The Healer's War (2 page)

The sweat wasn't just from the heat. It was from fear: fear that this child was going to die and I was going to have to live with it, and with myself. The fear soured in my throat and I leaned forward again and took her hand. It was clammy with sweat. How could I measure intake and output when she was sweating gallons like that, poor baby?

Her bald head was bandaged with a strip of white gauze, like an Indian headband, and her face didn't look like a child's. It looked like death, the high cheekbones jutting through the shiny flesh like carnival apples bleeding through caramel.

Her original problem was a depressed skull fracture. She'd tumbled off a water buffalo, something Vietnamese kids always seemed to be doing. I only wished the water buffalo had sole responsibility for her current condition. But unfortunately for us both, the poor kid had fallen right off that water buffalo into the hands of a numskull nurse, namely, me.

Now I was waiting to see if my carelessness had turned her simple, easily treatable injury into something that was going to kill her or make a zombie out of her.

I forced myself not to brood about how unfair it was, not to worry about what they would do to me if she died, or about what I could have done to prevent it.

Instead I held on to her hand and, in my mind, held on to her spirit, apologizing over and over and begging her to stay. "Tran, come on now, baby, keep it together. You know Kitty didn't mean to hurt you, and she's sorry, honey, she's really sorry. Just come on back. That shit of a doctor will fix your head and your hair will grow back and you can go back to mamasan and papasan and eat that bad old water buffalo, okay?

Aw, hell, sweetheart, I'm so sorry.........

The old man in the next bed, another depressed-skull-fracture case, with bilateral above-the-knee amputations, shifted slightly in bed so that his head lolled toward us. His name was Cao Van Xe, according to the strip of adhesive that had been taped to his wrist. His arrival had caused something of a stir. Some idiot with Special Forces had called a chopper out to a really hot landing zone just to load this one old man, who was probably going to die pretty soon anyway. The pilot had given the redheaded GI who loaded the old man a piece of his mind, but the man had grinned and waved and walked back into the bush. The object of all this dissension slackened his lower jaw so that it seemed to drop into a grin.

"What's with you, papasan? You think I'm as dinky dao as you, huh?"

Maybe it did sound crazy to be carrying on a monologue with first one comatose patient, then another, but in nursing school they taught us that hearing is the last sense to go, the first to kick back in. So I always chattered at my unconscious patients, telling them what I was doing, commenting on what was happening, and musing on life in general, as if talking to myself.

Papasan's breath emerged in a sort of groan, and I turned in the chair and leaned toward his bed, touching his bony hand. "You okay, papasan?"

His other hand fluttered like a bird to his neck and touched what I figured was a holy medal. To my surprise, the hand under mine twisted and caught my fingers for a moment before sliding back to lie flaccid on the sheet.

Well, good. At least somebody was responding. I patted his hand again and turned back, a little more hopefully, to Tran.

No dice. She hadn't stirred. Her breath was inaudible. I held on to her hand with both of mine and concentrated. I had done this before, while trying to hang on to someone who was dying, collecting my strength, and any other strength I could suck from the atmosphere, God, or whatever, building it into a wave and flooding it through my hands into that person, almost as if I could wash her back to me, back to herself. She lay there quietly, and when I pulled my hands away, her small pale ones had red marks from the pressure of my fingers.

George clomped up, large and olive-drab, his walrus mustache drooping damply at the ends. "How's it going?" he asked.

"Not good," I told him. "BP's a little better, I think. It's about time for an encore."

"I'll do it, Lieutenant. You get a cup of coffee, why don't you? I just made some."

"Thanks, but I'll do it."

He shrugged and clomped back to the nurses' station.

As soon as his back was turned I leaned over Tran again, but when I looked into that vacant little face I just lost it. My calm, I'm-incharge professional mask, the one no nurse should be without when on duty, dissolved. I had to pretend I was wiping sweat away again.

Then I repeated my routine: vital signs, neuro checks, and as many prayers as I could fit in between.

The prayers were for Tran, because I didn't know anything else to do, not because I'm this holy, religious person. Like all my family, I've always been a lukewarm, nonchurchgoing, nonspecific Protestant. People like us pray only on ritualized occasions, like funerals, and when there's a really big crisis. It isn't nice to pray for something you want for yourself, according to my upbringing, and God expects you to help yourself most of the time. But this was for Tran, not for me-not mostly. Well, not only me, anyway.

Maybe that was the trouble. Maybe God wasn't listening because my heart was not pure. Every time I squeezed my eyes shut and started mumbling humble apologies for my sin and error I ended up snarling that it wasn't all my fault. Even though I knew damned good and well I was going to have to take the whole rap. Despite the fact that pre-op orders were supposed to be written, pre-op medications and all narcotic medications double-checked and double-signed. But our high-andmighty new neurosurgeon had handed down his commands to our high-and-mighty new college-educated head nurse, the twit, who had demanded that I do it, damn it, didn't I know enough to give a simple pre-op?

I should have. I'd done it often enough. But not pediatric doses, and not on head injuries, not that often. I hadn't been giving meds long on this ward. And I was so mad at their sheer goddamned pompous arrogance that I kept jumbling it up in my head. I was mad a lot in Vietnam. My best mood, in the heat, with the bugs, and the lack of sleep, and these gorked-out patients, was cranky. But that day I had gotten so mad that

.25 ce of Phenergan turned itself into 2.5 ce of Phenergan. And I gave it to Tran.

As soon they came to take Tran to surgery, I got to thinking that that had looked like an awful lot of Phenergan. By then the doctor was on his way off the ward and the head nurse was in a more human frame of mind and I asked her. . . .

Had Tran been anesthetized already, she would have certainly died. The overdose I had already given her, combined with her head injury, was potentially lethal as it was. She was quiet as death when she returned to the ward, and I had been at her bedside ever since, watching for some sign of reprieve for both of us.

I couldn't just blame the doctor and Cindy Lou for the orders. I had to blame myself, too, admit that maybe I was getting rattled, after three long months in what was vulgarly known among staff members as "the vegetable patch." Maybe it was the Army's fault for sending a sweet young thing like me to Nam. But one thing for sure: it wasn't Tran's fault, and she was the one who was going to die. I tried to explain all of that to God to account for the impure static in my prayers.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of distractions that kept me from formulating a really good defense.

"Beaucoup dau!" This time it was bed seven, a fourteen-year-old boy whose Honda motorbike had collided with a tractor-trailer unit. The boy had a broken arm as well as a busted head. Once more George's jungle boots slapped wearily down the concrete floor.

Somewhere in the distance, mortars crumped. Outgoing. I knew the difference now: what was incoming, what was outgoing. After 124 days in country, I was fairly blas'e about anything that wasn't aimed specifically at me, despite the fact that another nurse had been killed by a piece of a projectile just before I arrived in Nam. Mortars bothered me no more than receding thunder, ordinarily.

But, God, it was hot! This had to be the only country in the world that didn't cool off at night. I finished Tran's neuro checks and vital signs again and tried to touch my toes with my fingertips. My uniform was sticking to my skin and my hair stuck out at all angles, I had run my hands through it so much.

Pain boomed through my skull louder than the mortars and probed at the backs of my eyeballs. The odors of the ward were making me faintly nauseous. The smell of disinfectant and an Army bug spray so strong that when I accidentally used it on the telephone it melted the plastic was bad enough.

But the reek of pot drifting in from the Vietnamese visitors' tent, a shelter set up between the neuro side of ward six and the generalsurgery side of ward five for the families of our critical patients, was potent enough to give an elephant a contact high from half a mile away.

At least the disinfectant and the pot smoke covered up the aroma of the scenic beach, which stretched beyond the hospital perimeter, between the barbed wire and the South China Sea. It was off limits to us because it was used as a latrine by the residents of the villages on either side of the compound.

The smells were something everyone complained about a lot. When George had gone on his R&R to Australia, he said he'd felt light-headed getting off the plane and figured out it was because he wasn't used to clean air anymore. He said he had to poke his nose into a urinal for a while until he could adjust to the change in air quality.

My own headache made me wonder about how Tran's head felt, with all that pressure in her brain. By now the bone fragment pressing into her head could have been gently lifted, she could have been recovering.

Since they'd brought her back, I'd replayed the scene in my head hundreds, thousands of times, hearing bits of their snippy put-downs.

Next time they could write down their goddamned orders as they were supposed to, so a person could read them, or give the medicine themselves, and the hell with Army wrist-slapping and nasty pieces of paper with snotty words like "insubordination." Better to go head to head with them than this. At the same time, in the back of my mind an accusing voice wondered if I hadn't overdosed Tran while entertaining some adolescent subconscious desire to "show them"-Chalmers and Cindy Lou-what happened when they didn't listen to me. The idea scared the hell out of me, and I shoved it away. I was a nurse, a helping person, a healer. The whole thing was a mistake. I hadn't realized the difference in dosages. I'd never harm a patient out of spite.

Gutlessness, maybe, being too chicken to challenge orders until I was sure of what I was doing, but that was different, even if the results were the same. Sure it was.

She had to live. She had to. What in the hell could I do to get some response out of that floppy childish body? The hard thing about somebody you've met only after they've nearly been brained is that you don't have any idea what you can promise them to induce them to do what you want. What did this kid like? What was her favorite color, her favorite toy? Did she even have any toys? Was a water buffalo a Vietnamese kid's teddy-bear substitute? How would she look in a pretty dress? Would she get a kick out of wearing a funny hat while her hair grew back? Would her hair have a chance to grow back?

And why in the hell would she listen to me anyway? I tried to concentrate on my prayers, visualizing not some holy heavenly father in a long white beard but other patients I had been close to, people I had comforted as they died. Nice people. I saw their faces as if they were watching over Tran with me. Mr. Lassiter, a kind man with a daughter a year ahead of me in nurses' training. When the doctor told him he had lung cancer, I'd held him in my arms while he cried and tried to get used to the idea. Later, when the cancer bit into his brain and he began doing weird, sometimes obscene things, I led him back to his room and talked to him and soothed him while he talked nonsense, and I remembered who he really was while he acted in ways that would have mortified him if he'd known. Mr. Franklin, an incontinent old man who was in a coma with a high fever all the time I cared for him, but who made me wonder, until he died, where he really was, and was he feeling the pain of the hideous bedsores that ate up skin and fat and muscle.

And the baby born with its insides so scrambled we couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl, but whom I rocked and eventually persuaded its mother to rock before it died. Those people were who I was really asking to help Tran-them and the handful of my own friends and relatives who had died before I came to Nam. I thought about all of those people, visualizing them as a cross between ghosts and angels, relieved to be free of suffering and looking down at us with a sort of benign apterest.

They wouldn't be overly anxious to have anyone, especially a child, join them prematurely. "Do me a favor, folks," I urged them. "Nudge her back this way."

Old Xe stirred, and I realized I'd been babbling aloud. I stood and stretched, my bones creaking louder than the mortars, and leaned over him. He didn't seem comatose now so much as dreaming. The fingers of his right hand still gripped the medal thing to his hairless chest. He mumbled a word and groped toward me with his left hand. I thought again of Mr. Lassiter, who mistook me for his daughter in vaguer moments, and gave papasan my hand to hold. He grasped it with a power that was surprising in someone whose bones looked like a bird's.

Whatever he was dreaming, it must have been intense, because he held on to me as tightly as if it were a matter of life and death that we remain connected. I stayed there as long as I could. It made me feel a little stronger, a little more confident, to provide even such a small measure of comfort. I thought that was what I was doing, at the time.

When I tried to pull away, his hand clenched over mine so tightly his ragged nails bit into my wrist. Well, the beds were on wheels. I tugged them a little closer together and counted Tran's respirations, then checked her pulses and pain reflexes with one hand. The old man refused to relinquish either my hand or his holy medal. The wrinkles of his forehead and between his eyes deepened, as if he was concentrating.