The careful doctor in a new land

This is really unprompted writing, a thousand words of total nonsense which you don't have to stand really, skip this one if you're in the mood for one of 'em experimentals because I dunno if I'm into this myself as a writer. I won't be offended. I am of course listening to jazz for a rainy day despite it not being rainy and not a specially jazzy kinda' time.

Something that's been missing from my life is...action, adventure...the doctor thought. In this little dinky hospital where the village people come, it's nice to save lives and all of that, but it gets boring after a while, same old people same old conversations, same old ailments. You want to know where the rest of the world is at, and not necessarily just with medicine either. Though that was an important part for him, he was an ambitious young man, he wanted to be a part of those experimental procedures and techniques and medications, write papers about how to improve so and so method so you can cut down the mortality by such and such times, all of that. Here though, there wasn't a lot of opportunity. The diseases were as boring as they come, the patients not very daring or interested in experimental procedures. It was a lot of mechanical work, autopilot, the simple surgeries he was trained for he didn't even need to pay attention. Perhaps medical science had made such great progress that a decent doctor like himself could take upon himself such great responsibility without being mentally excited, here he was anyway, in the middle of his life planning a transition of some sort. Action, adventure, glory, that's what I need. If that means I'll get to do doctoring less, he admitted to a friend one particularly drunk evening, I'm okay with that it's fine if I'm needed only to clean wounds and put on eyedrops as long as I get to explore life, explore...the world!

So it was fate that brought him the news of the peacekeepers going to foreign lands looking for civilian doctors. The army doctors had all done their rounds, the few that remained were needed in the hospitals. The army was paying a good salary, without the millitary deduction which went the government's coffers, and it was a safe assignment. Nobody was going to attack the doctors...they'd need care at some point too, and even if they did, medical facilities were the most heavily protected ones in the barracks anyway. Not dangerous but there was certainly a thrill to it. He signed up, they called in for the physicals two months later. A month after that, he was sitting on a military plane with the UN logo on it flying to a country he knew barely anything about, whose language he had found incomprehensible besides hello goodbye etcetera, and a weather that thoroughly disagreed with his body.

The doctor had forgotten about mosquitoes, having gotten used to the mountains and the cool weather the high altitude that got rid of the tiny bloodthirsty creatures. At his new station they were the number three cause of death among the patients, so he was expected to maintain a high degree of care for himself. The vaccines were fine, the disease he wasn't too afraid of, it was within the grasp of humankind. The individual bloodsuckers, those buzzing black-brown-gray vacuums of the devil who tunneled into your skin to slurp in the precious vital blood, he couldn't stand. Why did they have to brag about it by singing it to your ears, why did they have to show how much they had stolen from you by getting fat lazy and red. It was just so unnecessary, so gross, a little bit outdated, this concept of straight out villain in the ecosystem whose absence would have absolutely no negative consequence in the environment.

The water took a few weeks to get used to. It didn't taste bad per se, just different, so very different he discovered that it wasn't quenching his thirst. He was drinking twice, thrice as much as he did back home and still not fully satiated. My body's missing the minerals of the home, he reminded himself. It will eventually get used to the land here and it'll be fine.

The doctor fraternized with soldiers and civilians in he peace camps from other countries, that was his favourite part of the job. Unlike Nepal the others had made a pointed effort to send a decent number of women soldiers as well as civilians in their contingents, so there was always healthy ribbing flirting winking teasing going around. He wouldn't dare do anything beyond, for fear of unknown repercussions but it was a general practice he knew, when there was such diverse population in the same place, to decrease the rate of hanging out with different kinds of people. Places like these were petri dishes of all the various venereal diseases, basically the only way a large number of viruses survived, by continuing from one vector to another. Had there not been a similar action, they might have accused her of being....the....something else.