Page 11 of Caught in Time
“Too bad. You hired me and now you’re stuck with me.”
Their eyes locked, sparking with challenge.
“Fine,” Spencer barked. “But I won’t tolerate another outburst like this, and I will not have you questioning my medical judgment in front of the patients.”
Charlotte just narrowed her eyes. It would be a cold day in hell before she kept quiet about the deplorable conditions of thishospital, but there were other means of getting what she wanted. Spencer Abbott would never know what hit him.
****
Having spent severaldays at the Marshall House Hospital, Charlotte found herself slowly but surely becoming inured to the stench of stale bodies, rotting flesh, and to the sight of gore and pus. She knew that she had no choice but to deal with it. She weaved around the ward sponging, watering, and removing bloodied rags of bandages and soiled dressings until her spine felt it might snap. Time had no meaning, the hours became one long vista of suffering and groans, and yet nothing seemed to help. Men died and kept on dying.
The operating room was where the amputations took place and Charlotte did her best to avoid it, going out of her way to take any other route to reach the freshwater wells.
She tended to a young soldier who lay shivering in his cot. He bled from a small wound in his abdomen, and his face held the cheesy pallor Charlotte recognized on those about to die. She used an old tin spoon to feed him water, but most of it dribbled on his shirt. Gently, she stroked a strand of dirty blond hair from his forehead and smiled as he met her eyes. Suddenly, she heard Spencer’s voice behind her.
“I am about to perform a double amputation, and I need your assistance,” he informed her.
Her heart sank, but she turned from her patient and followed him to the operating room. She quickly saw that the amputation bench held a man whose legs were shredded from ankle to knee. His flesh wore the dark tattoo of deep tissue infection, and he was, Charlotte saw from his uniform, a Captain. Double gold bars on his shoulders had led her to believe this. It was hard to guess his age, for he wore a full beard, but even his rank and breeding failed to conceal the terror in his eyes. Spencer gave terse orders to Charlotte and to the two orderlies helping him.
“Hold that leg, Charlotte, and when I cut keep it level and hold it strongly. I don’t want it dragging on his flesh before it’s clear! And you two, hold him firm while I get this tourniquet on.”
Charlotte moved forward and glanced down at the ruination of the man’s legs. There were no gloves, no surgical masks, nothing to keep the infected blood off her hands. She braced herself then cupped the foot nearest Spencer, holding as firmly as she dared.
Another doctor took his place at the patient’s head, holding a copper funnel. Charlotte watched him pour chloroform into it, and the wounded officer slowly passed out.
It all happened so quickly that afterwards Charlotte had to admire Spencer’s skill. He cut through flesh, sinew and muscle with the aplomb of a master butcher. First, he used a double-edged knife called a Catlin to cut through the skin, pulling back a flap to sew over the stump. Then he applied the slimmer scalpel blade to cut through muscle and sinew. When he finally pulled out the tenaculum and began to hook out the blood vessels to ligate, Charlotte averted her gaze, fighting nausea, focusing instead on the orderly to the left of the patient. He was tall and slim, dressed in a white apron that covered his blue uniform, clearly a Union soldier.
Charlotte’s heart lurched and she closed her eyes as though that might blot out the din of the bone saw. When she opened them again, the other leg had been amputated, and another orderly took the leg to be thrown into a corner for the flies. She forced herself to concentrate on the job at hand, tried to focus her eyes on the chipped edge of the operating table, anywhere but the bleeding stump and putrid leg.
Her hands were slick with the juices of the officer’s infection as the second limb came free from the man’s body. Resisting the urge to wipe her fingers on her apron, she steeled herself to show no disgust or fear.
Oh, God, I want to go home!
The doctor who had administered the chloroform to the patient barked her name.
“Are you with us, pray?”
“Yes,” Charlotte answered automatically.
“Then gather these dressings and take them away!”
Spencer was sewing up the second stump as the officer started to come round. Charlotte, grateful to escape, scooped up the filthy bandages, heedless of how they dripped onto her apron. She turned on her heel without looking back and hurried through the ward to the back of the building to the makeshift laundry where huge pots of water boiled the soiled dressings and sheets. A young lad stirred one of the pots with a stick, and Charlotte smiled at him as she dumped the dressings on the ground. He couldn’t have been more than twelve. She then went to sit on a bench under the shade of an apple tree to contemplate her dire situation.
Charlotte found it unbearable to stomach assisting in amputations that offered little to no pain relief to the patients after the procedure. She could never erase the shrieks of those men and boys as the pile of limbs grew in the corner of the operating room and the blood flowed in freshets from the table.
It took three orderlies to hold the patients down, with her holding the limb to be cut. Most of them fainted with the shock and pain, leaving Charlotte thinking that surely this was purgatory on Earth.
Even Spencer who was performing the amputation as usual, was grim faced and scowling. The patients tried their best to be brave. They swore that they would not move in order to assist the surgeon, but each time they twitched and jerked so much in their agony that the newly severed limb would fly up when released from the final hack of the saw to spray blood onto all around the table.
Each time, Charlotte resolved to do better holding the limb firm but failed when the thrashing became too violent to contain. It was a bloodbath.
That day they performed three amputations and when at last another nurse came to relieve her, Charlotte went down the stairs like a sleepwalker to the apple orchard next to the hospital. She leaned against a tree and sobbed for half an hour. She felt ashamed that everybody seemed stronger than her and more able to cope.
Why is this happening to me? I am a surgeon back home. I should be able to stomach these grisly operations with ease, shouldn’t I?
****
The hour was late whenCharlotte was able to finally return to Annabelle’s townhouse. She ventured from the porch to the backyard of the house to amble leisurely with her thoughts. In truth she was hiding. After she had told Annabelle what had happened that day, the other woman had not so gently lectured her about the need to control her temper and to avoid another outburst like the one Charlotte had described.
