LITMIR.BIZ

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‘We have to reopen the soldier.’

      The soldier. Harriet shook her head as she stood. He’d looked no more than sixteen and had refused to give Theire his name. What was wrong with the world? Babies fighting wars?

      But that’s what they did. This was the organisation’s mission. It didn’t matter how young or old, male or female, civilian or military, goodie or baddie. If you were injured and needed surgery, the doors were always open. There were no moral or ethical judgments—it was just patch ’em up and ship ’em out.

      ‘I’ll alert the others,’ said Harriet.

      ‘Where’s Theire?’ he asked.

      ‘Making some more calls,’ replied Siobhan as they moved past him to go and set up the theatre.

      ‘I’ll get her to talk to the patient. I’ll also see Ben about evac-ing him out with the liver. See you there in five,’ Gill said.

      Harriet and Siobhan located the team in all their scattered locations, which wasn’t difficult, given their close confines. There wasn’t the infrastructure for a paging system so word of mouth was how it usually worked, except when there were mass casualties arriving. Then a hand-operated siren was used by Dr Kelly Prentice, the on-site medical director, who took the call from comms. It wailed mournfully between the two buildings occupied by MedSurg, spreading its bad news like an involuntary shudder to the furthest reaches of the complex.

      MedSurg had set up in an old whitewashed convent that harked back a couple of hundred years to colonial times. Kelly used this building for the medical side of the mission and across the dirt a long, rickety concrete path connected it to the old orphanage building, which was where the surgical side was housed. Gill’s territory.

      The area had once been a thriving community—now it was just a few buildings in the middle of nowhere on the periphery of a war zone. The buildings had been used until the recent civil unrest as a medical facility. The nearest towns were at least one hundred kilometres in any direction, the nearest hospital at least two hundred and fifty kilometres away.

      The old orphanage now used as the surgical block was a double-storey building with wide, open verandahs that wrapped around the entire building to take advantage of any breeze that might be wafting by. Two downstairs rooms had been converted to operating theatres with basic tables, anaesthetic machines, monitors and overhead lights, and smaller side rooms each housed ancient instrument sterilisers and served as storage rooms.

      Another of the bigger rooms was set up as the HDU/recovery area and there were various smaller rooms used for their triage meetings and as a communal kitchen and lounge area.

      Upstairs were the living quarters, which, although were small, had French-style doors that opened onto the verandahs. Not that it was actually that safe to be sitting out there a lot of the time, but the tantalising luxury was there if anyone had the nerve.

      By the time the rest of the team arrived, Harriet and Siobhan had everything under control. Siobhan was scrubbing up when Gill strode into the theatre. ‘Everything good to go?’ he asked a masked Harriet.

      Gill forgot the urgency for a fleeting moment. Harriet in her mask, her features completely hidden from his gaze, was mystically beautiful. The deep brown depths of her eyes were emphasised tenfold, and he felt like he was falling into a warmed vat of deep rich chocolate and drowning.

      Her luxurious hair was also hidden within the confines of the most unglamorous headwear on the planet, but he still couldn’t disguise his fascination with it. He knew that beneath the almost see-through blue fabric it was up in a ponytail and, despite her complaints about hat hair when she removed it between cases, it always made him forget to breathe.

      ‘Yup.’ Harriet nodded briskly and busied herself with opening the sterile packs, ignoring the brooding presence of her husband. She daren’t look at him. She could feel the intensity of his gaze like he had X-ray vision. What was he thinking? Was he reconsidering his position? Or just trying to visualise her naked? Suddenly the mask felt claustrophobic and she was grateful when he left.

      Siobhan entered a few moments later, her arms held slightly aloft and bent at the elbow, water dripping from them occasionally. She picked up the sterile towel that sat folded on top of the sterile gown that Harriet had opened for her and placed on a stainless-steel trolley.

      Siobhan dried her hands and arms thoroughly on the cloth and then picked up the gown, climbing into it with an efficient sterile technique and turning so Harriet could tie it at the neck. Next she moved to the size-six gloves Harriet had also opened and in a couple of smooth movements had gloved up. Siobhan set about sorting out the tray of instruments on her sterile draped table and she and Harriet conducted a count of the swabs, towels and instruments most likely to be used during the procedure. Harriet scribbled the numbers on the count sheet so they knew how many extra bits and pieces had to be kept track of.

      Then Gill entered the room in the same fashion as Siobhan and after he’d dried his hands he gowned, and Harriet had to get up close to tie his gown for him. She lingered for a moment too long and could tell by the stiffness of his shoulders that he was more than aware of it. He smelt so good and it was hard to believe she would never see him operate again after today.

      The patient came in then, accompanied by Katya and Joan, and it was all hands on deck. Joan and Helmut anaesthetised him and Katya left to scrub in as well. Harriet was the circulating nurse—euphemism for gopher. Anything any of the sterile people needed, she fetched. The three nurses took it in turns, rotating from scrubbing to circulating, and the system worked well.

      Finally everything was ready. The suction was working, the diathermy was in order and an earthing plate had been stuck to the patient’s thigh. The patient was draped and the surgical area prepped with Betadine. Joan signalled she was happy with their patient’s condition and for Gill to commence.

      As he removed the staples he had placed less than twelve hours ago, Harriet placed an Ella Fitzgerald CD in the portable player and switched it to background. It was Gill’s favourite, his grandfather’s influence, and he loved to listen to her dulcet tones as he operated. She knew it helped him relax into the job at hand and, well, she’d suffered worse surgeons’ tastes in her many years as an operating nurse.

      One particular surgeon she had worked for had insisted on listening to arcane, obscure Gregorian chants, and by the time the theatre list had ended, she’d always been at screaming point.

      Gill quickly opened the abdominal wound. ‘Retractor,’ he said, and Siobhan placed it in his hand. He inserted the heavy metal contraption into the wound and turned the cogs, watching as it slowly cranked open, taking the skin and layers of adipose tissue with it, pushing them back to either side to give a clear view of the abdominal cavity.

      ‘OK, folks,’ he said, ‘let’s find us a hole.’

      Gill knew this could take five minutes or two hours. Finding a little tear was sometimes like trying to find a needle in a haystack. He decided to try a short-cut first.

      ‘Saline.’

      Gill tipped the sterile bowl full of warmed sterile saline gently into the abdominal cavity, submerging the bowel, and waited. After a minute a small bubble squirmed to the surface and popped. As he’d suspected, he’d missed something. Now he just had to find it! And hope that one bubble meant only one hole!

      It was probably on a posterior side somewhere. He’d have to start from the top and work his way down. Siobhan used a sucker to remove the fluid and Gill began the painstaking process of checking every centimetre of the intestine. It felt warm in his gloved hands and sort of rippled. It was all gooey and squishy, like a bowl of warm jelly, but looked and felt like a string of sausages.

      He heard Harriet humming to ‘Cry me a River’ and glanced up. She always did that. Even scrubbed, she would hum along to Ella, completely unaware she was doing it. He’d missed that this last year, watching Harriet move around a theatre, humming quietly to herself. Or standing next to him, rubbing shoulders, passing him instruments as she hummed away. He’d had it back for a blissful two months and she was going to snatch

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