Sister Nunce and the Student Doctor

The nursing sister was sitting in her office when a timid knock came. She looked up from the charts she had been studying and called, "Come in!"

A fresh-faced young man came in, arms held to his side uncertainly. His eyes were shifty, looking from her desk to the window and back to her face.

"Good evening Sister Nunce!" His voice was slightly shaky.

"Good evening!" Her mind travelled to a document that had come to her some days before, now buried under others. It told her that the nursing home had employed a new doctor to help with the care of patients who were daily coming in with an ailment that still perplexed the medical profession; it was only known to be caused by a virus belonging to the 'corona' family. A patient once infected would develop a fever, a cough and difficulty in breathing. If they had another illness their condition would deteriorate quickly leading to death in a matter of days. The rate of spread of the infection had taken the world by storm, taking with it 185,000 lives globally. Medical facilities the world over had been quickly overrun without enough medical personnel, beds, or other resources. Any additional experts, or equipment was very much sought for.

The letter had said the Poznan clinic would be allocated a doctor, but day after day had passed without his appearance. She wondered if he was the one referred to in the letter. Looking at him, she very much doubted whether he would be of much help. "What can I do for you at this late hour?" she asked in a slightly unfriendly tone.

"I am Doctor Wilfred Samovize, sent to start work here. I have just arrived from Breslau by train."

"I had been expecting you since last Thursday," she countered.

"The railway had been flooded between Breslau and Ilmamen since the beginning of last week. When we started this morning it was not at all certain that we would make it all the way. But here I am. The receptionist has kindly kept my bags for me," the doctor explained, his confidence seeming to creep back the more he spoke.

She allowed herself to relax a little. Her irritation at the stress that she and her staff had been working under in the last weeks began to lift. She now saw that he was quite a good-looking man with his bushy hair, bright eyes and firm chin. Far from the fearful prospect he had at first presented, she could see that he was not timid in the least. His eyes held hers.

"In that case we have no time to lose," standing up from behind the desk. Her uniform crinkled with stiffness and her stockings rubbed noisily as she walked to the door, holding it open for him. She led him to the first ward where patients lay on small beds crammed so close together that there was hardly any room to move between them. Through the window he saw others outside pushed close to the walls to keep them from the rain. He figured those must be so far gone that the cold was the least of their worries. There were easily eighty people in this ward which seemed to his practiced eye to have been designed for twenty-five. How many nurses do we have here, he wondered as his eyes roved over the scene. He could not count beyond five. Definitely a run-away situation!

Sister Nunce led him from cot to cot (the beds were so narrow they hardly merited the name) explaining the progress of each patient. It seemed to him to be one long progression differing from one patient to the next only in how far they had come (or less charitably, how near death they were). As they returned to the cubby-hole office she told him they had lost one hundred and fifty people in the last fortnight alone; that was more than the patients they had been getting for a whole year before this outbreak!

The doctor was kept running from one cot to the next as each patient was an emergency throughout the night. At about daybreak, Sister Nunce gave him to a male colleague to show him to the house allocated to the doctor on these premises. He only managed two hours rest (he did not really fall asleep) before he was required in the wards again. The two other wards did not differ from the first one in any important aspect. That night they had lost seven people, three men, two women and two children. In his first week of work they even lost a nurse and two of the cleaning staff. He racked his brains to find a way of slowing down the spread of infection in this little nursing home. On a hunch, he asked the nurses to cover their faces with a surgical mask, as he did himself.

During the second week, they lost patients at the same horrendous rate, but no other nurses fell ill. He seemed to have found the site of entry of the virus. So it appeared to his mind that since the hands travel to the face more often than any other part of the body, it was the hands that were giving the virus a lift from contaminated surfaces to the face. So he instituted a regimen of constant washing of hands with soap. He felt it strange that such a simple action could thwart an enemy that had decimated so many lives all over the world. No more staff seemed to pick up the sickness from infected patients in his domain, however.

Sister Nunce was suitably impressed with his results in only a fortnight's work. She tried to keep things professional and not to show him any signs of the affection that had begun to stir in her mind; she mostly succeeded. She was unable, however to prevent a celebration of sorts. She called Samovize to her office where she had a bottle of a mild, sweet wine. They drank to the health of their patients and colleagues, even indulging in a small jig. His hands on her body created some wild, but very unprofessional, feelings in her, which she fought to shove out of her mind.

But when they called the district medical officer at Lodz to show him what they thought was a way to slow down infection, he looked it over and poured bitter scorn on their progress.

"Do you really think such a mighty enemy can be halted with a bar of soap? Keep doing the work assigned to you of taking care of infected patients and stop trying to make a name for yourselves. This is a state of war, not a time to make reputations." Doctor Pakowski made them feel like a couple of schoolchildren who had turned to play instead of homework.

Samovize was undaunted. He began visiting people in their homes and teaching them the wearing of cloth masks with at least three layers as he felt that a virus could not breach all three. He also set up hand washing stations in the shopping centre and other public places, exhorting citizens to wash their hands constantly and avoid touching their faces as far as possible, even at home.

He took Sister with him on some of these excursions so that she, too became expert at keeping people safe from infection. In about three or so weeks the numbers of those being brought in, not just to the nursing home but to neighbouring health centres, began to drop noticeably. This seemed to bring them even closer together. He felt a warmth towards her which he, however, did not allow to break out into the surface.

Instead of appreciation of their work, Doctor Samovize and Sister Nunce received a letter from the regional health council in Krakow accusing them of massaging the numbers of patients they treated, and those who recovered so that they were lower than other similar institutions. They were accused of hiding the true numbers of casualties. It would have been reasonable to expect an investigative team to be sent to verify the fraud claims, but none came, not even the press.

One evening, they had gone into the villages round about showing the peasants their simple devices to keep the from getting infected. They came back tired and dusty, but infused with the warm glow of recent successes. They decided to have supper at Samovize's house but felt unable to part afterwards. She hugged him in thanks for the supper, which he repaid generously in the same coin. The feelings they each had bottled up for weeks now erupted like a geyser, shooting them both high into the air. Kisses became fondling and before long both were naked, limbs intertwined, frantically touching each other all over in urgent need. His mouth trapped a nipple between its lips and her fingers found his stiff pole.

She guided it to her hot moist centre, and felt him push into her. He stretched her lips as he gained inch after delicious inch. When he drew back a bit and back in again, a rhythm quickly set in. It took them scant minutes to come with each other, wetly and noisily. Afterwards, as they came down from their high, they lay fondling each other.

Their minds latched onto the one blot on their work. He decried the power Pakowski seemed to have of blocking the progress they had made in Poznan.

"One could be forgiven for thinking he wants more people to die from this contagion. He cares more about his ego than about people's lives."

"I can't understand what happens to people when they attain high office. Would you believe me when I tell you I knew Pakowski when he was a dutiful doctor?" she posed.

"I could very well believe you. But it remains a mystery to me why men change in that way when they are given high positions." He rolled her nipple between his fingers.

"Would you succumb to that virus yourself when you ascend to his post?" She tried to wriggle away from his marauding fingers. "Please be serious for a moment."

"I am. Very." To show what he was serious about, his head descended to her tits and embarked on sucking them. She moaned as if in frustration, but in truth the pleasure travelled from her tits to every nerve ending in her body.

Meanwhile the number of dead globally soared to above 250,000 people, more than two-thirds of these coming from North America and Western Europe. The WHO had christened the disease CROWN-19 from the shape of the virus under the microscope. Nations in Eastern Europe, Asia and South America contributed almost the rest of the total. Staggeringly, Africa's numbers of infected persons equaled the dead of almost any one single country in Europe; their dead compared favourably with the daily figures of the infected in those countries. This puzzle plagued the pair daily.

Samovize's bile rose. He decided to write a report of what he had achieved at Poznan and send it to the national newspaper, the Vistula Herald. He was amazed to receive a regret letter by return post, with his report and diagrams. Neither would the medical journal accept his submission. Doctor Pakowski now had the Herald publish a long attack on unethical doctors who lied about the numbers of patients they had treated, and those who died. They had even inflated the figures of those who had recovered from CROWN-19. This practice was deplored by the article, which then went on to call on the people to condemn such unscrupulous people. Should they even be in charge of the nation's health resources, it posed.

Instead of slowing down, Samovize staged a number of public lectures to prove his point. He believed the world's population could be saved by his innovations, simple though they were. He had seen the results with his own eyes. One was even staged in Lodz, Pakowski's stronghold. Then he decided writing a book would be even more effective as it could be sold to neighbouring Germany, France and the most affected nations nearby. Who knows, it might even reach Britain and USA! Unfortunately, by this time Samovize was so incensed that the text was littered with vitriol against 'stubborn medical administrators' calling them 'shortsighted'. Nobody who read the book had any doubt that the target was Pakowski. Instead of winning other doctors to his side, Samovize only succeeded in alienating them further. From this point on, Pakowski did not need to do anything more, simply letting Samovize stew in his own fat.

Discouraged and distraught, Samovize finally resigned in a huff and returned to his native Breslau, a broken man. Meanwhile Doctor Pakowski came back to Poznan to see Sister Nunce. Unsuspectingly, she showed him all that they had achieved with Samovize. Now the villages round about had understood Samovize's methods and their sick had dropped to far below the national average. In fact, the numbers seemed to be on the way to compare with those of Africa. For the second time, the influential doctor slapped Sister Nunce in the face with his cutting remarks. He left behind a feeling that the little town of Poznan had no thinkers, and everything they had achieved was as nothing.

"Can you believe what Pakowski said to me?" she asked Samovize over the phone that evening.

"What did the rotten bastard want in a clinic he had shown such contempt for?"

"Ostensibly to see if we had heeded his warnings. But he was more interested in wooing me. I felt horrible after I had shown him all that we had done. Had I realised how low an animal he was, I would never have revealed anything of worth to him."

"Why don't you resign your job and join me here?" suggested Samovize one day. "I want to start a laboratory that will search for a vaccine against this virus."

"I would be very excited by that kind of work," responded the sister. "I have also been missing our love very much."

And so it was done.

The two, now research collaborators, watched as Pakowski wrote article after article parroting everything the Herald and the medical journal had rejected from Samovize. He was openly plagiarizing Samovize, knowing that the latter was a beaten man. In a very short time the masks devised by the pair had been modified and a suit invented to shield medical workers from infection. The gall of Pakowski left them equally nonplussed. The practice of hand washing, the wearing of masks and the new-fangled suit (which Nunce and Samovize could see clearly was an exaggeration designed to enrich Pakowski and his cronies) were all attributed to the wily Pakowski, but it took several weeks for the proposal to be approved by the WHO and passed on to the rest of the world. In six months Pakowski's (but really Samovize's stolen) ideas did help to slow down the rate of infection, something labeled 'flatenning the curve' but sufficient numbers had not been exposed to the virus to afford an immunity in the population so that a second wave followed on the heels of the first one.

This one did not manage to take away the 750,000 the first one had done, but it still managed a 'respectable' 420,000 including Pakowski himself. The researchers received the news of the doctor's death without any satisfaction. Had he listened to Sister Nunce and himself on his first trip, probably half a million people would have been spared. But how many deaths could one man be liable for, Samovize shrugged.

Finally the wave spent itself. For some reason that nobody could put a finger on, the African continent lost less than 5,000 in both plagues. The world economy was altered beyond description. I can only give you a sketch here but in the darkest hour demand for oil sank so low that in America the prices became a negative $133. This was like saying that oil companies were paying customers to take the oil out of their hands. The US government fell but the Democrats could not raise a candidate to replace him. Eventually a coalition between the two large parties had to be put together to try and shore up what was left of the 'great old US of A'. In Britain Labour tried to pick up the shards of government but it faltered after a few weeks. The populace was too worn out by the pandemic to go into another election so even here a coalition was cobbled together before Britain became a failed state altogether.

The situation in Eastern Europe, South America and Asia was not as dire but governments fell like ninepins to be replaced by hastily put-together alternatives which fortunately, worked. Africa did not witness any political upheaval, but the economic ramifications were far-reaching. Property prices tumbled dramatically and many who had been below poverty line inched upwards.

Eventually two or three vaccines were tried and tested before being rolled out to the world's population. Conspiracy theorists went ballistic about the pandemic, seeking to create doubt that it was a real disease. Then they set upon the vaccines, trying to show that contained infertility-inducing drugs.

Recovery from these two plagues (or two waves of one plague) will take a long time, experts agree.