"Hell," Nellie said with vehemence, "there's more of him still working outside than inside. Spleen's ruptured, pancreas sliced, punctured lung, one kidney, most of his liver's minced, guts are scrambled but they're easy. Eyes are okay!" Jessup liked to say something positive.
"We can replace those," Bardie said, sighing heavily. "But he wants out…"
"Shame to lose a guy looks like that. How come you just can't transfer the head?"
Bardie appreciated team support, but Nellie had a ridiculous notion that her superior could do anything. She glowered at Jessup.
"You know the rules about that as well as I do, and even if we could, there hasn't been a whole body in here all day. His head is legally out of bounds." She had been watching the vital-signs monitor now that the pressure suit had been hooked into it, thus saving any unnecessary manipulation of the injured man. Once again, Bardie shook her head in amazement. "He's one tough fella. He should be dead from the trauma of such massive injuries."
"The suit did it. That'll look good in the report." Jessup smiled kindly down at the unconscious man: Bardie was surprised to see the tenderness on the woman's face. Nellie Jessup had developed the necessary tough and callous objectivity essential in triage.
"He's just not giving up without a fight." His BP was low but steady, the heartbeat was weak but working.
"He deserves a chance, doesn't he?" Jessup was eager, her brown eyes imploring Bardie.
"I know I shouldn't listen to you, Nellie…"
"But you're going to!" Nellie Jessup's face radiated approval.
"Let's get to work."
There were twenty teams of highly skilled surgeons and surgical nurses on this theater deck, one of five on the hospital ship Elizabeth Blackwell, though all the teams constantly bitched about being understaffed whenever a flood of wounded arrived from the latest assault on Khalian positions. At the team's disposal were the most advanced, and sometimes experimental, implements and procedures available to martial medicine.
Bardie Makem was serving her compulsory two-year term as a combat surgeon and was going to be very glad indeed when her stint was up in two weeks' time. She'd had enough of battle gore for the rest of her lifetime. Nellie Jessup was on a ten-year contract - if she survived. She had already been wounded twice riding up the MASH courier shuttles.
Now Bardie and Jessup walked their patient to the stripper, a machine programmed to remove anything not flesh, bone, or sinew attached to a body. Its antigrav cushion managed mangled flesh as delicately as a spider weaves a web. Its sensors also examined hard and soft tissue, sending the results to the theater hood; weighed and measured the patient; retested blood, bone, and tissue type; and could color-dye the circulatory system to pinpoint punctures or embolisms. The speed with which the injured were prepared for surgery often made the difference between life, half life, and death. They walked him through the sterilization beams that sanitized surgeon and nurse as well. And on into the surgical unit, where Bardie began hooking up the heart-lung machines and the auxiliary anesthetizer while Nellie slipped a shunt into the relatively undamaged right arm to start the flow of supplements into his bloodstream and to service his bodily fluids. She kept up a flow of vital-sign information until the wrap screens in the theater hood took over. By then the pertinent damage was also visible.
"Not quite as bad as it looked," Bardie remarked, assimilating information and making decisions as to what delicate repair to undertake first. It was her speed in assessment that made her the valuable surgeon she was. She seemed to have an uncanny instinct that had saved many almost irreparable bodies. She slipped her hands into the glove dispenser, for much of her work would involve the highly adhesive glue-gel, or GG. The joke was "Adhere to proper procedures. Stick with the patient, not to him, her, or it."
"Organ replacements?" She raised her voice to activate the theater wrap system.
"Ready," said a disembodied voice. And it was, for the intelligence that managed the organ bank had once been a senior surgeon.
"Red? Got a bad one here. Give me the whole nine yards. O'Hara, R. E. C., spleen, left lung, left kidney, liver, new left shoulder joint, left elbow, wrist, knee, ankle…"
"He belongs down here, not up there," Red answered, but already the chill-chute signaled arrivals, sacks filled with the fluids that maintained the organs. Jessup began the antirejection procedures that would insure that each replacement adapted to the new environment. The catch-as-catch-can procedures of the late-twentieth century were considered barbaric, cruel, and inhumane. But it had taken the science of several species and several horrific space wars to perfect such repair for the humans who fought them.
"He didn't want his head on a plate!" Bardie said.
"What's so special about his head?"
"You're no longer in a position to appreciate it, Red." Bardie shot a glance at O'Hara's classic profile.
Jessup had glued the thin face laceration shut while Bardie replaced the lung - his own heart would manage after the rest they'd give it - so the lung lay flaccid in the chest cavity. Well, this Sleeping Beauty was also Humpty Dumpty, so they'd better put the rest of him back together again. They both worked on the shoulder joint, the arm, and the battered sacrum and remolded the crushed ribs with bone-set gel. Liver and kidney, spleen, pancreas. He didn't need a new gall bladder. Now they both began reassembling the intestines, repaired the rip in the stomach wall, glued the skin back in place across the lacerated abdomen.
"Nicely hung," Jessup remarked all too casually. "Unusual in a tall man."
Bardie merely grunted. It did not do to encourage Jessup's earthiness. She could go on quite irrepressibly, with endless variations on the theme.
"Me, I've already preferred short men." Today Jessup was going to be incorrigible. "BP picking up. Hey, he might make it yet. If one of those ET germs don't get him."
"He might, at that," Bardie said, then began to work on his left leg.
There were many servomechs, robotics, and other computer-assisted surgical machines, but, as every human being was slightly different from any other, even the most sophisticated machine could not duplicate the instinct of a human surgeon. Even the most gifted of the nonhumans didn't quite have the same knack with this species. Machines did what Jessup called the grunt work, but nothing replaced a human on the work at hand.
By the time they had finished putting Roger Elliott Christopher O'Hara back in one glued, stapled, renovated piece, they were both exhausted. The monitor told them in its implacable voice that they were to log off immediately. Their efficiency levels were dropping below permissible levels for surgical procedures. It had taken four intensive hours of flat-out surgical skill and decisions to effect the resurrection, and O'Hara had not been the first patient of the shift for Bardie and Nellie.
An orderly came forward to move O'Hara's gurney from the theater. Bardie and Jessup followed it, one on either side, through the sanitizing green-light bath and out into the broad corridor.
"Officer?" asked the orderly.
"Yup!" Bardie said, the adrenaline leaving her slightly lightheaded. She had to cling to the side of the cart.
"I can do it. Don't you goils trust me?"
Bardie grinned. "No, Naffie, I don't. Not with this one."
Naffie looked peevish because he had taken a very long look at the unconscious O'Hara.
"Oh, have it your own way. You always do. Not that he's any use to anyone for a while! Bay twenty-two, bed four." The two weary women turned to starboard. "Monitor says he's unattached. How can you be sure it's you who can attach him?"