Dr. Zol Szabo gazes across the Niagara Escarpment, his fingers crossed. Three citizens on ice in the university’s morgue, mad-cow prions riddling their brains — it must be just a cruel coincidence. If not, Zol’s patch of the province’s public-health map is a disaster about to explode onto grocery-store shelves and newspaper headlines. Within a week, infectious-diseases guru Hamish Wakefield — Zol’s eccentric friend and former classmate — confirms more human mad-cow deaths creating a pattern of disease never seen before. A consultant from Toronto, spoiling for a fight, hijacks the investigation and plunges the country into gastronomic chaos. The race to discover the source of the suspiciously aggressive prions tainting the food supply brings Zol face to face with forces darker and more personal than he ever bargained for.
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The Unforgiving Tides is the true story of Dr. Ross Pennie’s two-year posting as a medical volunteer on a remote island in the South Pacific.
He sets off at age 25 with his diploma’s ink barely dry and his heart afire with tales of the South Seas, Captain Cook, Robinson Crusoe, the Bounty. The moment he arrives at Catholic Mission Vunapope in Papua New Guinea, he draws the ire and suspicion of Sister Pirmina, the sharp-toothed nun who rules the hospital: he misinterprets the administration of the Last Rites as a Catholic code for “Do Not Resuscitate” and nearly allows a local hero to die. For the next 2 years, the young Dr. Pennie, re-christened Dokta, struggles as much against his own inadequacies as with the medical crises presented to him.
His treatment of Lillianna, a small child suffering from diarrhea and dehydration, goes horribly wrong. Was the girl poisoned with bush medicine or has he missed something obvious?
He faces amputating a woman’s mangled leg with little more than a hacksaw and the knowledge that the closest he’s ever come to witnessing the procedure is a Hollywood movie.
An earthquake rocks the operating theatre in the middle of delicate surgery. A mysterious epidemic threatens hospital staff. People keep turning up poisoned. A fatal form of childhood malnutrition must be overcome in the face of poverty, ignorance, indifference and tradition.
