"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.