It could only have been a nuclear detonation of some sort. She did not want to believe that, but it was the growing consensus. That would be crazy! How could that happen? The United States wasn’t at war with anyone, and no nuclear reactors were nearby.
But, this theory fit the patient types they were seeing. The injuries came in a small number of categories. They were easily divided up to find doctors and nurses who were the most efficient at that particular type of treatment.
There were patients with severe burn injuries. These were almost always bad.
She would have expected any burn injuries came from the explosion of the actual bomb, if that is what happened out there, but it seemed that wasn’t the case. A patient had told her that structural fires and wild fires had broken out all over town. It was those fires where most people had been injured. Many patients had been trapped underneath things and it took them some time to get out. The time of exposure to either fire, or just intense heat that caused the severity.
One of the blur of people she had treated told her that these fires were everywhere. They were in every neighborhood, office building or shopping mall starting just a few blocks to the west of the hospital. The closer one got to Fort Worth, the more intense the fires became. This was the one and only thing that everyone seemed to agree on.
One patient who had been at the amusement park said that fires had broken out on all of the rides. The patient thought it seemed odd to say, but the actual metal appeared to be on fire. At that park burned people jammed the parking lot trying to get out. To make matters worse, according to multiple patients, the traffic was so bad that there was no hope of fire trucks, or any other type of first responder, getting in. That assumed any were available, there was so much need inside the hospital she could only wonder what things were like outside. So the stories went, people were starting to move away from the area on foot. Some people panicked so badly, as a result of whatever happened, that they just stood there staring into space as the world burned around them.
She was glad that they were allowing nurses to treat more wounds than normal. Doctors were coming in very short supply and were clearly needed elsewhere. The less severe burns were easily treatable by a nurse with ER experience. Soon, those injuries would be left to lesser trained staff members as the nurses were pressed into performing more and more doctor-like activities to save as many people as they could.
There were a few patients coming in with what it took the staff a while to diagnose as radiation sickness. These people were merely being made comfortable. There wasn’t really anything else the hospital staff knew to do for them. They were moved to a back area, and given morphine to make them peaceful in their last hours of life. They were going to die no matter what, it made her want to cry just to think about, but she didn’t know what else could be done. Many of them could be heard praying softly to themselves in their final minutes and hours.
They had very bizarre and grotesque symptoms. Sandy had struggled to find a way to describe it to someone who had asked. The only description she could provide was that they were all in intense pain, their skin looked like it had come from a horror movie set with blisters the size of baseballs, and they a strange yellow puss oozing out that smelled, for lack of a better term, like rotting meat.
Those were the patients that lived for more than an hour. Others who had been closer to the blast, and probably been hit with higher doses of radiation, had it much worse. Their skin was melting off their body leaving a bloody plastic looking structure in its place. Their teeth were falling out from rapidly decaying gums and their bodies were in too much shock to even feel the pain. Some were barely aware of what was going on. One asked if he was still alive or if he was in Hell’s waiting room.
One man had come in, somehow walking under his own power, with his hair missing as his scalp was gone from his head. He was carrying his teeth in one hand that had partially melted away. He was leaking blood and other unidentifiable fluids that slowly dripped onto the once pristine floor. He had a hand written note asking someone to put his teeth back in his destroyed and decayed mouth. According to the note, he wanted to finish his breakfast. He attempted to speak a few times and a noise more like a wounded cat came out. At least it sounded more like that than anything that could be recognized as words from a human. He died shortly after arrival while coughing up blood. He had obviously been in too much shock to know how badly off he was, thankfully. As the man slowly collapsed on the floor the only thing the people around him could think was that at least he would not suffer any longer. Silently Sandra wondered if he was the lucky one.
She couldn’t help but think that these people with radiation sickness looked more like zombies than living people. They all had bloody patches of skin gone from their body, or in the process of sloughing off. They had real trouble speaking, or even walking without looking stiff and zombielike. They tended to not live very long, and the morgue had already surpassed its normal maximum capacity. They had to start using an empty store room to handle the overflow of expired people. One of the maintenance people must have been a saint because he found portable air conditioners and adjusted them to the lowest temperature it would go to. Everyone who placed another body in that room prayed it would be enough to slow down the eventual gas expansion and decay of the radiated and burned human flesh. The smell was already overpowering, and was only going to get worse in that part of the hospital.
Today, normal rules and limits on capacity did not apply, in any part of the hospital. One administrator had told Sandy that they would have to stop people at the door to the ER and not let anyone else in because of the fire code. It was the closest in her adult life she had come to hitting someone. Instead she had heavily sedated the administrator and taken over. She decided that in this ER they would not start turning away people in need, to hell with rules and regulations.
There was a third type of patient that massively outnumbered the rest. These had broken bones. There were so many as a result of falling structures that medical supplies to treat these injuries were already either rapidly disappearing or had run out.
Just as she was thinking about what she could possibly do to help make things more efficient for the broken bone patients one of the younger nurses came up to her. The young woman had tears running down her cheeks and dark circles under her eyes, she was obviously nearing exhaustion, “Sandy, we are running out of splints and are already out of everything we need to make casts. We can’t set any more bones, but so many more keep coming in. What do we do?!?”
“Think for a second, Carrie. Splints and casts are merely devices to immobilize parts of the body. In a very real sense we don’t have to have things designed specifically for that purpose. Just find some long stiff things and medical tape. If we have to we can just use some tree limbs. For smaller fractures, use old magazines from the waiting rooms. Find some old wooden chairs and break those apart. If you can’t find anything, go to the kitchen and get some cooking utensils and use those.
“Hell, if the patients are right, just four blocks over is a ton of scrap metal. We can go cut some the right length. It isn’t ideal, but we need to help these people the best we can. The faster we get these people treated and moved out of this area, the better. I have a feeling this is just the beginning of our day. Take a few minutes and get some water. Once you catch your breath, we can re-evaluate our supplies. If we treat someone, and it becomes necessary, because someone doesn’t heal properly we can always reset bones later, once we get more supplies.”
The younger nurse nodded timidly and went back to work with no intention to stop helping those in pain. She had needed to regain her composure, merely venting to someone helped. Her appearance was marked by the tears that continued to streak down her cheeks following the black smudgy path that they had already formed in her makeup.