiped the gel off both Marisa and his little machine before stowing everything back in the bag.

“Can you put out your arm?”

Marisa did as she was asked. Pete placed her hand atop one of his. Then with his other hand, he gave the skin on the back of her hand a pinch, holding it for a second before releasing. As he suspected, it stayed peaked like a little tent for longer than it should have. Decreased skin turgor was a classic sign of dehydration.

And dehydration was a gateway to a variety of adverse outcomes in a pregnant woman, including fainting spells.

Pete rocked back on his heels, still squatting nearby, but trying to give her a little space. “So, Marisa, tell me how things have been for you since the storm.”

Marisa’s eyelids popped open, then she rolled her eyes and made an indelicate grunt in reply.

“I know, dumb question, right?”

She made another grunt, then fell silent for a moment before answering. “The worst.”

“How’d you come to be here at the tent city?” Pete decided to keep gently holding the hand he’d done the pinch test on. Sometimes, patients just needed to know someone was there for them, looking out for them.

“We lived in Coronado Heights,” she said, naming one of the city’s subsidized housing developments on the edge of the La Missión area of town. “Our place was on the first floor. They told us that the water was up to the ceiling. Everything’s gone. They won’t even let us go back inside. It’s just all gone. “

Marisa took an uneven breath, then looked up at the top of the tent with an intense gaze. “My husband lost his job after Labor Day weekend. The tourist season was over, and they'd had a slow year. So now we don't have any insurance. The hospital's closed, but I couldn't afford a doctor bill anyway right now. No job, no home, no money. No nothing. What kind of mother am I, bringing a child into all this mess?"

A sob shook her chest as the tears started to flow. Pete could see the burden of her circumstances pressing down on her, suffocating her dreams and tearing apart her security net.

"I understand." Pete gave her hand a gentle squeeze and hoped he sounded reassuring.

“How? How could you possibly understand, Mr. Fancy Doctor?” She pulled her gaze from the top of the tent and turned her head to look at Pete. A hint of sheepishness crossed her face. “Sorry. That wasn’t very nice.”

A lump of ice hit Pete square in the throat. He’d hoped to be compassionate. He wanted to explain what he meant, but knew no matter what he said, it wouldn’t be adequate.

“Well, I lost my job too. The clinic where I work was destroyed by the hurricane, and we won’t be re-opening.”

“Oh,” Marisa said flatly. “But you’re a doctor. You can get another job, right?”

Pete thought of his application for Mercy Medical Mission, taken with a friend to Houston two days ago so it could be mailed, as mail service on Provident Island had been suspended since Hope. His uncle knew the medical director of the organization and had already made a few phone calls, so the actual application was more or less a formality, pending an opening coming available. “I hope so. I don’t really know where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing, though. I do know something I can do right now, though.”

Marisa pulled her hand back, then tried to lift herself into a half-sitting position on her elbows. “What?”

“I know the head of obstetrics over at Mainland Medical, the next closest hospital to us. It had very minor hurricane damage, so it’s open and accepting patients. I’ll call my friend and arrange to get you checked out, free of charge, and get you back with routine prenatal care. I think you’re pretty severely dehydrated and I believe you have a condition called vasovagal syncope.”

Her brown eyes widened. “That sounds serious.”

“It’s when the part of your nervous system that regulates heart rate and blood pressure malfunctions in response to a trigger. Your heart rate slows, and the blood vessels in your legs widen. This allows blood to pool in your legs, which lowers your blood pressure. This drop in blood pressure and slowed heart rate quickly diminish blood flow to your brain, and you faint." Pete had seen this happen many times over the years and was as certain as he could be without labs and other diagnostic tests. “It can be triggered by things like stress and dehydration, and you’ve got plenty of both. I want you to spend a couple of days in the hospital, getting IV fluids and regular meals and getting you and the baby checked out to make sure that there are no other underlying causes. Dr. Mitchell will make sure you get the best possible care.”

“You promise they’re not going to care that I can’t pay?” She seemed so scared, so unsure.

Pete nodded. “I promise. I’m going to talk to Dr. Mitchell personally. In fact, I’m going to step outside and make the call. Do you want me to send your husband back in?”

Marisa rubbed her belly and nodded. “Ok. Thank you, Dr. Shipley.”

“You’re welcome.” Pete smiled. He hadn’t done much, but if he’d eased even a fraction of her stress and worry, he’d consider today a success.

He motioned to Marisa’s husband, pacing just a few steps away. “I’m pretty sure they’ll both be fine. I want her to go to Mainland Medical to get checked out and to get some fluids for her dehydration.”

“We can’t—“

Pete cut off Marisa’s husband before he could start. There was no need for the man to air their situation out in front of the gathered crowd. “I know. I’ve already told Marisa I’ll take care of everything.”

“Everything?” The young man looked at Pete with hope and gratitude.

“Everything.” And he meant it, even if Pete couldn’t work out a pro bono arrangement and had to tell Dan Mitchell to send the bill straight to him.

Marisa’s husband disappeared inside the tent. Pete reached in his pocket for his cell phone but decided to check in with Angela before he made the phone call, in case he needed to find two beds at Mainland instead of just the one for Marisa.

“She’s going to be okay?”

Angela’s arms were crossed over her chest tightly. Pete couldn’t tell if she was trying to keep something in or something out.

“I think it’s stress and dehydration. I picked up good fetal heart tones on my portable Doppler, so I think the baby’s fine. A few days at Mainland Medical getting real food and some IV fluids should have Marisa good as new. I’m going to make the arrangements, but in the meantime, I need to get Gloria to go over to the Samaritan’s Cross medical trailer and get me a bottle of a sports beverage with electrolytes. They should have some on hand. Where is Gloria? I thought she was staying here with you.”

“She was, but the Bordegos needed her to look at their daughter. She's got an upset stomach, and they're concerned. No one wants a stomach bug to break out in here." Angela nodded her head in the direction of a tent a few feet away. "And the Samaritan's Cross relief team is delayed. They won't be here for another two to three days."

That didn’t sound right to Pete. “Aren’t they always the first on the scene of every disaster?”

“Well, before Hurricane Hope, the local Samaritan’s Cross team had arrangements with 10 different locations in town for shelters and command centers. But then the storm surge blew the doors off of every prediction and every single place the Samaritan’s Cross team had identified—including their main office downtown—was flooded and not able to be used. So they're scrambling, and we're just using what supplies are being trucked in from over the causeway on a day-to-day basis."

That threw a wrench into Pete’s plans. He wanted to start treating Marisa’s dehydration as soon as possible. He looked around the sea of people and felt even more hopeless about the situation surrounding him. Not only had most of these people suffered catastrophic losses, like Marisa, and were forced to live in this crazy situation temporarily, but even the groups who should have been providing basic relief weren’t here.

These folks literally had nothing right now.

“I see Gloria. Looks like she’s walking back this way. Let me see if she has any ideas.”

Pete met Gloria about halfway and quickly gave her an overview of the situation. They discussed a few options, then she decided she would use her connections with the Port Provident Beach Patrol to bring a few bottles of sports drink and some peanut butter crackers—or anything with protein—over to the tent city from the Beach Patrol’s official stash of supplies.

It was a bit like putting together a puzzle. Not your typical medicine. He liked it, and he couldn’t wait until everything was straightened out with Mercy Medical Mission and he was doing this kind of work full-time.

As he waited for Gloria, he called Dan Mitchell, who was more than happy to open his practice to Marisa and assured Pete that no compensation would be necessary. He agreed with Pete that Marisa had been through enough and needed a dose of compassion in addition to some medical care.

Gloria arrived back about fifteen minutes later, a loaded plastic bag in one hand. “What’cha thinking, boss?”

“I’m not your boss anymore.”

She smiled broadly. “Sí. What’cha thinking, Doctor-Who-Used-to-Be-My-Boss?”

Pete laughed a little at her new salutation. It was good to see this transformation in Gloria, who’d once been serious enough for everyone on staff in the clinic. Losing her home and her job to the hurricane—and reconnecting with her former boyfriend, Chief Rigo Vasquez of the Port Provident Beach Patrol—had seemed to free Gloria in a way. She’d been able to let the wind and the waves drive away her past and embrace the future to come.

It fascinated Pete.

In fact, it inspired Pete. Maybe there would be a new beginning like that for him soon. “I was thinking about puzzle pieces.”

“Gloria!” Angela raised her voice a bit and waved her hand. “Did you get those for Marisa?”

Gloria nodded and waved a bottle of blue liquid. “Yes, I was able to get some sports drinks from Rigo’s stash at the temporary Beach Patrol headquarters. Rigo will actually be here in a few minutes, and we'll take her to Mainland Medical, if you've got everything set up, Pete."

“Just got off the phone with Dan Mitchell. Everything’s set. Great thinking on having Rigo take her there—I assume he’s got emergency medical training because of his work on Beach Patrol, right?”

Gloria nodded. “Absolutely. An extra level of precaution, just in case. We could even flip the lights on the truck on if we needed to.”

“I’m pretty sure you won’t need to, Gloria. She’s pretty stable. Just needs a saline IV, some real food and some TLC.” Pete took the bag and bottle from Gloria’s hands and turned back toward Marisa’s tent.

Within minutes, Rigo drove his truck over the narrow strip of grass at the fence line and parked nearby.

“Pete,” Gloria called, “Rigo’s here. It’s time to get Marisa in the truck.”

Marisa shuffled out, Pete supporting her under one arm and Rodgie, her husband, holding up the other side. A duffel bag was slung over Rodgie’s shoulder, and a deep poke of pain hit Pete’s heart as he realized that duffle bag likely held all of their few remaining possessions.

Gloria darted over to the passenger side door and opened it before Marisa got there, then everyone took care to get the young mother-to-be in the truck and make her comfortable. Pete watched Rodgie tuck the duffel bag on the floorboard at Marisa’s feet and felt that sting of sharp metal in his chest again.

Please keep them safe and healthy, God, she thought silently. Give them some rest and renew their spirit—just like we all need right now.

Rodgie climbed in the back seat of the truck behind Rigo, and Gloria closed the passenger side door in the front seat, and just like that, they were off.

*

“Brought you something.” About two hours later, Gloria stuck her head through the flap of Angela’s tent. She held up a small cooler and wiggled it.

“I hope that has an iced coffee and a real dinner in it.” Angela laid down the folder of papers she’d been reviewing.

It had been a few hours since this afternoon’s drama, and as her blood sugar rose, Angela had decided to just sit on her sleeping bag and go over the data about temporary housing sites she’d been given that morning by FEMA. She couldn’t decide if her headache was a lingering effect of the earlier insulin rollercoaster or because she was so frustrated that this program that her constituents desperately needed was so wrapped in red tape.

Gloria shrugged. “Well, no, but I passed the Samaritan’s Cross food truck when I turned on 51st Street. I guess they’ll be here within the hour or so.”

“I said a real dinner. I miss food. Real food. I just want to go to Porter’s and have a shrimp po-boy or to Huarache’s and eat my weight in those amazing pork tamales your madre makes. I should miss real things, like my daughter’s baby book or my parents’ wedding portrait that used to hang in my hallway. But no. Food. I think about a real meal morning, noon, and night.”

Gloria ducked and came inside the tent. “Well, most people think about food morning, noon, and night. It’s called breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

Angela’s stomach gave a little gurgle. “Not quite what I meant. So, what’s in the cooler if it’s not something iced down and caffeinated?”

“Insulin.” Gloria gave the blue and white rectangle a little shake. “There’s a glucagon kit in there too.”

Angela raised her brows. “Insulin? Did you go to City Hall and get my last vial or something?”

“Nope. Pete called the pharmacy at Mainland Medical and had me do a pick up for you while we were dropping Marisa off. This is Rigo’s cooler. There’s no ice in here because I didn’t want it to freeze. I just didn’t want it to get too hot. September on the Gulf Coast is brutal on everyone, especially something delicate like insulin.”

Angela blew out a strong, deep breath. “Yeah, it is. Thank you, Gloria. I’ve been asking for a few days if there was a resource to get me more insulin. I’ve been skipping doses to stretch it. Of course, I’ve been skipping a few meals too, so I tried to tell myself it all balanced out.”

“Angela, you’ve got to take care of yourself. Times are crazy right now, I know. But you can’t sacrifice your health.” Gloria sat down, cross-legged, on the end of Celina’s sleeping bag. “Especially for Celina. She needs her mother, and she needs her to be well.”

“I know, Gloria. I’m trying, really, I am. But it’s like everyone has a question or a need or something right now. I’ve been hiding in here reading these FEMA briefs, and I think it’s the longest stretch of alone-time I’ve gotten since Hope hit.”

Gloria shifted slightly, opening her mouth, then closing it again without speaking.

“What?” Angela questioned.

“Do you think it would help if Celina went and stayed with her dad for a few weeks until the worst of this is over?”

Angela felt a lick of fire flare in her chest. “Absolutely not. Gloria, if you think I’m overworked and inattentive, you can’t possibly think David is a good option. He is a workaholic. He doesn’t even know Celina—by his own choice.”

“I know he’s not involved, Angela. I just know he’s got a good job and I assume a good house and such now. I thought maybe getting Celina out of the elements and this crazy tent city might be better for her, just temporarily.”

Angela picked up the FEMA paperwork and waved it. The pile made a satisfying slapping sound as she threw them back on the sleeping bag. “What will make things better for everyone is when the bureaucrats cut the red tape and get the trailers here so people have real shelter. Celina belongs with me, Gloria. Not someone who is biologically related to her yet doesn’t know anything about her.”

She pushed a hand through her hair and tried not to let her frustration with her ex-husband get the best of her. He was not worth tanking her blood sugar over. The time for that had been six years ago. She had the well-being of thousands of constituents to worry about now, not one selfish man.

“You’re probably right, Angie. I just hate seeing you here. I wish I had a bed to offer you, but I’m still crashing in the guest room at Inez Vasquez’s house. My parents are crowded into a garage apartment with my sister, Gracie, and her husband and their baby. I just wish that our area of town hadn’t been so badly hit so you could get out of here.”

Angela cracked a wry smile. "There's no place I'd rather be than here, Gloria. I had the option to get a room at the Grand Provident. I gave it to Lola de la Vega. She needed it more than I did. She's been my assistant since my first campaign, and I owe her so much. I was glad to let her have my spot. This is a mess, but it's home. These are still my neighbors, still my constituents. And in a way, it's more important than ever that I'm here with them. I have a little fireside chat every night and tell them what happened today at City Hall. People don't have good access to TV or radio or phones or internet like they're used to. I keep them informed, and they tell me what they need. I can't leave them."

“So when do you think FEMA will bring the trailers?”

“I hope soon. They’ve backed out of two locations because of elevation concerns. This proposal is to clear out the old municipal baseball fields and put the trailer park in there. I don’t really like that because it’s so far from town, and there’s no public transportation, obviously, so it’ll be hard for people to get to grocery stores and work. Plus, we’ll be starting from scratch, so it’ll take a while to put in electricity and water and such. But it looks like the best option right now.”

“And you’ll go there?”

“That’s my plan. We should have room for more than 150 trailers there. So that would be a good start.” She tried to smile at her friend, but she was too tired to do more than barely tug the corners of her mouth upward. It had only been just over a week since the hurricane made landfall, but it felt like Angela had been sleeplessly living in a tent behind an elementary school her whole life. “Our community needs stability now, any kind we can get.”

“The new normal, huh?” Gloria twisted her smile like a corkscrew. “Do you think you’ll be okay here, Angela?”

Gloria gave the cooler a subtle push toward Angela.

“I’ve been diabetic practically my whole life, Glo. I was diagnosed when I was nine. I’ll be fine.”

Gloria pulled out her cell phone and tapped at the screen. “I just texted you Pete’s contact information. Promise me you’ll call him if you need anything? I’m going to be off the island tonight at a family dinner in Houston, and since the curfew will be on by the time I would get back, I’m just staying with my cousin Carla on the mainland.”

Angela nodded. “Really, Gloria, I’ll be fine. But I appreciate the concern. And thank you for bringing me a refill.”

“Thank Pete. He took care of everything. I’m just the delivery lady.” Gloria stood as much as she could, and then shuffled awkwardly to the door of the tent.

“And I appreciate it. Thanks for everything today, Gloria. I’m lucky to have a friend like you.”

Gloria ducked out, then stuck her hand back through the curved fabric arch and waved her fingers in a gesture of goodbye.

Angela picked up her folder again and tried to focus on reading the documents on the temporary housing options FEMA was putting on the table. She could hear the sound of the Samaritan’s Cross truck rumbling up. As soon as they were set up, they’d be swamped with a mass of hungry people from all over the tent community. The lines had been averaging almost two hours the last few nights.

As the person elected to represent the majority of the people now calling this patch of grass behind Provident Elementary School home, it made Angela’s blood boil like a stock pot full of soup. She wanted her friends, her neighbors, her constituents to have their dignity and their lives back. The solutions presented in that manila folder weren’t good enough.

There was so much that needed to be done in the wake of this huge, life-altering natural disaster. Knowing how long and winding and bumpy the road ahead would be, Angela paused and swallowed past the small lump forming in her throat.

Was she good enough to get it all done?

The late summer sun still stretched brightly in the streaked sky as Angela finished her dinner. Tonight’s offering from the Samaritan’s Cross mobile kitchen had been simple, but filling: a cheese sandwich with a surprisingly crisp leaf of lettuce and a cheerful wheel of bright red tomato, a cup of tomato soup, and an orange. Angela gave the orange a quick toss from hand to hand as she walked back to her tent.

Should Angela save the orange as a snack for Celina later, or should she eat it herself now as a sweet, juicy dessert?

Angela could almost taste the drips of fresh orange juice on her tongue. She looked at the gently dimpled peel of the orange and stopped herself before she dug in. Considering all of today's blood sugar drama, she should probably check her levels first. She'd headed to the food truck without taking her insulin shot first, and now that Gloria had replenished her supply, Angela mentally chastised herself. She knew what would happen if she didn't keep up with her regimen. Like many diabetics, she'd skipped a shot here or there and just stayed on top of her monitoring. But the batteries had run out of her monitor, and she hadn't been able to find anyone with extras—which led to the scare earlier today.

And goodness knows there wasn’t a big box store or corner market open in Port Provident to get any replacement batteries.

Relying on a lifetime of instinct and observations when it came to insulin was not a recipe for success, and she knew it. Angela blew a heavy breath out of pursed lips. She was stuck. In a big way.

For the first time since Hurricane Hope rolled past, Angela was scared. She needed to keep her blood sugar in check. One missed shot wouldn’t hurt her. Forty-eight hours without shots or monitoring could actually kill her. But what could she do?

Back in her tent, she sat down and pulled out her phone. Could she call the police and report a battery emergency? They probably got plenty of assault and battery calls, but probably not many three-volt lithium battery calls.

Seriously, Angela, she muttered to herself. The police force is overwhelmed these days. You can’t call them because you’re out of batteries. If they have batteries to spare, they’re probably double-As or nine-volts or something common like that. You can’t be a pest.

Absently, she scrolled on her phone. Then she saw the contact card Gloria had texted her earlier.

Well, obviously Pete Shipley had a working glucose monitor. And she had to admit that calling him made more sense than calling Port Provident PD.

She clicked on the phone number hyperlinked in the text.

“Pete Shipley.”

Angela couldn’t figure out why she was nervous to tell the doctor why she was calling. “Hi, Dr. Shipley, it’s Angela Ruiz—Gloria’s friend.”

“Hi, Angela. You can call me Pete. Any friend of Gloria’s is a friend of mine.” His voice sounded as warm and soothing as the whipped milk on top of a designer cappuccino. “Is something wrong at the tent city? Did you get the insulin I asked Gloria to pick up?”

“No one else is sick. And I did get the insulin. Thank you very much. That’s actually what I was calling about.”

“Did I get the type wrong? I called in Humulin. Did you actually want Novolin?” He named off the two most popular brands of insulin.

"No, you got the right type. The problem is my monitor. It doesn't work, and I obviously can't take a shot without knowing what my numbers are. My battery is totally dead, and there's nowhere to get a lithium battery here right now. I won't be able to get to the mainland and back before the curfew goes into effect."

She hesitated before voicing her request, but she couldn’t say exactly why.

“So you need to borrow my monitor?”

Pete completed Angela's sentence, and she relaxed a little bit.

“If I could, yes. I don’t want to inconvenience you, but…”

Angela could hear shuffling noises in the background and a metallic sound that she suspected was the jingling of a set of keys. “Don’t apologize, Angela. I should have left it with you earlier today. You can’t give yourself a shot without knowing your glucose levels. That’s dangerous. I was just finishing up some clean-out at the clinic, so I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Can you wait that long?”

She didn’t have any of the tell-tale signs of highly fluctuating sugar. “I think that will be fine. Thank you, Pete.”

“Not a problem, Angela. Happy to help a friend of Gloria’s. I’ll see you shortly.”

He hung up the call, and Angela turned back to her paperwork. The longer she spent in this tent, the more resolved she became to know everything about the temporary housing issue. She needed to get her constituents back to safe housing so they could have stability in their lives.

Angela looked over at the little blue cooler in the corner, full of the insulin that was such a part of the routine of her own life.

Her constituents and neighbors weren’t the only ones who needed some stability in their lives. She had read the reports, she sat in the meetings with officials and bureaucrats. She didn’t have the luxury of not knowing just how steep the hill was for Port Provident to climb. She had a young daughter who missed her home and her favorite toys. And she herself had a health condition that needed to be managed. She couldn’t afford to just blow off the necessary management of her condition, but living in a situation like her current one made the day-to-day difficult.

She had to get stability in her own life in order to bring stability to all the thousands of lives around her.

Angela frowned thoughtfully. She couldn't even manage an insulin shot right now. How could she help all the people who were depending on her?

*

For being an unemployed doctor in a town with no working medical facilities, Pete sure seemed to have a full patient load today. At least Pete felt confident that Marisa would be taken care of and back to full health in no time, thanks to the staff at Mainland Medical.

As far as Angela Ruiz was concerned, Pete wasn’t quite as certain. She’d raised his doctor radar. He couldn’t quite say what triggered it, but he knew to trust his instincts and keep asking questions until he figured out the puzzle.

He was glad she called. She’d been on his mind since he’d returned to the clinic. He wanted to tell himself it was all concern for her health, but the number of times he’d caught himself paused and thinking about her cocoa eyes instead of working on cleaning up the clinic was anything but healthy.

Pete wound through the maze of tents and set-ups that were more like lean-tos, and about a dozen other things in between. He found the tent that Angela had been sitting in front of earlier. He’d seen lots of insurance agents and government groups setting up temporary field offices in areas all over the city, and thought it was a good thing that Angela had set up a place here in this tent city so that the citizens of Port Provident had access to her—especially since everyone’s access to radio, TV, and the Internet were very limited right now.

He gave a little knock on the tent to announce himself, and the fabric structure wobbled with the gentle taps.

“Come on in,” said Angela’s voice from the other side.

“How are you feeling? Any better?” Pete held up the glucose monitor as he ducked through the opening. “Let’s do a quick check so we can calibrate your insulin dosage.”

Angela stuck out her pointer finger, and Pete swiped an alcohol wipe over it, then massaged the tip of her finger to get the blood flowing. He couldn't help but notice Angela's nails, the bright pink polish shredded and chipped on the ends. It struck him like a cosmetic metaphor for the woman next to him. She had fine, classic features, but he could tell she was frayed and worn out.

Quickly, he pricked the edge of her finger with the lancet, then fixed up a test strip and popped it in the monitor. He smiled a bit when he saw the reading.

“Rebounding nicely, just as I’d hoped.” He showed Angela the digital display. A slow smile appeared across her face.

“Thanks, I’m sorry I made you come all the way back over here.” She kept stroking the hair of the little girl sitting quietly in her lap. “I’ll be fine. Thanks again for getting everything taken care of for Marisa at Mainland Medical Center. That was very generous of you.”

“It was the right thing to do.” Pete tucked all his supplies back in the blue bag. “And the right thing for you to do is get some rest and let your body get back to normal. I’d feel better if I saw you back to your house and got you settled before I go to my house for the evening.”

“We can go home, Mama?” The little girl’s eyes took on the look of donuts—perfectly round and sugar-glazed—as she lifted her head off Angela’s shoulder. “I can see Huggy Lovey!”

Angela’s own glance skimmed the top of her daughter’s forehead, careful to not make eye contact before looking blankly out toward some trees in the distance. “Not today, sweetie, remember?”

The little girl shook her head, black pigtails flapping assertively.

“We have a lot of work to do before we can go home.”

“Home probably wasn’t the best choice of words. I can get you settled wherever you’re staying, and then I can head back to what I was doing at the clinic.”

“Really, Dr. Shipley, that’s not necessary.” Angela shifted her weight from her left hip to her right and twitched her shoulders.

“The name’s Pete, remember? And it is necessary. You’re my patient now. And I take care of my patients. Especially now, when this corner of the world’s a big mess.” Pete stood up. “Now, where are you staying?”

Angela pursed her lips and the corner of her mouth twisted downward. She looked hesitant, a far cry from the stereotype that would be attached to someone in politics.

“There.” The little girl pointed in the direction of the area behind Pete’s foot.

He turned around furrowed his brow in concentration. He was beginning to put two and two together, and he didn’t like how the equation was adding up.

“That’s a sleeping bag. Is it yours?” Pete knelt down and got at eye level with the little face.

She nodded.

He’d been terribly wrong in his assumption when he walked up and knocked on the wall of the tent. “So, where is your house?”

“We live at 404 Houston Street. Huggy Lovey is still there, and I miss her." She spoke with the distinct syllables of childhood.

Houston Street. If he wasn’t mistaken, that area, where streets were named for the heroes of the Texas Revolution, was one of the hardest hit in all of Port Provident. That’s where Gloria’s house was. “You live in Alamo Court?”

“Lived.” Angela jumped into the conversation with one charged syllable. Her voice sounded stronger, which Pete took as a good sign. “As Celina pointed out, we’re staying here for right now.”

Pete had a hard time believing his ears. “But you’re a member of City Council. Surely there’s someplace better for you to stay.”

She fixed her gaze squarely on Pete’s face. “This is where most of my constituents without homes are. They elected me to represent them. That doesn’t make me better than them, or worthy of staying someplace special when they’re stuck in a tent city because they don’t have anywhere else to go and there’s too much red tape keeping the people who are supposed to be helping from actually doing anything.”

He could hear the conviction in her voice. It bordered on anger when she talked about the inefficiency of aid.

“I understand, and I didn’t mean to say otherwise, Angela. But you’re exhausted and not eating well, and you said it yourself—you aren't able to adequately keep up with your insulin levels. You can't help your people if you can't stay well."

“Things will be better in a few days. We’ll make do until then.”

“Angela, look around you. Look at your daughter. I know you’ve managed diabetes probably most of your life. You’ve got a routine. But when you’re in a place where you can’t manage that routine, it can become a life and death situation. You need to be somewhere that you can take care of your little girl and yourself.”

Pete had no idea why his blood pressure was ticking up. He barely knew this woman. But his doctor’s instinct had kicked in, and he wanted to fix this whole messed up situation. He couldn’t fix everything on the island, but he could fix this.

“There isn’t any place for me to go now, anyway. There aren’t many hotels even open on the island to begin with. I was offered a room as a city councilmember, but I gave it to a lady on my staff. She needed it more than me.” She picked up the soda can and lifted it to her lips for another drink.

Pete immediately knew what happened. She'd gotten a little defensive, and her fight-or-flight reflex had kicked in, the hormones and chemicals surging alongside the adrenaline messing up the delicate endocrinological balance Angela had just started to gain back.

“Your sugar’s dropping again, isn’t it?”

“You can’t tell that just by looking at me.”

"Actually, I can. You're starting to sweat just a little bit up along your hairline, and you're leaning back in your chair. Look, I don't know how to fix FEMA's issues, but I have more than a decade's worth of experience around medical patients. What's going to happen to your daughter when you pass out on that sleeping bag in the middle of the night, and there's no one to help you or take care of her? There's no 911 to call right now, no ambulances, and no hospital on the island to go to in the event of an emergency."

Angela looked up at Pete. Her brown eyes flashed with a small glint of lightning, then the feistiness dimmed and she turned her gaze down to her feet. “I don’t know. But I truly don’t know where to go now, either. Sure, there’s actually power at my City Hall office, but there's no one else up there in the middle of the night if something were to happen to me. At least here, there's plenty of people we know."

“Plenty of people who don’t know how to treat blood glucose reactions.”

There was only one solution to this problem, crazy as it was. Pete decided not to beat around the bush, but instead to just come out and say it. Sometimes you needed to sugar coat things for your patients, but other times, you had to give it to them straight. This was definitely the latter.

"You just need to come back to my house. I have a guest room, and my home is on stilts, so it thankfully sustained almost no damage. This way, you're under a doctor's care. I can monitor your sugar and your diet, and you're not tied to the hours or offerings of the Samaritan's Cross truck, which I know are not exactly diabetic-friendly. Way too carb heavy. What did you have for dinner tonight?"

Angela muttered something under her breath.

“I didn’t hear you. But let me guess…white bread was involved, wasn’t it?”

She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Maybe.”

“I’ve been practicing medicine long enough to know when a patient says ‘maybe,’ they actually mean yes. Especially when we’re talking about bad diet choices.”

“I don’t have a choice! They serve what they serve. I’ll be sure and have City Council request chefs from the Food Network to man the food trucks after the next hurricane.”

“Angela, even Bobby Flay couldn’t help you right now. You don’t need a side of chipotle. You need a balanced meal with some protein and some low-glycemic offerings.”

Pete couldn’t keep from letting out a breath when he noticed Angela’s nostrils flare slightly and her lips purse. He could see her protests crumbling in the face of the facts that she, as a life-long Type 1 diabetic, knew all too well.

“It’s likely anyone would have struggled to maintain optimal blood sugar levels—even non-diabetics—in the stressful, uncertain environment created after Hurricane Hope rolled through Port Provident,” Pete said. He didn’t want her to talk herself out of what she knew deep inside. “But you’re not just anyone. You’re a Type 1 diabetic. You’ve been too lax with your numbers and your levels for too many days in a row now. You were very close to needing to go to the hospital today along with Marisa. This isn’t just a matter of me telling you to watch your diet. You’ve got to get some help and stability because this is getting close to a life and death type of issue, and you know I’m right.”

Angela nodded slowly. “Pete, I think maybe you’re exaggerating just a little bit. I’ve had diabetes my whole life. It’s not like I was just diagnosed last week and don’t understand what I’m dealing with. Besides, I can’t take my daughter to your house. I don’t even know you.”

“Well, to that point, I don’t know you either. But we both know Gloria. I trust anyone who is a friend of hers, and I’d hope you’d feel the same.”

“Of course I trust Gloria’s judgment.” Angela’s voice was still. It reminded Pete of the calm of the eye in the middle of the hurricane not so long ago.

“So you’ll come with me?”

Gloria shook her head, her brown hair softly dancing around her face. “Really, I’m fine. I’ve got the monitor. I’ve got the insulin. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Pete stuck his hand out and gave her the monitor. He didn’t know her well, wasn’t her physician of record, and didn’t have any other way to convince her.

He said a brief goodbye to both Angela and Celina, then stooped to exit the tent, trying to convince himself that the nagging feeling in his midsection was just the remains of his own Samaritan’s Cross food truck meal, and not the gut instinct honed from years on the front lines of medicine.

*

His bed was lumpy. After seeing how so many of his fellow citizens were sleeping, in tents and sleeping bags, Pete mentally chastised himself to ignore the fact that he couldn’t get comfortable. But in spite of this, he kept shifting his position and mentally replaying the events from earlier in the day.

Angela had to be a practical woman. She'd been elected to the Port Provident City Council, and he remembered from the last election that she also helped run her family's small business. While he respected the fact that she'd been managing diabetes most of her life, he didn't understand why she seemed to agree with him yet couldn’t accept the help he was offering.

He rarely pushed aside his gut reaction. Part of being a good doctor was the balance of knowledge and instinct. Instinct pushed him to follow his knowledge down paths to solve his patients’ health issues, or to proactively make decisions to keep them from ever having issues. Tonight, though, he made himself ignore that strong feeling.

He told the voice in his head to hush, rolled over again, and picked up the remote control to the TV. He'd come into his bedroom early, trying to wind down with a favorite movie recorded on his DVR, knowing he should enjoy the distraction while he could, since TV of any kind likely wouldn't be an option to unwind with wherever Mercy Medical Mission would probably send him. For now, though, he was still in the United States, where mindless TV would take his mind off everything that had happened lately.

Especially one epically stubborn, brown-eyed City Councilwoman.

The sound of his cell phone buzzing against the nightstand woke Pete up from a sound sleep. The blue light of the TV flickered from the corner, giving the whole room a strange glow. He must have fallen asleep while zoning out on reality TV.

“Dr. Shipley.” The digital clock near the phone said it was too early to be asleep, but too late to be receiving social phone calls.

He didn’t know what this call could possibly be about. All of his patients had been transferred to the care of doctors off the island since the clinic was now permanently closed and even Provident Medical Center was shut down for the foreseeable future due to hurricane damage.

“Pete, it’s Angela. I need your help.”

Of all the calls this could have been, Angela asking for help didn’t even make his top 100 list. She started talking so fast, his brain couldn’t keep up.

“Whoa, whoa. What did you say?”

She paused, then thankfully spoke much more slowly. “There’s been a shooting on the other side of the tent city. The police are here now.”

“Angela, are you ok? Is Celina ok?” The brain fog induced by mindless television was completely gone now. Pete felt like a bolt of lightning had cracked under his bed, propelling him up into a sitting position.

“We’re fine. It happened on the other side of the grounds. But the police are shutting this down. They’re clearing everyone out right now and moving us to the high school. They’re re-establishing a shelter there, like they had the shelter of last resort there the night of the hurricane.”

He relaxed a little at the knowledge that Angela and her little pigtailed pixie of a daughter were okay. “So what do you need? Help taking down the tent and packing up?”

"My car is in the City Hall parking garage, and I need to get out of here. They've got the area on lockdown, but I think I can get the police to let you in. I told you I don't like using privileges that my constituents can't use. But this isn't for me. It's for my daughter." He could hear her take a deep breath and then he heard a small, muffled sob. "Celina is terrified of going to the shelter. She spent the night there during the hurricane with my sister Emmy, because I had to be working at the command center. She was terrified, and she doesn't want to go back. Can we still use your guest room?"

He knew there was a reason he couldn’t dismiss that gut feeling earlier. He just didn’t expect the reason to be something other than blood sugar.

But the truth was, he didn’t blame Celina one bit. She’d been through enough in the very recent past to last her a lifetime. Whatever he could do to bring the smile back to her face, he would.

“I’m on my way.”

“Thank you, Pete. Thank you for helping my daughter.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “I wish I could fix things for everyone else here as easily.”