And once we'd gotten the I.V. bottles hung, the next ones mixed, one round of pain meds given and dressings done on the GI side, there were always the Vietnamese patients. Dang Thi That's neomycin irrigations to her hip needed to be monitored. She was still our most critical Vietnamese patient, but her surgery had been postponed until after the crunch was over. Ahn's surgery, which was a relatively quick and simple debridement, had been left on the roster for Wednesday, which was two days after the casualties started arriving. If the kid didn't get in soon, he was going to rot away.
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."