Chapter Forty-Two Marion
forty-two MARION
Marion loved the panic of a hospital emergency room. She loved when people ran to her, bleeding and broken, having no idea what to do. There was no feeling in the world she liked better than being the one who could turn chaos into logic. Pandemonium into efficiency.
But not here. This place seethed with so much turmoil, so much madness, it was like the river where she’d almost drowned. She couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t focus. She watched the orderlies rolling gurneys in or helping the wounded hobble onto a cot, and for the first time in her life, she found herself rattled by the sight of blood. Sure, she was out of practice, but it was more than that. It was the sheer volume of need here. The all-consuming, inescapable tragedy of war.
Her first surgery in Vietnam was a compound femoral fracture. She had done similar procedures in the efficient, sanitary Toronto hospital, but this felt nothing like that. She was assigned to the debriding, but the sheer extent of the damage was shocking. She could not fall back on what she knew would help, because despite this hospital being funded by Canada, they didn’t have what she needed. Once the femur was put back together, they needed to extend the muscles, ensuring they maintained length. At home, they did that by using a pulley system with weights. Here, they used sandbags. And at one point, she had three patients in the same bed, all hooked up to the same sandbags.
Later that first morning, a young man ran in, shouting something at her in Vietnamese. When he saw her confusion, he switched to French. “ Venez vite! Maintenant! ” A nurse, the anaesthetist, and Marion ran outside and found an older man lying unconcious on the ground outside. His head was bruised and bleeding, his blood pressure was elevated, and his right pupil was dilated. But it was the swelling over his right temporal area that demanded attention. Even without an X-ray, she was fairly sure it was a skull fracture with a subdural hematoma. As they rushed him inside, the anaesthetist slid in a nasotracheal tube to help him breathe, then the nurse shaved the side of his head with an old, albeit clean, straight razor. Just in time, the surgeon arrived and cut an incision down to the man’s skull. He drilled into the bone, and they were rewarded with a spurt of dark blood as the area decompressed. The surgery continued for two more hours at least, and at the end the medical team were feeling cautiously optimistic.
“Keep the nursing staff away from the dressings. This is vital,” the surgeon told her. “They will want to change them, but in a case like this, it increases the chance of an infection.”
With the revolving shifts, it was impossible to know which nurse might come next to change the dressings. Marion went to one of the interns who spoke passable English, had him translate a phrase for her, then she wrote it on the patient’s head bandage.
“ Khong thai bang ,” it said. DON ’ T CHANGE THE BANDAGE .
When the obstetrics doctor was busy elsewhere, Marion successfully delivered a baby through caesarean section. Hours later, another labouring woman arrived, her belly sliced apart by shrapnel. When Marion finally brought her baby into the world, the child was dead. The grieving mother passed away shortly after.
There was so much. One after another, patients were rolled into the operating room, barely giving Marion time to change her gloves.
“Say-ow-toy,” she said over and over to the blank, pleading faces around her. Daniel had taught her the phrase. S? ?n th?i. Or sometimes in French. ?a va aller . “It’s going to be okay.”
Marion’s last surgery of the day was on a five-year-old boy, struck in the face by a grenade. Somehow he had kept his eyes, but his jaw had been torn apart, and it took hours to clear enough of the damage to figure out how to rebuild.
When she emerged from the building an hour past the end of her shift, Daniel was waiting for her at the hospital’s exit. She felt his troubled examination as he led the way to the dining hall, and when she almost collapsed from exhaustion, he braced her elbow. He told her to sit, then he brought her food. Afterward, he led her back to their separate apartments, and he sat on the side of her bed when she asked him to stay a little while.
“Daniel,” she whispered, feeling ashamed. “I don’t think I can do this.”
He waited.
“It’s so much more than I imagined. It’s too much.” Tears rushed up, hot and urgent. “The children— How can men blow up children? How can they slaughter pregnant women, leaving dead fetuses behind?” She stared at her hands and watched them shake. The cuffs of her shirt were brown with so many strangers’ dried blood. “I can’t do this. I’m not who I thought I was.”
“Who did you think you were, Marion?” he asked. “Superman? Someone who could fly out here and save everyone? Maybe end the war?”
She looked at him, tears streaming down her face. “I just wanted to help. I never thought—”
“Then you didn’t think at all.” His gaze hardened. “Tell me you didn’t watch the news, but I won’t believe you. You watched hours and weeks and months of American boys humping through the heat, getting blown up. What did you see after that? Did you see any of this?” He held out his hands, palms up. “It’s so convenient at home. We don’t know the soldiers, we don’t know the enemy, and we don’t know any of the children who are being killed. We flip off the TV and go to bed, but we don’t see what happens after.”
She looked away, ashamed. “I didn’t…”
“No, really. Who did you think you were, Marion?”
She covered her face, sobbing. “I’m nobody. I don’t belong here.”
How could she have even contemplated this? She should be in Toronto, drinking wine with Sassy. Hoping some of her patients would come to the community health centre. Maybe one of those would have been Daniel. Maybe he would have come in, smiled at her, and everything would have been all right.
Instead, she was in a war zone, and after only one day, she was defeated.
Daniel took her hand in his, and his thumb slid over her knuckles. She felt the comfort he offered, stirring the butterflies in her stomach. “Wrong again. You are so far from nobody. You’re the bravest woman I know. You did something no one ever thought you’d do. Not even you.”
She searched his expression, wanting so badly to believe him. If she could, maybe she could believe in herself again.
“You came because you knew you could make a difference. Nobody can do what you do. My grandpa used to say there are always bumps in the road, but you keep driving anyway. I’m named after him, you know. I’m Little Danny back home.” He held his other hand against his chest. “Imagine me being called ‘little’ anything.”
She sighed deeply and managed a small smile.
“You can do this, Marion. This was day one. That’s always the hardest. Now you know what you’re up against, it’ll be better. Never easier, but a little bit predictable.”
She snorted. “What about any of this is predictable?”
“You can predict it will be all over the place. Every day different. Every day bringing challenges.”
“I wish that made me feel better, Daniel. You’re trying so hard. But you’re wrong. I’m not made for this. I shouldn’t have come. I can’t even handle the heat. Look at me. I’m disgusting.”
He brought the back of her hand to his lips, stilling her heart. “You’re not disgusting. You’re amazing.” His expression was calm, his breathing steady, like she’d taught him. “I heard people talking. You saved a bunch of lives today. Including a little boy’s.”
She nodded. That was true. Why was it so easy to focus on what went wrong instead of what went right?
“You know what you need?” he asked.
She was afraid to guess.
“You need a shower. And sleep. And my protection.”
The tears came again, but this time from relief. “Yes,” she said weakly. “A shower. Sleep. And you.”
He leaned in and kissed her lightly on the brow. “I’ll see you in the morning, Marion. A brand-new day. You get to live that adventure you wondered about. Not many people are brave enough to try that, you know. Don’t worry. If you falter, I’ll be right there behind you.”