The Healer's War - Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page 0,3
of all this dissension slackened his lower jaw so that it seemed to drop into a grin.
“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-in-charge 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-and-mighty 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 cc of Phenergan turned itself into 2.5 cc 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