CHAPTER 3

The show ended and so did the day and night. Another morning, another ambulance ride, another airport, and into another C47 transport I went. I calculated by that time that the United States Army was running out of litter bearers. The boys who were doing the loading looked tired. Their carrying me on and off this plane didn’t help their morale any as I weighed about one hundred and ninety pounds. Before they could rid themselves of me I managed to give them extra work, for while in the air I began to nauseate. I tried to squelch this ugly desire by drinking cold water, but didn’t accomplish much more than to help fill the paper bag with which the medics were carrying away the emeses. Happy we all were when we finally landed near the next transit hospital in England. A quick skip and hop by ambulance, and once again I was a hospital patient.
At that point I was certain that I could lie back and relax, for at long last I was in Merry England. Relax I did for an hour or so when I found a million things to complain about. Trouble was they were all about me. Someone was beating my head; another nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand were stomping on my chest. Occasionally one or two would sneak off to wrap his fingers around my throat in an attempt to choke me to death. I wanted to yell, and yell, and yell I did.
In came the “Marines” (dressed in Army uniforms, of course), and I was given my first taste of a process called aspiration. I watched them closely as they stuck a huge needle into my chest between my ribs. The needle naturally was hooked into a syringe, and with this combination the doctors drew out a large quantity of pus. When this big (?} operation was over I lay back to relax once again. “Hell,” I mused to myself, “my chest troubles are cured.”
According to the Gregorian calendar it wasn’t quite spring that day when I was removed from that temporary hospital to a permanent station. I can’t recall the names of any poems that might have been written about England in the springtime, but had I had a pencil and paper the cool clear air rejuvenating my lungs would have made me write one.
The Army had a general hospital in Salisbury, England, and there I soon found myself Suddenly the environment seemed to change to one that was more like a glue factory. The joint was jumping beneath the tyrannical rule of a Sergeant who was positive he was God. Under his supervision I was double timed into bed. Five minutes later he was back with a tray full of food and ordered me to eat its contents. By this time the fever, though I wasn’t fully aware of it, was beginning to affect me. The radio by the next bed sounded like Gabriel’s trumpet, and the Sergeant’s voice resonated as if it were coming through its amplifier. I replied, “Leave me alone; I’m not hungry.” He repeated his order. Realizing that my salvation called for rank I yelled for the nurse. She was an experienced Florence Nightingale, for she quickly went for a thermometer, blood pressure machine, and other gadgets needed to make a basic examination. This time it was she who shouted al the orders as she sent my tormentor off to find the doctor.
Repeating her tests the doctor gave instructions for my immediate removal to the “shock ward” (a term used in some hospitals for the ward in which the critically ill and post-operative cases are kept). I’m positive that there was a look of frustration in that Sergeant’s eye as he carried me to the “shock ward” for he never did have his chance to ram that food down my throat. By the time I reached my new bed the aches and pains started to double. I apologetically asked the aide to be careful; saying, “I think that there is something wrong with my back. When you are young; you are ignorant, and ignorance is bliss. At that stage of the game I was still blissfully ignorant.
Before I had a chance to memorize the nurses’ names I was rushed over to the operating room for what was a routine operation given to paraplegics, and for my first lesson in surgery. The operation was given while I was conscious and lying on my back. Though my vision was supposed to be blocked by a face shield I was able to follow everything step by step from the View afforded to me by the reflectors that made up an integral part of the overhead lighting system. The doctor who was performing the surgery gave to his assistant an oral blow by blow description of what he was doing. I’ll admit that at first I didn’t understand ninety-nine percent of the terms he was using, but whether I did or not didn’t matter, for I was on my way to qualify for a first class degree in “quackery”.
There was a standard rule in the European Theater of Operations that all paraplegics were to have super-pubic catheters inserted into their bladders as a safety precaution before being transported home. In the short time that I was on the table I had witnessed my own super-pubic operation performed. It consisted of the surgeon’s cutting directly into my bladder and then inserting a catheter (rubber tube) into it.
The aides and doctors must have belonged to many unions, for when I was returned to the “shock ward” I found myself being hooked to all types of hosing, plumbing, and bottles of fluids, the net result of which led to my super-pubic catheter, and then to my bladder. The answer to my “Why this?” was, “This is to keep your bladder irrigated and distended so that it does not shrink.”
They could pump water into me from top to bottom, but somehow I could not build up an appetite. The Army’s favorite cure for that situation is whiskey, and whiskey its doctors prescribed. Three shots a day; one before each meal. Now ordinarily this to a GI in a country full of shortages should have been a good deal even a bonanza except that I don’t particularly care for whiskey, or for the way it affects me. Frankly; I don’t think that even a sot would enjoy being awakened at five forty-five every morning, and handed an ounce of dear old “spirits fermenti” The “Double A” won’t believe this, but when no one was around most of it went onto the floor.
It didn’t take long to discover what was holding back my yen for food as I found myself coughing and choking once again. In came the old bottle of blood, intravenous fluids, and an oxygen mask. The combination was a magnificent flop, and the next morning I was back on a litter headed for the operating room. Someone must have warned them that I was studying medicine at their expense, for this time I found myself face down on the table. I should make a notation here that before all my operations I received an anesthetic; this time it was local. Feeling no pain as they hacked away at my carcass I had to find a way to amuse myself and while away the boredom. Looking around the room I spotted some X-ray films that had been hung on the window with the daylight permeating them so that they could be studied. These were great curiosities to me as they were pictures of someone’s chest, and they all had extremely large light blotches in them.
To add to my interest someone had placed a suction machine on an adjacent table. The bottle section of the machine seemed to be filling itself with some butterscotch type of fluid until finally toward the end of my surgery it was filled exactly to the quart line. Now at that point I began to ponder as to what the pictures and bottles meant. Surely there was no use for butterscotch in an operating room, and whoever heard of a quart of pus. The pictures too added to my confusion, for what I knew of photography said that a light area on a negative meant a dark area on the subject. I concluded that the chap whose pictures were on the window must have been hit in the chest by a large piece of shrapnel. After all who could possibly have so much pus inside of him. It’s amazing what some people can live through.
It didn’t take but a few hours for the doctors to finish when I found myself back on the ward with a tube that was going from the inside of my chest to the inside of an airtight bottle that had been filled with water and placed on the floor. The explanation for this “closed drainage” was to protect my surgery from any air entering the wound since my right lung had been collapsed to rest it.
The GI in the bed next to mine had collected his share of German machine gun bullets. We were both; to be modest about it; on the “critical list”. We never had any dislikes toward each other, in fact we got along rather well; excepting for the days when we saw them bringing transfusions onto the ward. He would wish them on me, and I would in turn wish them on him. The joke was usually on both of us, for ninety percent of the time we were both scheduled for a pint (blood that is).
We weren’t carrying on our mental feud for too long when they took him to the pirating room to amputate his remaining leg. It was an emergency measure, but too late; he died the next day gangrene had reached his vital organs.