Cherry Ames 04 Chief Nurse (7 page)

Trucks and the unit’s two ambulances were pulling up in the glaring sun. Corpsmen unloaded wounded men from the forward islands. Cherry had been hearing occasional, distant gunfire. Here was the result of it.

She went into the Receiving tent to talk to Captain Jonas.

“A few wounded,” he told her, “but mostly fever and dysentery cases from our own three islands. One man hurt when his jeep rolled over. And an airman stricken at high altitude.”

An airman! He must have been landed at the Army Air Forces air base on their island! This was the third mention Cherry had heard of the secret base, the first time when the Intelligence Officer had confidentially told the medical people about it, the second time when the Navy fighter plane was forced down. Did this new
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arrival mean the air base was completely constructed, finished, now? Did it mean that planes would come to Pacific Island 14 now? But Cherry had heard no planes.

She asked Captain Jonas no prying questions, but looked over his records with him. Then she accompanied him down the huge Receiving tent.

Those soldier-patients able to walk went to desks, where Captain Jonas’s assistants took their medical histories. Then they turned over all their belongings—

barracks bags, worn rifles, mud-covered bayonets.

Cherry had to grin when she saw an attendant gingerly accept a hand grenade and give the sick soldier a receipt for it. Behind a flap at the end of the big tent, the soldiers turned in their uniforms and emerged wearing Army hospital pajamas and bathrobes, and their own shoes.

Then Cherry stepped in to send the soldiers to the appropriate wards and to notify the ward nurses of their new admissions.

Next, Cherry saw to the mobile services. It still amazed her to see a repair shop in a truck, a laundry on wheels, and a rolling Army kitchen. This last had been wangled from Australia. The nurses had complained to Cherry that food carried on trays from the regular mess kitchen to the distant wards got cold. But now, with this kitchen on wheels, they could bring piping hot food to every patient. The unit even had a portable X-ray and a portable surgical unit for emergencies. Cherry was very
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proud of all this shiny new equipment and completely fascinated by it. By the time she had talked with the soldier in charge of laundry, arranged to have two stuffed-up ward sinks and an O.R. table repaired, and visited the regular kitchen to order tomorrow’s diets, Cherry wished she were on wheels herself.

“An executive shouldn’t try to do everything herself!” she sighed, as she started out for the wards and her daily rounds. “I ought to assign Ann to work with Captain Jonas, and Bertha would make a fine dietitian, since our old dietitian was kept on in Panama, and even Josie would be reliable as dispensary nurse. But how can I take them off the wards when we’re already short of nurses?” she despaired.

She wished she could talk things over with her old nursing teachers, supervisors and head nurses. Miss Mac or Miss Reamer would know exactly how to help and advise her. She certainly missed these firm, quiet, experienced nurses whom she had loved so much.

On her way to the wards, she groped her way into the darkened X-ray tent. Here films were developed on the spot, for the use of surgeons in the Operating hut. This was a tent within a tent. Major Pierce had received complaints from the surgeons that X-ray was slow and had asked Cherry to “do something about it.” She started by asking the two young men in charge of X-ray how their work was going.

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“There’s something wrong with the machine,” they told her. “Oh, we know we’re slowing up operations! But we can’t help it, Lieutenant Ames—this tube seems to be choked up—we’ve tried to repair it but no luck—” Cherry looked at the big, shiny, metal rods, thick rubber tubing, and camera box, sitting incongruously on the dirt floor. She was stumped. The best she could suggest was, “I’ll send the repair truck over. And I’ll also try to hunt up a soldier who is a mechanic.” Cherry made a note to take care of this and half ran to her next job. She
must
divide up the work—she must have a regular anaesthetist instead of using a ward nurse in O.R.—Just then, she heard a tiny humming above her. Immediately she threw her head back and squinted into the sun. There, high in the brilliant sky, was a plane, looking about as big as a fly. It rapidly crossed their island and proceeded south toward Janeway. Where had it started from?

But there was no time to speculate now. She should have stopped in at the laboratory tent, which overflowed with basins and test tubes and burners. She should have had a look in at the tent drugstore, where hundreds of prescriptions were filled from hundreds of bottles. But there was no time, no time! Cherry scurried on to her daily rounds of the wards.

This was the part Cherry liked best. She missed doing actual nursing, although often enough even the Chief
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Nurse was pressed into bedside service. Mostly she missed having patients of her own. However, she knew most of the patients, and they all certainly knew Cherry!

She was enormously popular.

“Hello, Lieutenant Ames!” thirty-seven of them called out, as she entered the doorway of Mai Lee’s rough Medical Ward.

Cherry grinned and waved and called back to the boys in the beds, “How are you today?” She turned in at the utility room to speak in a low voice to Mai Lee.

Mai Lee, with the help of two corpsmen, was setting up trays for the patients’ noon dinner. It always reassured Cherry to see standard hospital routine going on here in the jungle, with the same order and cleanliness as in a real hospital back home.

“How are those colds? The shock cases? And the gastritis case?” Cherry asked Mai Lee anxiously.

“Pretty fair,” the Chinese-American girl replied.

“Come have a look at the charts. But, Cherry, I’m worried about the boy with the brain fever. When Dr. Willard made his eight-thirty sick call this morning, he said we ought to put that boy on isolation and keep him more quiet—if you can possibly arrange a private room for him.” Mai Lee’s almond eyes pleaded with her.

“Certainly I’ll get him a room,” Cherry said, hastily scrawling this job too in her tiny notebook. “There isn’t
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any such room but we’ll rig one up, that’s all. Don’t ask me how!” She grinned at Mai Lee. “Anything else?”

“I’m not sure I remember exactly how to set-up for that tricky spinal tap,” Mai Lee confessed. “Is this right?” The two girls carefully recited together the set-up and the difficult technique of assisting the doctor in doing the tap.

“Whew, I sure am glad we studied hard while we were in school,” Cherry said. “There’s no one here to tell us these things now!”

“Miss Cher-ry!” called a boy’s voice. “Aren’t you coming in to see us?”

“Sure thing!” and Cherry and Mai Lee went into the ward itself.

Here were the young men who were the whole reason for Cherry’s being at this far end of the world. They lay in the none too comfortable cots, tall, lean, limp, sunburned over their sick pallor, weakly smiling at Cherry and Mai Lee. These bronzed young fighters with the sensitive eyes made special patients from a medical viewpoint. Their irrepressible high spirits and their uncomplaining fortitude made them the most lovable and heroic patients Cherry had ever seen.

Cherry stopped to talk to the blue-eyed boy with the soft Carolina voice.

“How long ’fore I go back and git me some more Japs?” he demanded impatiently.

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Did you kill any Japs?” Cherry asked him.

“Oh, yes.”

“How?”

“Shootin’.”

That was all Carolina would say. But Colorado’s strong plain voice came from the next bed.

“Carolina’s got three medals.”

“Shut yo’ mouth,” said Carolina, flushing a bright embarrassed red. “I never asked for no medals, Lieutenant Ames.”

“Okay, I won’t hold the medals against you,” Cherry teased, and the whole ward smiled with her.

Cherry walked on slowly, down the row of cots, Mai Lee following her. “This is Private John Andrews, our Chief Nurse,” Mai Lee said. “Private Andrews was just admitted with—”

“—with a G.I. haircut,” the soldier said in a faint voice. It was one of the boys’ favorite jokes. “Hello, ma’am. Are
you
the Chief Nurse?” He started to laugh with pleasure but choked and lay back on the pillow.

“Quiet there, soldier,” Cherry murmured, laying a hand on his arm. She knew better than to offer him pity.

He looked up at her and grinned.

The soldiers often told the nurses hair-raising stories of their adventures. They had to get it off their chests to someone. They seldom wrote these things home, for fear of worrying their families, because civilians might
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not understand. But nurses are soldiers, too, and they have their patients’ confidence.

There was the man on Postsurgical who had lost a leg. “Well, at least I’m still here,” he told Cherry. “Believe me, I’m going to get well and get home some day—

because I want to see that boy of mine.” He showed her snapshots of the baby son he had not yet seen. Cherry and his own nurse nursed and encouraged him, and he
was
getting better. He would go this very week to Janeway, where a road had been cleared by now, and thence to the base hospital in San Francisco for therapy that would make him active and self-supporting again.

Then there was the quiet soldier who talked and talked to Cherry, trying to clear his fear-struck mind of the unbelievable things that had happened to him. “It’s a strange feeling to be hit,” he said. “Just a sharp sting, and you don’t pay much attention, for you are so intent on your job nothing else seems to matter. But after-wards——”

Afterwards there was the pain. The soldier had managed to take the sulfa powder out of his kit and sprinkle it into his wound to prevent infection. Then litter-bearers, searching the field, found him and carried him in. After receiving first aid, a small boat had brought him back here to the evacuation hospital. “It’s a good feeling when you’re hurt to know the nurses are near by,” he said. Cherry had nodded and brought him a
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deck of cards and a book to cheer him up. She had asked Vivian to watch this soldier’s state of mind as well as his physical health. This soldier was discharged from the hospital now, cured, and, he said, “eager to return that bullet!”

There was a cheerful attitude on the wards just the same. Some of Cherry’s highly unorthodox but ingen-ious measures gave the soldiers a lot of laughs. She prescribed nail polish for chigger bites, despite the protests of “Sissy!”—and it worked. She gave a sham-ming patient a huge pill which he swore “cured” him—

the pill consisted of nothing but bicarbonate of soda, to the whole ward’s amusement. She ordered fancy foods for soldiers who had no appetites, and they ate out of sheer astonishment. She made a rule that her nurses wear their feminine white uniforms on Sundays and curl their hair and powder their noses, come storms, heat or bombings—and it perked up everybody’s morale.

There was a bully on Josie’s ward whom timid Josie could not handle. The big, husky soldier roared refusal to take medicine and remained sick, apparently a permanent fixture to haunt Josie. He
had
to take that medicine. This day Cherry decided to challenge his sporting instincts. She held the pill between thumb and forefinger, her black eyes dancing but watchful.

“Now look, Private Edwards.” Private Edwards glow-ered at the pill from his pillow. “I’ll toss you for it. If you
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can catch it, you don’t have to take it. If you miss, down your throat it goes!”

The bully grunted. “If
you
miss, you gotta take it.”

“All right!” Cherry shot back, while the ward listened eagerly. She flipped the pill.

The pill shot out of Cherry’s hand in an arc, flew toward Private Edwards who grabbed and missed it, and rolled merrily along the ward floor. It stopped rolling near the door, and settled before a pair of well-polished boots.

Cherry looked at those boots and gasped. Then slowly, very slowly, she raised her eyes until they were level with Colonel Pillsbee’s. “Darn it!” Cherry thought.

“Why can’t he stay in the military area? Why must he inspect us so often?” But the painstaking Commanding Officer made a daily inspection of the hospital, though it was Major Pierce’s job to inspect and then report to Colonel Pillsbee.

“Lieutenant Ames.” His voice was very precise, very dry. “I should like to see you outside.”

“Yes, sir. Just as soon as I give Private Edwards his pill,” Cherry said firmly. She took another pill from the bottle. The bully’s mouth was already open in surprise, and the pill went down before he could protest.

Cherry followed the Commanding Officer into the hot, steaming outdoors. But he did not say a word. With his birdlike steps, he started off for the yard, Cherry
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marching forlornly at his heels. At Medical Headquarters tent, he went in and motioned Cherry to Major Pierce’s desk. The three of them sat down together.

“Major Pierce, it is high time we discussed Lieutenant Ames’s unseemly conduct,” the Commanding Officer started. With the tips of his fingers poised on the desk, Colonel Pillsbee primly outlined the pill incident.

Major Pierce’s lips twitched, and he avoided looking directly at Cherry. “The recalcitrant patient took the medicine, though,” the unit director pointed out.

Colonel Pillsbee waved a limp hand. “That is beside the point. Lieutenant Ames is—er—almost too popular with the patients. I also do not understand why the nurses must wear white dresses on Sunday. It increases the laundry.”

“Very well, Colonel,” Major Pierce said, poker face.