Cherry Ames 09 Cruise Nurse (5 page)

The steward, a heavy-browed, stoop-shouldered man, was grumbling: “Come on, miss! I’m a busy man, can’t stand here all day while you daydream. I declare, you women’s crew are more trouble than the passengers. Seems to me you could carry your own bag. Look healthy enough.”

Cherry’s red cheeks fl amed. “Of course I can carry my own bag, Waidler,” she said rather curtly. Then controlling her temper fl are-up, she said meekly, “I hate to bother you, but I’m afraid I’d get lost trying to fi nd the way to my cabin and sick bay. And Dr. Monroe wants me there in a hurry.”

“Okay, okay,” Waidler growled, starting off at a fast trot.

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CHERRY

AMES,

CRUISE

NURSE

Cherry stumbled after him, depressed by his rudeness. If only she had had an hour or so to get adjusted before being called to assist at an operation!

Why did the steward have to be so disagreeable?

She followed him down the long corridor on B deck and noticed that the ship had nothing but outside staterooms. The wide corridor dwindled into a narrow passageway with small cabins on either side. “Women’s crew quarters,” Waidler said brusquely. He produced a bunch of keys and opened a door leading into a win-dowless, nine-by-twelve room.

“Why, there’s not even a porthole,” Cherry thought, momentarily disappointed. “I’ll suffocate.” Then she remembered that the
Julita
was air-conditioned. The cabin, though tiny, was attractively furnished. There was a bright-fl owered chintz spread on the comfortable-looking maple bed, with a matching slip cover on the big easy chair. On one side of the room was a small maple desk with a straight-back chair; on the other, she saw a dressing table and a mirrored door opening into a small but compact closet.

Cherry had time for only a brief glimpse of her cabin. Waidler set down her suitcase just inside the door, handed her a key, and started off again.

“First I’ll show you Doc’s suite,” he muttered gruffl y.

“Bedroom, offi ce, and the dispensary. Your offi ce opens into it. On the starboard side, after section of B deck.

Sick bay is right below. Starboard side, after section, C deck,” he fi nished in the supercilious tone of one speaking to a very stupid child. “Do you think you can fi nd your way around now?”

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Cherry’s mind reeled, but she said with forced cheerfulness, “Oh, yes, thank you very much, Waidler.”

“Don’t thank me,” Waidler retorted sourly. “That’s what I get paid for. Although some people think they cause me enough trouble so it’s worth a dime tip anyway.”

Cherry went icy cold with embarrassment and inner confusion. She had taken it for granted that since they were both employees he would have been insulted if she had offered a tip. After all, that type of thing worked both ways. If he became ill, she would nurse him faithfully without expecting a gratuity. That was her job, just as the few begrudged minutes he had spent with her were his.

She fumbled in her change purse and produced a quarter. He accepted it expressionlessly and left her outside the doctor’s suite without a word.

Cherry hurried back down the corridor to her cabin.

Hastily, she changed into uniform, white stockings, and rubber-soled white shoes.

“Oh, dear,” she thought, locking the door behind her, “I hope the other employees aren’t going to be as uncooperative as Waidler.”

Then, remembering her fi rst pleasant impression of the young ship’s surgeon, she cheered up. The important thing was that she and Dr. Monroe should make a good team. According to what Miss Henry had told her in the medical offi ces on the pier, she would have very little to do with the rest of the crew. And none of the passengers would even know of her existence unless one of them became ill.

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CHERRY

AMES,

CRUISE

NURSE

And then, hurrying along the corridor, she banged right into one of the passengers. A stateroom door was suddenly thrust open and out popped a slim young girl, right in Cherry’s path. They collided for one breathless moment, and then both of them laughed, apologizing:

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“It was my fault,” Cherry insisted tactfully. “I’m in a frightful hurry to help with an operation.” The girl, who looked about sixteen or seventeen, had thick golden-blond braids wound around her head.

Cherry noted briefl y that her huge hazel eyes showed signs of recent weeping. The reddened eyes grew even wider with respect and awe as she stared at Cherry’s crisply starched uniform.

“Oh, you’re the ship’s nurse,” she breathed. “How wonderful! It must be marvelous to have a career.”

“It is wonderful.” Cherry smiled. “I love my profession.”

“My name’s Jan,” the tall, slim girl blurted out. “Jan Paulding. I want to be an artist, but my mother—” A querulous voice from inside the stateroom interrupted: “Jan.
Jan!
Please close that door. I feel a draft.”

Cherry gave Jan a friendly wave and hurried down the linoleum-covered stairs to C deck. She found sick bay without any trouble at all. It contained two wards, one for men and one for women, with upper and lower bunks in each ward.

“Why, it’s a miniature hospital,” Cherry thought with an approving glance at the white-tiled walls, the
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spotless sink, the gleaming instruments that lined the walls of the tiny instrument room. In the center of the operating room, lying on a long table under a powerful lamp, was the patient, his face white under a spatter-ing of freckles. He looked like a drowsy-eyed boy and he smiled cheerfully up at Cherry as she checked his temperature, pulse, and respiration. The purser, who Cherry guessed would act as “scrub nurse” during the emergency operation, was already in coveralls, cap, mask, and gloves.

With a friendly nod he introduced himself as

“Ziggy.” Before she began to scrub, Ziegler handed her a cap and mask. Cherry carefully adjusted the strings on the cap so that the fl ap completely covered her dark curls. Then she turned to the sink as she pulled the mask up over her mouth and nose. She waited while Ziggy adjusted the little hourglass above the sink. “When all the sand shifts from the top to the bottom,” he told her, “you’ll know you’ve scrubbed for at least twelve minutes.”

Halfway through, the ship rolled, and Cherry, who had not yet got her sea legs, lost her balance for a second. One of her fi ngers brushed against the side of the sink.

With a shrug, Ziegler adjusted the hourglass again.

“Don’t mind that, Miss Cherry,” he said kindly. “We all make slips.”

Cherry, as she started to scrub all over again, decided that there
was
a difference between operating on a deck and operating on a nice, steady fl oor!

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CHERRY

AMES,

CRUISE

NURSE

And it was very generous of a seasoned sailor like the purser not to have lost patience with a landlubber nurse.

Once scrubbed, Ziggy helped her into a sterile gown and gloves, being careful not to contaminate them. Ziegler then unpinned the big surgical bundle. Deftly avoid-ing contact with the inside of the bundle, he turned it upside down and dumped the sterile contents on the sterile O.R. tray.

Using the big forceps that always reminded Cherry of ice tongs, she set up the O.R. equipment: Sheets, towels, swabs, gauze bandages, vaseline, solutions—

she did not yet even touch her gloved hands to the can of sterile powder with which she would later dust the interior of the surgeon’s gloves.

As she worked, Ziegler said, “Bill, that’s the patient, has already had his Ether. He’ll be asleep in a minute.”

Cherry knew about Ether, the wonderful anesthetic.

But she wondered about the purser who seemed to know almost as much as an intern. She asked him point-blank:

“What are you anyway, Mr. Ziegler? A combination purser and pharmacist’s mate?”

He grinned. “Call me Ziggy, Miss Cherry. Everybody does. I’ve been with this line since I was a kid like Bill. And I’m ex-Merchant Marine. Went to the pharmacist’s mate school during the war. Had eighteen months of what you R.N.’s would probably call nothing but elementary fi rst aid training. I’ve had lots of
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practice since school, though. Assisted at all sorts of emergency operations at sea.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Most of the time there wasn’t anybody else
but
me to help the surgeon. You pick up a lot of know-how when you have to.”

“You certainly do,” Cherry agreed, remembering her own experiences as an Army nurse. She liked this ex-merchant seaman. He was small and compactly built, with an ageless but battered face which made her guess that he might well have been a boxer at one time or another.

Now to prepare the wound.

Bill was completely anesthetized and Cherry had just fi nished the eighth washing when Dr. Monroe came into the operating room. He slipped on his cap and mask, and as he scrubbed up said succinctly:

“X ray showed a compound fracture of the humerus, noncomminuted, not impacted.” Dr. Monroe added:

“If it had happened a few minutes earlier we would have put the boy ashore.”

Cherry knew that the complicated-sounding medical phrases simply meant that the operation would be
un-
complicated. The surgeon would not have to probe for fragments of broken bone in the upper part of Bill’s arm. The bone would be set and the wound sutured with very little risk of infection.

Cherry was glad of that. Bill would, of course, wear a cast for many weeks, but he looked like the kind of a boy who would manage very well with his right arm in a sling.

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CHERRY

AMES,

CRUISE

NURSE

She draped the patient in sterile sheets and arranged sterile towels around the wound. Dr. Monroe held out his arms. Cherry helped him into his gown and slipped rubber gloves on his hands. Ziggy, standing behind the surgeon, tied the strings that held his gown in place.

It was routine after that: the debridement—cutting away dead tissue, reducing the fracture, and suturing the wound. Cherry’s hands were steady and she anticipated every one of Dr. Monroe’s quiet, staccato orders:

“Scalpel . . . forceps . . . sponge . . . suture . . . penicillin and sulfa solution . . . vaseline gauze . . .” At last it was over and Bill’s arm was in a cast.

Cherry took a deep breath of the warm, soapy, sweet air in the tiny room. Had she made good? Did Dr. M onroe now feel as she did that they were a good team?

His gray eyes smiled at her above the mask. “Thanks, Miss Ames. It’s a pleasure to work with someone who really is effi cient.”

Then he was gone. A minute or so later a redheaded young man in a short, white coat came into sick bay.

“Rick, the emergency orderly, reporting, ma’am.” He grinned at Cherry. “Doc says I’m to sit with Bill for the rest of the day.”

Cherry hastily rubbed away the frown that creased her forehead and forced her lips into a smile of greeting.

But she didn’t like it at all. Was she to leave the patient, stiil under anesthesia, to the care of a mere boy?

“Take over, Rick, from here on in,” Ziggy said. “Miss Cherry and I have work to do. But fi rst help me get the patient into bed.”

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Cherry watched them worriedly, but relaxed as she saw that they lifted Bill from the operating table with effi cient gentleness, and. settled him comfortably in a lower bunk. Cherry took the patient’s pulse and saw that he was breathing normally. Rick drew up a chair to the side of the bunk and sat down. Unconcernedly, he produced a comic book from an inside pocket of his jacket.

“Don’t worry about me and Bill, Miss Cherry,” he said. “We’re buddies. If he gets to thrashing around I’ll read to him. Or conk him over the head,” he fi nished with a mischievous grin.

So Cherry left them together, reluctantly, because they both seemed so very young. Together she and Ziggy cleaned up O.R., the purser chatting conversa-tionally all the while.

“Nice guy, Doc. Never loses his temper when a guy makes a mistake. Dropped a thermometer last trip and he didn’t say a word. Guess he was almost as nervous as I was. We all knew we were going to lose that pulmonary thrombosis case. What can you do when a guy gets a blood clot in his lungs? And we had to think of the other passengers. A death on a pleasure cruise isn’t what they paid out their money for. Doc and I didn’t think the old fellow would last until we docked at Willemstad. But he did. Had an iron constitution, I guess, for all that he must have been way past seventy.”

Cherry worked swiftly and deftly, listening with only half of her mind. She hoped they wouldn’t have another tragic case this trip. But lightning didn’t strike twice at the same place. Or did it?

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CHERRY

AMES,

CRUISE

NURSE

“Like all physicians, Dr. Monroe hates to lose a case,” she said to Ziggy. “What was the old gentleman like?”

“My guess,” the purser said as he wheeled away the instrument table and tray, “is that he had spent a lot of time at sea, during his youth, and not too long ago either. Had that weather-beaten, seafaring look. A rough diamond but a nice character, although peculiar.

Doc and I liked him, but Waidler, the steward assigned to his cabin, couldn’t get on with him at all.” Laughter bubbled up to Cherry’s red lips. “You’d have to be a saint to get along with Waidler, I imagine.”

“That you would,” the purser agreed emphatically.

“Personally, it’s all I can do to keep a civil tongue in my head when he’s in one of his moods. But for all his fi ts of bad temper, he’s a good employee and has been with the line as long as I have. Knows the ropes better than any other member of the crew. Effi cient as all get out. But even
he
slips up every now and then. Like at Willemstad last trip—” Ziggy suddenly clamped his mouth shut.

Cherry wondered what the rest of the sentence might have been. In what way had the effi cient Waidler slipped up? Mildly curious, she would have enjoyed hearing how the disagreeable steward had got himself into some sort of scrape. But Ziggy adroitly changed the subject.