Mobile Clinic: Sumner

Sumner is a tiny settlement barely urban enough to qualify as a town. The closest thing they have to a doctor is the preacher's wife Milla, a twig-thin woman nearing the end of middle age. Her hodgepodge of folk remedies, superstition, educated nursing, and common sense serves her community well enough on a day-to-day basis, but she's more aware than anyone of the limits of what she can do.

And when the traveling doctor sets down, she's the first waiting to see him: standing in the dusty square, squinting into the wind of the shuttle's landing with her short grey hair flying about her head and her brown coat whipping about the tops of her boots. There's a sense in the crowd that Milla's got the right to talk to him first, seeing as how it was her who browbeat the town council into calling for his help in the first place.

"We got one pregnancy going bad fast," she says without preamble, "one fellow ain't been able to keep his food down for months, three coughs hangin' around longer'n they should be, one woman with her legs swollen up too bad to walk, and a kid whose mama says there's nothin' wrong with him but he can't get out of bed. Which one d'you want to see first?"