“Oh no. The work they do here is much more involved! Mine was a very simple injury. If you’ll come with me?”
She led the group into a laboratory. After the bustle of the rest of the hospital, it seemed oddly quiet. The walls were lined with cupboards. The only furniture was a table, a chair, and an operating table, from which various restraints dangled.
“This is where we perform some of the more challenging reconstruction surgery.” Nurse Fellowes opened a cupboard, taking out a pile of photographs. She set them out, one by one, on the table. “We’ve been learning as we go along, developing new techniques as the need arises. As you can see, some of these men came to us in a dreadful way.”
“Dreadful,” echoed Emmie. Her tongue felt unnaturally thick in her mouth. She had never, before, been aware of all the different features that went into a face until one looked, until one saw . . .
Nurse Fellowes went on laying out photographs on the table. “We’ve been experimenting, rather successfully, with facial reconstruction. In this case, you can see that the patient’s upper lip and nose were largely destroyed.”
The man didn’t look like a man at all. There were bulbous blobs where his nose and upper lip had been, as if a child had tried to form a mask out of clay and got bored before smoothing out those final two features.
“In our first surgery, we concentrated on restoring his upper lip.” Another photo. Then another. “Over the course of four surgeries and over a year, we were able to send him home like this.”
The man’s face was choppy, as though an artist had laid on paint too thick, but it was recognizably a man’s face again, with a Roman arch of a nose and a discernible upper lip.
“That’s incredible,” said Kate quietly, touching the photograph, carefully, with one finger.
“You do it with skin grafts?” asked Julia, looking at the photos with a professional eye.
“Skin and bone grafts,” said Nurse Fellowes, holding up another photo. Emmie took an inadvertent step back. If the last man had looked like clay, this one was all too clearly blood and bone. His face had a crater in it, a crater stretching from his cheek across his mouth, a gaping hole where the bottom half of his face had been, as though someone had smashed it like a pumpkin. “This was one of our more challenging cases. The man’s cheek was entirely blown away. . . .”
Even in the black-and-white photograph, one could see the layers of muscle and tissue revealed.
How had he lived? How had he survived to come for treatment? How did one scream in pain if one had no mouth left with which to speak?
Miss Cooper made a gurgling noise. Emmie turned, glad for the chance to look away. Her colleague was a delicate shade of green.
Emmie didn’t want to embarrass Miss Cooper by drawing attention to her, so she tried to turn the topic, seizing on a photo that wasn’t like the others. It showed a nurse standing with a soldier on crutches, a dog sprawled in front. “Oh, how adorable! Whose dog is that? Miss Cooper, did you see this darling dog? I can’t tell—is he a border collie?”
“An Airedale,” said Nurse Fellowes. Her dimple deepened as she smiled at the photo. “I can’t think how that photo got in there. It’s a marvelous story. That’s Private Thomas and his dog Snug. Snug dug him out after his trench collapsed. He saved his life. We were all rather fond of Snug. He was such a good dog.”
“What happened to them?” asked Miss Cooper, a bit of color back in her cheeks.
“They went back to the front. Snug too.” The smile was gone; the dimple too. Nurse Fellowes seized on another photo at random. “Look! We have had such success with the most remarkable bone regeneration from mere fragments. This poor chap lost all his teeth and some of his jaw, but you can see, in the progress of these pictures, the process of regrowth. . . . It’s keeping them entirely still that’s the hardest. Dr. Blake has devised the most ingenious variety of splints.”
“Did I hear my name?” A slender man with a long, thin nose and a scrubbing brush of a mustache entered the room. “Ah, the lady doctors.”
“Hello, Joseph,” said Dr. Stringfellow. “It’s an honor to be greeted by the great man himself.”