An Irish Doctor in Love and at Sea (35 page)

Fraser grunted then said, “Let's see his belly.”

Sister drew back the bedclothes, took a pair of scissors from her apron pocket, and deftly snipped the adhesive tape that held a bulky dressing in place over the man's upper abdomen. The incision, closed with black silk sutures that ran from the top of the V between the ribs to the umbilicus, was now a dark red scab. Commander Fraser bent his head and sniffed. “Good. No infection.” He palpated the upper abdomen. “That hurt?”

“Not much, sir.”

Of course it bloody well hurt, Fingal thought. Fraser was palpating around a recent incision. It was necessary—one of the first signs of peritonitis was severe tenderness—but the examiner could choose to be gentle. Fraser did not.

The surgeon manoeuvred his stethoscope in his ears and moved the bell over the abdomen, listening intently. “No bowel sounds. Early yet, of course. Keep on the fluid and analgesics as before.” Without a word to the patient, he moved on to the next bed. The VAD left for a moment to get a sister to redress the wound and tuck the patient in.

Fingal bent, touched the man's shoulder, and said, “You're doing very well. We'll have you back to HMS
Victory
in no time.” It was the Portsmouth Dockyard headquarters, where the man would spend the rest of the war—or another shore establishment like it. The navy did not want anyone on seagoing duty with an ulcer that might burst again.

The CPO smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

“Lieutenant O'Reilly.” The commander's voice was hard. Imperative.

Fingal trotted to the next bed. Words from his old senior Phelim Corrigan in Dublin rang in his head. “Never let the patients get the upper hand.” He was sure Phelim would extend his motto to imperious senior surgeons in this case. Fraser may outrank him, but Fingal was not going to be pushed around simply for doing his job. He held up his arm and pointed at the two broad gold rings with the narrow half ring between. “It's lieutenant-commander now, sir.” He heard Sister Blenkinsop's rapid indrawing of breath.

“So it is,” Fraser said. “I'll do my best not to forget in future. Now what about this patient?”

Fingal took the chart and was about to start his presentation when a VAD whispered something to Sister, who said, “Excuse me, Commander Fraser, a leading seaman is in the receiving room. There's been an accident.”

“You go, Lieutenant-Commander,” Fraser said, with emphasis on the “commander.” “I'll finish rounds. Do try to be on time for the service.” He turned his back. “And this man, Sister?”

Fingal, still smarting, left the ward and headed for the receiving room.

It was on the ground floor near the office of the officer commanding, where Fingal had had his first interview with Admiral Creaser. Fingal was greeted by a junior sister. “Thanks for coming, sir. I've got the patient on the examining couch. He's in a fair bit of pain. It's his hand. I've put an instrument trolley beside the table.”

“Let's have a look.” Fingal crossed the linoleum floor, past a desk and chair and a wash-hand basin secured to the grey wall. A man in a two-piece blue work overall sat, bent over, on an examining table. The patient was clutching his bandaged left hand in his right and alternating a low moaning with a string of profanity delivered in a thick Yorkshire accent. He looked up as Fingal approached.

“Good God,” O'Reilly said. “Henson. Whatever's happened to you?”

“Lieutenant O'Reilly?” Henson said. The man's face crumpled and he screwed his eyes tightly shut before opening them and saying, “You've got to help me. Please, sir. If you don't, they'll invalid me out. Please, sir.”

“I'll do my best.” As Fingal spoke, he was taking Henson's pulse. One hundred and ten. Either due to anxiety and pain, or blood loss, or both. Fingal remembered how passionately Henson had told Fingal of his desire to make the navy his life, how proudly he'd told Fingal and Deirdre of his progress on his gunnery course. And he recalled the CPO with the ulcer who'd never go to sea again. Was Henson's dream going to go up in smoke because of his injury? Fingal looked at Henson's damaged hand. The dressing was blood-soaked and oozing. “Can you take his blood pressure, please, Sister?”

She didn't waste words but rolled up Henson's sleeve on his good arm, strapped on a blood pressure cuff, and got on with her job.

“What happened?” Fingal asked, partly out of medical need to know and also to distract Henson from the dressing being removed.

“It's one ten over seventy, sir,” the sister said.

So there was a degree of shock. Fingal ignored what Henson was trying to tell him. “Bring me a tourniquet and then get plasma ready.” There were now two imperatives. Stop the bleeding and replace the fluid loss with plasma.

She handed him a length of rubber tubing and said, “I'll get the plasma drip ready.”

“This'll be tight,” Fingal said as he looped the tubing round the middle of Henson's forearm and tied it tightly with a half hitch. “I'll get a look at your hand now,” Fingal said. “You've lost a lot of blood. I'm sorry I had to interrupt you. Tell me again what happened.”

Henson shook his head. “I did something so fucking stupid I could cry.”

Fingal glanced up from unwrapping the bandage that held the dressing in place. The curse seemed to have run off Sister like water off a duck's back. Naval lower-deck patients were not renowned for purity of speech.

“I were showing a clumsy bloke 'ow to close a breech block on a four point seven dual-purpose gun when I got distracted—”

Fingal dropped the soiled bandage into a pedal bin under the instrument trolley.

“And like the daft bugger I am, I slammed it on me own hand.”

Fingal flinched. He could imagine the shock, the searing pain of several pounds of steel milled to fit so snugly into the breech that not even smoke would escape when the weapon was fired. Henson might as well have stuck his hand under the blade of a guillotine.

“I couldn't bear to look. The gunnery CPO got stuff and put a dressing on it. There was blood everywhere. The clumsy bloke fainted. Daft duck.”

Fingal was working his way through layers of blood-caked Gamgee—cotton wool between two layers of gauze. The last layer was stuck to the wound by clotted blood. He had a choice: rip it off or soak it off.

“The plasma's ready, sir,” Sister said. She approached the table pushing a smaller trolley, above which a bottle of plasma hung from a stainless steel gallows. On the tabletop he saw red rubber tubing with a needle at one end for pushing through the rubber cap of the plasma bottle, and a needle for insertion into a vein. One kidney basin held saline, and brown antiseptic was in a small gallipot. There was a sponge holder, swabs, tourniquet tubing, and a splint accompanied by a roll of two-inch bandage. Several strips of surgical adhesive tape hung from a low railing that surrounded three sides of the trolley's top.

“Right,” said Fingal. “Henson. I'm going to give you some plasma while Sister gets some saline in a bowl, where I want you to put your hurt paw. It'll make it easier to get the dressing off.”

He moved to the sink, washed his hands, and returned.

The sister already had Henson's injured hand in the saline.

“Help Leading Seaman Henson off with his top on his good side, please, Sister.” It would be the very devil to get him undressed once the intravenous drip had been set up.

Off came the top of the boiler suit and a white T-shirt. Fingal smiled when he saw a heart pierced by an arrow and containing the word “Elsie” tattooed on Henson's upper arm. Fingal remembered the petite blonde in the Trafalgar Pub. Enough. Time to get on.

In very short order, Fingal had inserted a wide-bore needle into a vein in the hollow at the front of Henson's elbow, the antecubital fossa, and connected it to the tubing from the plasma bottle. The tubing was strapped to Henson's forearm with adhesive strips and the elbow joint immobilised by the splint held on with the bandage. Bending the joint could force the needle from the vein.

“Right,” he said. “Sister, hold Henson's left forearm steady.”

“I'm afraid this may hurt a bit,” he said as he began as gently as possible to remove the last strip of Gamgee.

Henson whimpered but made no attempt to pull his arm away. The Gamgee hit the pedal bin's bottom and Fingal scrutinised the wreckage. Clotted blood obscured his view. He reloaded the sponge holder, soaked the swab in saline, and cleaned away as much of the clot as possible. As best as he could tell, the breech block had mangled the tip of the ring finger to just below the nail and had sliced through the lower middle joint of the middle finger. Only a shred of skin held it on. “Sister, undo the tourniquet for a couple of minutes.” He held Henson's hand over the kidney dish, which was now practically empty. “Got to get a bit of blood flow into your hand, Henson, for a minute or two.” The cutting off of the blood flow had stopped the man bleeding to death, but depriving the healthy tissues of oxygenated blood for too long would cause gangrene.

“Bloody 'ell … sorry, Sister,” Henson said, “but talk about pins and bleeding needles?”

“It's your nerves waking up,” Fingal said as his nostrils were filled with the coppery smell of the fresh blood now dripping into the kidney dish. “Henson, I'm sorry, but you've lost a bit of one finger, and the top of the middle one is just hanging on. It'll have to go, but it could have been much worse. The most important thing is that your thumb's fine and so are your index and little fingers. You'll have a working hand.”

Henson managed a cross between a grimace and a smile. “That's not so bad, sir. The Andrew kept Lord Nelson on and he'd only got his left arm and one eye. At least it's my left hand what's hurt and I'm right-handed.”

O'Reilly nodded his support, but inwardly he wondered. King George VI's regulation-bound navy of today was a very different one from the less restrictive wooden-walled world of King George III's ships. Henson's fate might hinge on a report from his surgeon or some kind of fitness board. But there was no point worrying the man about that now. “Soon have you right as rain,” Fingal said, and looked at his watch. “Sorry, Henson, it's time for Sister to tighten up your tourniquet, but I'll make it easier for you. We're going to give you morphine as soon as she's stopped the bleeding. Quarter of a grain, please, Sister.”

Henson gasped as the tubing was tightened.

Fingal was gratified to see the bleeding stop.

“I'll get the morphine and then I'll put a dressing on, sir,” Sister said. “Then we'll get him up to the ward.”

“Thank you, and thanks for all your help,” Fingal said. He walked to the desk to fill in an admission slip so the ward staff would know the extent of the man's injuries, that he was being given one unit of plasma, and that he had received one quarter of a grain of morphine. As Fingal sat, he heard through the open window the sweet liquid notes of a lone bugle sounding the “Last Post.” He stood to attention, sorry to have missed the service of remembrance, thinking of the words often said after the lines, “At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.” He said aloud, “‘Lest we forget.'” He pictured the World War I memorial to the left of the main arcade door. Among Haslar's fallen—140 surgeons, 9 QARNNSs, and 6 VADs—were the names of 13 Irish naval surgeons who had made the supreme sacrifice. He thought of Deirdre and how vain had been his promise that he'd “do his best” to return to her. And he marvelled at the waste, the suffering, the lunacy that was war.

 

27

The Ear of Jealousy Heareth All Things

“Morning, Barry,” O'Reilly said. “Making yourself a cuppa? Bite to eat?”

“Not very hungry. Just tea,” Barry mumbled, sitting hunched over at the kitchen table. His fair hair was tousled, he was blinking sleep from his eyes, and his shoulders were slumped beneath a plaid dressing gown over pyjamas. If O'Reilly didn't know better, he'd have guessed the lad had a hangover. But he'd been on call last night. He must be just recently risen. And why shouldn't he have a lie-in? It was Saturday and they'd all been working hard keeping up with Ronald's practice as well as their own.

“It's absolutely true that a watched kettle never boils.” Barry scowled and inclined his head to where one sat on top of the range. “Going shooting?”

A reasonable question. O'Reilly was wearing his Paddy hat, Barbour waterproof jacket over an Aran sweater Kinky had knitted for him years ago, corduroy trousers, and thigh waders. His slung gamebag held his sandwiches, his binoculars, and a couple of bottles of Harp lager. He shook his head and pulled out a chair, sitting opposite Barry. “I'm on my way to meet Lars in Lisbane. He takes part in the annual bird count on Strangford Lough. I'm no expert at that but I'm going down to keep him company, give Arthur a run.”

“At least,” said Barry, staring out the window, “it looks like you're getting a half-decent day for it.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes.

“Bad night?”

Barry nodded. “And I can forget trying to get an early night tonight. I promised to go up to Belfast to see Jack Mills. He's taking Helen Hewitt to a party in the junior doctors' mess, can't get away until eight, so he asked me to run her up.”

It wasn't like Barry to complain about doing a favour for his best friend. “Were you called out last night? I didn't hear the phone.”

“Nah. I got a letter from Sue yesterday.” As if that explained his mood.

“And?”

He sighed and said, “I miss her, Fingal. I really, really do. I never thought I could miss someone so much.”

O'Reilly would have expected a letter to have cheered Barry up, but the lad was clearly down in the mouth. “Aye,” said O'Reilly, thinking of the interminable months that he and Deirdre had been apart while he was on
Warspite
in the Med before she had been able to join him in Gosport. “I know what you mean, but take comfort, lad. The time will pass.”