4. Sarah
4. Sarah
‘Incoming in five!’
It was Jenni, the head nurse.
‘We’re on, pet,’ she said, yanking a plastic apron over her head and tying the strings expertly behind her back.
A look passed between us as we listened to Colonel Blackstone, the chief surgeon, relay the news.
‘It seems that one of the patrol vehicles drove over an IED,’ he announced solemnly.
A shudder travelled through me. Danny’s patrol had left the compound an hour earlier. Cherub – ‘Jenni’s Cherub’, as I thought of him now – was with him in the same vehicle. So were Sarge, Squadron, Jobbo, Fridge and Carl.
The radio rasped again. A second vehicle had also come under attack. Three more severely wounded casualties were on their way.
Dear God, don’t let Danny’s patrol be one of the ones that was hit.
Doctors rushed past me, their blue surgical gowns hastily pulled on over their camouflage uniforms. Two headed straight for theatre, while another gave orders to the X-ray team.
‘Bloods,’ yelled Jenni.
‘On it,’ I said, making my way to the fridge door. Outside, I heard the sound of a helicopter.
Less than a minute later, the wounded were being wheeled in. A crazy, electric energy took over, as it always did when traumas were arriving. Soldiers were triaged in seconds, clothes and boots cut away and dropped unceremoniously into plastic bags to be incinerated later.
Someone’s boots. Someone’s uniform. Someone’s life.
‘He’s gone,’ I heard the chief surgeon say, pulling a sheet over the blond-haired patient on the first trolley.
‘Blood pressure a hundred and forty over forty-six,’ Jenni called out, frantically working on the second patient.
Steeling myself not to think about the sheet-covered corpse, I joined the colonel at the side of the third casualty. Before he even had time to ask, I reached for the dose of adrenaline and handed it to him.
I watched as he pushed it into the patient, the magic fluid that would keep the soldier’s heart pumping. I scanned the lad’s heart rate, his blood pressure and blood oxygen level. It wasn’t until I moved to check his temperature that I realized he was awake. His eyes scanned my face urgently. Another desperate stranger, just a boy, a long way from home, searching for reassurance. My heart contracted.
‘Hey,’ I said, pressing my gloved palm gently on his forehead. ‘It’s okay. You’re in the hospital. You’re safe.’
‘I need you to get a message to my wife,’ he said shakily. ‘I need you to tell her how much I love her.’
It was the universal request of almost all the injured soldiers brought into the hospital. With each new request my heart hardened a little bit more towards this war they were fighting. I always contacted the families of the ones who didn’t make it, their frightened faces etched into my mind forever.
‘I will.’ I nodded. ‘I promise.’
The colonel laid a hand on the lad’s chest and tilted his head down so he could look him in the eye. ‘You’re going to be all right, soldier. You’re in good hands. We’re going to take you into surgery now.’
The soldier reached for my arm as we wheeled him into the operating theatre. ‘You won’t forget, will you?’ he said, his voice weak. ‘Her name is Ellie. Tell her she’s the love of my life.’
‘I won’t forget,’ I told him as I inserted the cannula into the vein on his forearm. I looked back at him and smiled my brightest nurse’s smile. ‘But you’ll be able to tell her yourself soon enough.’
A single tear rolled down his cheek, leaving a strip of clean flesh on his otherwise bloody, soot-blackened face.
The anaesthetist placed the oxygen mask over the soldier’s face and told him to count backwards from ten. He made it to six before his hand released its fierce grip on my arm.
I thought of his wife back at home, unaware of what had happened. I thought of Danny, still out there somewhere, imagined him hurt and asking one of the lads to tell me how much he loved me, and my breath caught in my throat.
Poor Danny. He’d been so clingy these last few weeks, anxious and jumpy in a way he never was back home. Even when we were alone, he was never really able to fully disconnect from what was going on outside the camp.
I’d seen how afraid he was sometimes; told myself, and him, that it was his fear that would keep him alive. That being afraid would make him alert, keep him safe. How useless those words seemed now. Being afraid, being brave, they wouldn’t stop him from being blown up by a roadside bomb. From being hit by a bullet, or from accidentally stepping on an IED.
And what did I know of what it felt like to be overcome by a fear like that? To head out on another patrol, wondering if this would be the day you didn’t make it back.
Around camp the lads were always full of bravado, but in the hospital tent I got to see how scared they really were. Sometimes patients woke screaming from nightmares so vivid they looked around them as if expecting to see bullets whooshing by their beds. Even when I told them where they were, that they were safe, they were still too afraid to go back to sleep. Suspicious of the hospital’s silence, they forced themselves to stay awake, alert to the invisible enemy that stalked them.
The same deadly enemy that lay in wait for Danny and the others.
A sudden terror descended on me.
I listened to my patients’ cries, I held their hands, but I couldn’t help them. What if Danny’s patrol had come under attack by that same enemy and I couldn’t help him either?