CODE
BLUE
April 2013
MS Explorer
Pacific Ocean
“Attention
all guest. Attention all guest.” The voice over the PA is calm and clear.
“Code blue in the dining room. Code blue
in the dining room.” And the message stopped all of us in our tracks. It sent a
shiver down my spine. A few minutes
later, the alert signal is sounded again.
“Would the ship’s doctor please report to the dining room? Would the ship’s doctor please report to the
dining room?” And the silence that
followed was deafening. And I sit back
and wonder how much critical time has elapsed since the passenger
collapsed. And where the hell is the
doctor?
I wait
to go to dinner because I don’t think another spectator is needed in the dining
room right now. So maybe it’s a half
hour before I make my way up there.
There is no indication of a crisis.
But I see and hear two crew members frantically searching the entire
boat, looking for the ship’s doctor. He
is nowhere to be found.
“Where
do you think he is”, asked the officer to his crew member. His tone indicated to me that he was worried.
“I
don’t know. Do you think we could have left his at port? We don’t have him checked out but where is
he.” They quietly peek in and out of every door.
That
news sent a little panic through me.
What if we did leave the doctor behind?
Would we ever see him again? And
what if we have an emergency within the next two days at sea. Who will take care of us?
The
next day, I learned that the doctor was out on the observation deck, watching
for whales when the code blue alert was announced. Apparently the PA system does not go out to
the front of the boat. So the crew had
an emergency meeting and came up with Plan B for the next emergency which incidentally
was this afternoon. They didn’t have to
call for the doctor this time so their new plan must have worked.
