Dr. Lily Smith sat at her desk in the medical center of the Star of the Seven seas and looked over her paperwork.
As the ships onboard doctor, her job was both demanding in some sense and totally easy on the other. For one thing she was basically a staff of one, some of the crew members where trained in 1st aid and could be pressed into the role of nurses but not really. So she had the health of everyone onboard to worry about which was around 5,000 passengers and a couple hundred crew members. That was the hard part of her job, she was always on call.
The easy part was, that aside from common injuries not many critical emergencies happened on a cruise. Yes, she had to deal with a few heart attacks, some strokes and she had to call a few people’s time of death but that was rare. She didn’t have to worry about gunshot injuries or stabbings for the most part, unlike some of her classmates who now worked at regular land hospitals. In fact the only stabbing she had to deal with was a freak accident when a cook slipped while holding a knife and it flew up and landed point first in his arm. Most of her injuries fell along the lines of sea sickness, sunburns from people too stupid to put sunscreen on and people having allergic reactions because they didn’t tell the chiefs that they where allergic to something. She did have a few broken bones every so often, normally a kid going down one of the many slides in a way they shouldn’t but was about the worse she had to deal with.
The first day of the cruise had been like any other, she did have to deal with some idiot guy who had drank too much at the bar the 1st night and was found passed out. They had to treat it like a possible alcohol poisoning, but he just needed to sleep it off and was likely back at the bar right now.
The second day was when she began to get strange requests and it was a rather busy day. Multiple people, across multiple decks had all reported strange rashes. She had to go see every one of them and they where all the same, red and bumpy but they where always in different spots but almost always on a person’s legs, hips or lower back. She had given out multiple antibiotic creams and told them all to monitor it but everyone said it didn’t hurt so she had filed a report. She didn’t confine them to quarters because it seemed like a typical allergic reaction and doing that was always a last resort. These where customers who had dropped a lot of money on a cruise and to force them to remain in their cabins was something both the captain and corporate had to clear. The captain to his credit was concerned but wanted to give it a day.
“It must be some kind of general reaction to something.” Stated Dr. Lily as she held a cup of coffee in her hands as she felt the ship moving forward in the water. “Likely a general cleaning product, but that department said they haven’t changed anything. So, unless one of the suppliers have changed something….”
That is when the phone rang and Dr. Smith was about to learn what she was really dealing with.