John Wiltshire - (More Heat Than the Sun 07) by Enduring Night

Author:Enduring Night
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ben learnt a great deal about sepsis shock while he waited in a small anteroom in the medical centre at Longyearbyen. He also read a lot about the hospital, its services, charter, and mission statement. They gave him nothing to research about rabies, because Nikolas didn’t have it, they were pretty sure. But sepsis apparently killed far more people than rabies per year, so this wasn’t particularly good news. The one thing Ben actually took in and held in his heart from all this bombardment of new information was that it was illegal to die on Svalbard. He didn’t analyse this odd pronouncement, didn’t allow Miles’s voice to come into his head with the inevitable and very reasonable questions that might be asked about it. It was illegal to die on Svalbard.

God, it appeared, was sending him a sign.

This message became a little confusing when he discovered that Nikolas had to be transported to Tromso, on the mainland, and the big university hospital there. Still, promises were promises, and Ben had now put his faith entirely in God and reasoned that had He not wanted Nikolas to live, He wouldn’t have provided air ambulances in the first place.

Statistics meant nothing to Ben given his new, unswerving faith in divine intervention. That forty percent of people who went into sepsis shock died was dismissed as another test of his commitment. Half a million people in America alone lost their lives each year to this extreme form of blood poisoning. Two from rabies. So he was told. Be careful what you wish for. But God would have known this, Ben surmised, so when he’d prayed that Nikolas wouldn’t die from rabies, God would have known he’d meant sepsis. Faith was faith; it had very little to do with common sense or logic.

Not only did this buoyant optimism prevent his own incipient panic, it seemed to invigorate the medical staff too—those who’d been present when frozen and exhausted he’d carried his dead friend into the reception of their little yellow hospital and croaked that he’d skied from Jasper Bay. He’d staggered and fallen to his knees, but still he’d managed to lay his burden down with a care and concern that belied his own terrible physical condition.

Ben was lucky they hadn’t believed him—that his companion was dead. Instead, they’d immediately checked for signs of life and found them. He was even more fortunate that on the medical team treating Nikolas was a major contributor to the ‘Surviving Sepsis’ campaign—a man who had, in fact, written the antimicrobial therapy section. This American doctor, just on a visit to Svalbard, had immediately given Nikolas oxygen, intravenous fluids, and multi-spectrum antibiotics until, as he’d informed his sceptical colleagues, the specific microbe could be identified.

When Nikolas was stable, this gift from God had arranged for transport to the much larger medical facility on Tromso.

With one shaky phone call to Peyton Garic, Ben set in motion Nikolas’s onward transfer to Derriford Hospital in Devon. Home. Sunshine, although

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