First thing the next morning, I put on an actual skirt, a smart blouse, and low heels and went for a job interview at the Berlin Center for Torture Victims.
BZFO, as the clinic was called, specialized in treating refugee patients from forty countries, mainly Middle Eastern, but there were African patients as well.
The clinic was new and looked immaculate. My interviewer, Dr. Mary Maillet, wore a severe black suit, red combs in her wavy, gray hair, and lime-green-framed glasses, making her look simultaneously warm and tough.
She told me that the staff at BZFO was made up of multidisciplinary doctors and therapists of all kinds. Then she sat back in her swivel chair and grilled me about my training and my experience in South Sudan.
I was describing our 24-7 surgery at Kind Hands when she interrupted me to say, “When can you start?”
“I have the job?”
“We’ll be lucky to have you, Brigid. Welcome to BZFO.”
I started at the clinic the next morning, and I stayed late into the night. My new patients had terrible physical injuries and profound emotional ones. They were all refugees with horrific stories like the ones I’d heard in South Sudan.
A young woman named Amena, just twenty-three, had escaped from war-shredded Syria. Her town had been shelled either by ISIS or Assad, from which side of the conflict, she didn’t know. Her beloved husband and two young boys had been killed in the blast. She had lost an eye, and her neck and hands had been burned. But, still, she had escaped, making a long and arduous journey by foot and boat and train to Berlin.
Amena said to me, “God is great, Dr. Fitzgerald.”
Her faith in the face of appalling tragedy simply brought me to tears.
“You are great, too, Amena. Now, please, cough for me.”
Within the week, I was seeing patients with flu-like symptoms. I had worked with Ebola, HIV, and kala-azar, and now I was tackling MERS in a new infectious-disease quarantine wing at the torture clinic. I was helping desperately sick people, and they needed me. I needed them, too.
And then I got sick myself.
Chapter 49
ONE MINUTE I was tending to a patient.
The next, I had collapsed in her room.
I was helped to a bed, where I hacked and threw up and wheezed for days I couldn’t remember, and I was so weak, I couldn’t sit up. I had feverish sleep in which I felt as though I were drowning. I dreamed of Africa during the flood season and that I was sinking to the muddy floor of the White Nile. I heard my own underwater screams.
I wanted to die.
In conscious moments, I grabbed my chart from the end of the bed, and I read the stark truth. My white blood cells were losing the battle against the disease.
I was going to get my dying wish.
I’d always heard that God works in mysterious ways. Now I was right there at the heart of the mystery. I had survived the plagues of Africa, bullets and near death on the killing field. I’d survived the blade at my neck, only to lose my life to a virus inside a clean German clinic.
I used some of those lucid moments to reflect on what I had done with God’s gift of life, now that I had lived out the extent of it.
Images of my childhood, my school years, the people I’d loved and ones I hadn’t loved well enough, flashed through my mind in random order and vivid color. Although I prayed, I didn’t look for a connection to God.
I just wanted to leave.
I dropped off into a haze of watery memories, and sometime later, I came out of this sweaty dream state with a normal temperature and a great thirst. I knew that I was past the worst of it. I had survived.
I thanked God humbly, passionately, and then I asked Dr. Maillet for a report on the patients in the MERS wing. My wing.
She dragged a chair up to the side of my bed.
“I don’t have great news, Brigid. Half our patients were transferred to Charité.”
She was talking about the largest, most advanced hospital in Berlin. That was good, wasn’t it?
“Why only half our patients?” I asked.
“Fourteen people died. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Brigid. That sweet girl from Syria. Amena. She asked about you before she passed away last night.”
Amena’s death was devastating. I hadn’t known her well, but she was like so many people I had known who had come through Job-like adversity with shining optimism and glowing faith.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Why did it happen?
I broke down in deep sobs, and when Dr. Maillet failed to comfort me, she injected me with a sedative, and I fell into a deep, drug-induced sleep.
I didn’t want to wake up.
It felt to me that God had forsaken me and everyone on earth.
Chapter 50
THE THIRTY of us from the BZFO clinic had gathered at the edge of the pond in Volkspark to say a few words about our patients who had died from MERS.
We all looked how we felt: heartsick, exhausted, and breaking down from frustration because the disease was still taking lives, and nothing had been found that could stop it.
At the same time, other epic tragedies were erupting around the planet: earthquakes where none had been before, and opportunistic disease that swept into ruined cities and killed tens of thousands. Financial collapses had bankrupted countries, induced even more poverty, and swept corporations, along with potential technological and medical advances, off the table. Crazed shooters got away with mass murders in malls and schools, and the genocide in sub-Saharan Africa not only continued but intensified.
Why was all of this happening?
Was God testing humanity? Or was He unwilling to intervene?
When it was my turn to speak at the service, I thought of Amena, that sweet, young widowed mother of two dead children. I pictured her scarred face and empty eye socket, and how she glowed like a neon sign in the dark with her love of God.
I said to my friends and coworkers, “You know that Amena survived what for most would have been soul-crushing tragedy-the loss of her home and entire family. But she rallied, and she was brimming with life and faith.
“I wished I had gotten to know Amena better. I would have loved to have been her friend. She told me that she had spoken with her dead boys since their deaths, and she said, ‘Don’t be sad for me, Dr. Fitzgerald. I will be with them again.’”
I teared up as I searched inside myself for an authentic, hopeful note that would represent Amena’s undiluted faith. Just then, a small bird flew across my line of sight and skimmed the glittering surface of the pond before disappearing into the tree shadows.
I snapped back into the present.
I said, “I am thinking of Amena now. Her husband sits with his arms around her, and her children are in her lap. I see her safely reunited with God.”
Was she with God? Really? Was God real? If so, did He care?
The sun was still high when the service ended.
I was still weak and depressed and thought I would simply walk home to my quirky apartment, write a journal entry about today’s service, and then drop into a dead sleep in the huge bed. I was heading toward Friedenstrasse when a gentleman coming up behind me on the same path called out, “Dr. Fitzgerald, may I give you a ride?”
I recognized Karl Lenz, one of BZFO’s benefactors. I’d seen him at the clinic but was surprised that he seemed to know me. Still, I wasn’t feeling chatty.
“Thanks anyway, Mr. Lenz. It’s a short walk.”
“Please. Call me Karl. Would you mind if I might walk with you?” he said. “I feel pretty awful, and I’m not ready to be alone.”