The Healer's War (13 page)

Marge had a day off that morning, so as soon as I'd done the rockbottom morning necessities on the GI side, I left the ward to Sergeant Baker and Voorhees and crossed to the Vietnamese side to see how Mal was doing.

Ahn, who had been fairly quiet and tractable for a day or two, was once more in full voice. O.R. should be calling anytime to tell me to give his pre-op, and it didn't look as if ong thing had been done to get him ready for surgery. If he wouldn't cooperate, the very least I expected was to find Mal trying to shush the kid or talk some sense into him.

Instead, she appeared to be engaged in furious gossip with Xinh, both girls frowning and gesturing in the boy's direction.

I held my temper. Mai was highly regarded by Joe, Marge, Baker, and both corpsmen. It had to be more than her pretty face and wet coiffure.

So in my best head-nurse voice I said, "Miss Mal, I'd like to speak to you for a moment, please." Mai ignored that, but both she and Xinh began flapping their hands at me to 'oin them.

"Tell her, Xinh. Tell her what he say," Mal said.

"You know Vietnamee soldier next to babysan, Kitty?"

"Private Dong?"

"I hear him say babysan, I hear him say, 'Babysan, you go with them-' "

She turned to Mai and broke into frustrated Vietnamese.

"Surgery," Mal supplied. "He tell babysan if he go to surgery, they cut off all his arms and legs."

"He did, did he?" I asked, very calmly, under the circumstances. The days of handling big-time crises really had done wonders for my self-control. "Xinh, thank you very much for telling us this. Mai, would you come with me, please? I'd like you to set babysan straight for me and then there are a few choice things I'd like you to convey to Private Dong."

We stood before them. Ahn looked up at me, not with the same fear and hatred he had before, but with disappointment and hopelessness. I wanted to wipe that away, first. "Please tell babysan that when he goes to surgery, Bac si Joe will only work on what is left of his left leg to try to save as much as possible. Later, the doctor will give him a new wooden leg so he can walk again. Tell babysan that Private Dong was not telling him the truth." She shushed Ahn and talked to him for some time, answering his interruptions until his expression changed to one of skepticism and worry. He glanced down at his soiled dressing and up at me and seemed about to cry again.

Then I turned to Dong, who was blowing smoke rings and smirking. I pulled the cigarette from between his fingers and crushed it under my boot. "Mai, please tell Private Dong that I'm very sorry if he thinks we amputated his legs without cause, but that is untrue. Please tell him that if I ever again hear of him frightening this child or any of my other patients with such stories, I'll personally take care of his remaining limbs with a rusty butter knife."

Mal looked a little puzzled at some of the terms, but got into the spirit of the thing and, I think, invented Vietnamese equivalents for the parts of my threat that didn't translate.

Sometime during this discussion, the phone had started ringing. It stopped of its own accord, but shortly thereafter Joe stormed onto the ward, still in bloody green scrub clothes and paper scuffs. "What the hell is going on, Kitty? They've been trying to call to tell you to give Ahn his pre-op for fifteen minutes. I'm going to lose the room if-"

I told him what had been going on. Fortunately, he was the sort of person who, when he demanded an explanation, listened to it. While I was explaining I drew up the pre-op, checked it with him, and gave it to Ahn, who accepted it with surprising readiness. Joe chewed his fingernail while I talked, looked at the little boy, and looked at Dong, who had turned over on his stomach sometime during Mai's lecture. Then kindly Geppetto turned on his heel and jerked a thumb back at Dong.

"Lose the bastard," he said. "Send him to the ARVN hospital or, if that's full, to Province. I don't want to see him again. I'll write the order when I'm through in O.R."

I caught Mai's eye. Her mouth was compressed, with a little quirk at one side, and she nodded once, sharply, with satisfaction. I almost expected her to dust her hands as if she had just finished taking out the garbage.

Rounds on the GI side were no quieter. A second push had come in around 0200 hours, so most of the men had been quiet earlier that morning, still sleeping or sedated. I knew them only by which antibiotics they were getting, and the name on their plastic wrist tags and at the foot of their beds, all of which I double-checked before handing them the pill cup under the little card carrying the same name.

I passed pills to two wan young men who accepted them with gratitude.

The second one had some questions about his cast, followed by a brief chat about the medevac procedure and his telling me he was from Pennsylvania and had I ever been there?

"Hi," I said, all unsuspecting, to the third patient. "How you doing this morning? Need anything?"

"Out of this fu-out of here, that's all," he said.

"I think that can be arranged," I told him. "You'll be going to Japan pretty soon. I see the night nurse gave you a pain shot just before we came on. That holding you?"

He nodded, but didn't look much interested in talking, so I moved on.

"Hey, Lieutenant, I could sure use a pain shot," the guy next to him said. He had his arm in a cast and the whole thing suspended in a sling from an I.V. pole.

I checked his chart. "Looks like you had a shot about two hours ago, too, corporal. It's ordered every four hours."

"But this arm still hurts like shit!"

"I'm sorry. I can give you something in about another hour, but it's dangerous to give you too much too close together."

I checked his cast. There was about a half inch of extra I-oom around the wrist and another half inch above his elbow, so it didn't seem too tight. The color in his fingers was fine, tan, still grimy around the knuckles. His nail beds were pink. A bloody spot had already appeared at the cast's pristine elbow, but that wasn't unusual, unless it got larger. No, clinically everything checked out. Unfortunately, the first couple of days, fractures just plain hurt.

"Oh shit," he said and smacked his head back down on his pillow, jingling the dog tags, love beads, and roach clip around his neck. "I don't even believe this shit. Come to a fuckin' hospital and they can't even give you somethin' for the fuckin' pain, man. Anybody got a fuckin' joint?"

Nobody offered him one, at least in front of me. I probably should have had Voorhees take him out to the Vietnamese tent to get high on the atmosphere. But it was no wonder his pain medication wasn't holding him. Even pot raised people's tolerance to pain meds, so that the same dosages were less effective. I'd had the same problem with civilian patients addicted to their prescription Valium or Librium. I decided to ask Joe about increasing the dosage, at least for the day, but didn't say anything to the patient, in case Joe didn't go for it. No sense in raising false hopes.

Farther down, a red-faced young man still wearing a splint on his left ankle suddenly sat bolt upright. He strained Is neck toward the entrance to the ward, his Adam's apple bouncing up and down, and the veins in his arms stood out so clearly I started imagining how easy they would be to hit with an I.V. needle. "Hey, ma'am," he whispered hoarsely. "Ma'am, I don't want to alarm you or nothin', but I think I just saw a zip go past the doorway."

I almost said, "What? A zip in Vietnam? Surely not!" but remembered in time that the grunt sense of humor was usually dampened considerably by being wounded. So I just told him casually that he probably had, since we had lots of Vietnamese patients and staff members.

,,But this is an American hospital!" he said indignantly. He was as young as they all were, his face deeply sunburned and peeling, with a white line near the hair where his hat or a bandanna might have been. He had frag wounds in both legs as well as the fractured left ankle. When he saw that I wasn't going to rush out and correct what he seemed to think was a terrible oversight, he continued. "Man, I don't want to just lie here with no weapon with damn zips runnin' around. You can't trust 'em. Not any of 'em. The kids will blow you up, the babies are booby-trapped- Hey, ma'am, no offense, but you know what they say about the way to win Vietnam. You take all the friendlies and put 'em in a boat in the middle of the South China Sea, nuke the country, then sink the boat."

Yes, indeed, I had heard that one. Many times. Way too many times. But I ignored it and said, "Well, most of the patients have been here for a while, and we don't let them have weapons either. They're mostly hurt as bad as you are, or worse. And the interpreters have been working here longer than I have, and haven't hurt anybody yet."

But he was still shaking his head as I moved on.

Two beds down, a man was moaning low heretical obscenities that rose in volume as I approached, to, "Oh, why me? Why did this happen to me? Aw, shit. Goddamn, this hurts like a motherfucker."

The two patients between him and me had rolled onto their stomachs with pillows covering their heads.

I checked the noisy one's chart. Crushing injuries to the soft tissue of both legs, it said. Nasty. The crisp smell of antiseptic gauze was overlaid by the tang of old blood and a touch of the sicky-sweet reek of rot. His bandages were soaked with the breakdown fluids from his crushed skin and muscle. Soft-tissue injuries were often more painful than broken bones-and healed more slowly.

"Sounds like you're really hurting," I said, checking his chart, which identified him as PFC Ronald G. Dickens. "You need something?" It had been only two and a half hours, but I was willing to stretch it and estimate a long fifteen minutes to prepare the injection. Fifteen minutes' leeway on the three-to-four-hour limit was usually permissible.

" I sure as hell do. I need you to get your ass over there to your little stash, sweetheart, and get me a fuckin' pain shot before I go through the fuckin' roof. Oh God, oh Gawd."

Nursing is such a rewarding profession. All that gratitude. Restraining myself from strangling him, I drew up the Demerol, but when I swabbed the alcohol wipe on his thigh before administering the injection lie started bellowing in my ear again. "Jesus fucking Christ, woman, you can't give it there. Not in my leg, oh shit-"

"Well, if you want to wait until I get help to roll you over-"

"And move these legs? Lady, are you out of your fuckin' mind?

I'm hurt, you stupid-"

"Hey, man, cool it," the fellow across the aisle told him. "The lady's just trying to help you."

"Fuck you," Dickens said, and while he was flipping my would-be rescuer the bird I shoved in the needle, aspirated, and pushed in the plunger before he said something I really couldn't ignore.

"I'll let that take effect and be around to change your dressing pretty soon." I ducked around to the other side of the next bed to put maximu4n distance between us, and tried to calm myself down. I knew the guy hurt and hurt badly and was probably still shocky. But he still pissed me off. Maybe he wouldn't be so nasty once the Demerol took effect. He probably realized he might lose some or all of both legs with injuries like that and would undoubtedly lose some function-it was one thing to express those feelings, even loudly, and another thing to take it out on me.

My hands shook as I disposed of the needle and syringe at the nurses'

station. Then I took a deep breath and concentrated firmly on the next patient, a Navy corpsman who was lying on his stomach because, in addition to having lost both legs, he had sustained multiple deep lacerations to his buttocks and back. I thought he was sleeping, but he turned his head toward me. "Hi, Lieutenant. Having a nice day?" he asked, grinning. "Don't answer that. Listen, I think it's about time for the heat lamp to my butt. Would you do the honors?"

I pulled back the light sheet that covered his lower half-his upper half, like that of most of the men, was already bare except for dog tags and assorted GI jewelry. His stumps were bandaged, with drainage at the ends, and I made :! note to bring more gauze to reinforce them when I changed the dressings of the charmer in the next bed. The lacerations on his hips were deep and infected, seeping green and smelling to high heaven of pseudomonas, a germ that got into everything. I pulled the silver gooseneck lamp over and cranked his bed down so that the lip of the lamp was high enough above him that it wouldn't burn him. "There you go," I told him.

"Thanks a lot, ma'am."

"Uh-you need anything for pain?"

"I think I'd better hold off. I'm going to need it a lot worse later,"

he said ruefully.

"How-uh-how did you get hurt?" I asked.

"Oh, I was helping out when the compound this bunch came from got hit. I saw this dude get hit out by the perimeter and was trying to drag him in out of range. I screwed up and dragged him across a live grenade. Threw him up in the air and blew the shit out of my legs. I don't remember any of that. I guess the Army medic saved my life, but he couldn't save my legs. They tell me I landed in a nest of concertina wire-that's how I got cut up."

"Yeah? How about the guy you dragged?"

He shrugged. "Nobody's said. I think he just took some frags, but hard tellin'. If you hear anything, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know."

Tony called as I was finishing my charting on the Vietnamese side.

"Keeping busy?" he asked.

"Sure am, thanks to you."

"No problem. Happy to be of service. When can we get together again?"

The red-haired Special Forces type, Heron, flipped a mock salute as he passed the nurses' station on the way to visit Xe. The old man lay

','lke a poor man's skinny Buddha, hands crossed on the concave spot where his belly should have been, eyes closed. They opened when he saw Heron and he actually smiled.

"Uh-I don't know," I told Tony. "Can you come over here after work tomorrow?"

"I doubt it. We're still on alert."

"Well, I'm off Monday next week. We could go to the beach or the club, maybe.........