I’d come out into the hall, curious to see who our caller was. Jamie was so tall that I couldn’t see past him, but I heard him greet whoever it was in Gaelic, with a formal honorific. He sounded surprised.
I was surprised, too, when he stepped back and gestured Hiram Crombie into the hall.
Hiram lived toward the west end of the cove, well down the slope, and usually ventured away from his own neck of the woods only to come to church of a Sunday. I didn’t think he’d ever come to the house before.
A spare, dour-looking man, he was the de facto headman of the village of fisher-folk who had emigrated, en masse, from the far north near Thurso, to settle at the Ridge. I looked automatically over my shoulder for Roger; the fisher-folk were all rock-ribbed Presbyterians, who tended to keep to themselves; Roger was probably the only person in the household who could be thought of as being on truly cordial terms with Hiram—though Mr. Crombie would at least speak to me, after the events surrounding his mother-in-law’s funeral.
Roger was gone, though. And it appeared that, in fact, Hiram had things other than religion on his mind.
He’d doffed his hat—his good hat, I saw—when he came in, and gave me a small nod of acknowledgment, then cast a glance at the knot of children, blinked without changing expression, and turned to Jamie.
“A word with ye, a mhaighister?”
“Oh. Aye, of course, Mr. Crombie.” He stepped back and gestured toward the door of his study—known to all and sundry as the speak-a-word room. He met my eyes as he followed Hiram into the study, and gave me a wide-eyed shrug in response to my questioning look. Hell if I know, it said.
I SHOOED THE children off to the creek to look for crawdads, leeches, cress, and anything else that seemed useful, and retired into my surgery, seizing the rare moment of leisure to ramble through the pages of my precious new Merck Manual, keeping one ear out in case Jamie wanted anything for Hiram.
One of the unusual accoutrements of my new surgery was a cane-bottomed rocking chair. Jamie had made it for me—in the evenings, over a period of months—from ashwood, with rockers of rock maple, and got Graham Harris, the local expert, to cane the bottom, assuring me that the chair would outlast me and any number of subsequent generations, rock maple being called that because it was hard as stone. The chair was remarkably helpful for soothing babies or small, wiggly children that I wanted to examine—and just as helpful for calming my own mind when I had to retreat from the stresses of daily life, in order to avoid throttling people.
At the moment, though, I was content in mind and body, and absorbed in finding out what the modern treatment for interstitial cystitis might be.
Lifestyle adjustment
Up to 90% of patients improve with treatment, but cure is rare. Treatment should involve encouraging awareness and avoidance of potential triggers, such as tobacco, alcohol, foods with high potassium content, and spicy foods.
Drug therapies …
Granted, there was nothing I could actually do with much of the information—no one on the Ridge ate spicy food to start with, but my chances of talking any of them out of using tobacco, alcohol, or raisins were low. As for drugs, the only applicable substance I had was my reliable willow-bark tea. Beyond curiosity, though, there was somehow a great comfort in the sense of authority in the book; the feeling that there was someone—many someones—who had blazed a trail for me; I wasn’t completely alone in the daily struggle between life and death.
I’d felt such reassurance for the first time when I, a fledgling nurse, was given a copy of the U.S. Army’s Handbook for the Sanitary Troops by a Yank medic I’d met during my first posting during the War. My War, as I always thought of it.
That’s what the Yanks called us—the enlisted medical support—the sanitary troops. After the first week in a field hospital, I wanted to laugh （when I wasn’t crying with my head under a pillow） at the name, but it wasn’t wrong. We were fighting with everything we had, and cleanliness was not the least of our tools.
Nor was it now the least of mine.
The amount of water needed by the average man daily for drinking purposes varies according to the amount of exercise he takes and the temperature of the atmosphere; a fair average is three or four pints in addition to that which he takes in food. On the march the amount is limited by the capacity of the canteen to about one quart, and this quantity should be very carefully husbanded.
A water is said to be potable when it is fit to drink. A potable water is an uncontaminated water; no matter how clear, bright, and sparkling a water may be, it is not potable if it is so situated that it can be fouled by fecal matter, urine, or the drainage from manured lands. There is a very common error that all spring water is pure; many springs, especially those which are not constantly flowing, draw their water from surface sources.