Cherry Ames Boxed Set 1-4

by Helen Wells

  A minute later two orderlies brought in a man moaning on a stretcher. Occasionally he cried out pitifully. Miss Schwartz did not show a flicker of pity or concern. “This bed, more blankets,” she ordered. “Miss Post, will you call Dr. Jackson immediately? Oxygen tank, Miss Ames, please roll it over. Heating pads. Quick now, lift him. Good work, Miss Ames.”

  Almost indifferent, she seemed. But, lifting, Cherry found that the head nurse’s hands had gone ice-cold and her eyes were tense with worry.

  “She looks and acts so hard-boiled,” Cherry thought, as she worked with her, “but I’ll bet she’s one of the kindest people here.”

  By the time Dr. “Ding” Jackson arrived, Miss Schwartz, with Cherry’s help, had made the patient comfortable, arranged serums and oxygen should the doctor want them quickly, got a report from the ambulance interne, and prepared a chart.

  Dr. “Ding” was a sandy-haired, lanky young man with a New England drawl. He frowned as he examined the suffering man. “Looks like he’s on a one-way street, and going in the wrong direction.”

  “We’ll just take his foot out of those clouds,” Miss Schwartz said sternly. Cherry thought she looked angry enough to speak to St. Peter personally about saving this patient.

  But after Dr. Jackson and two orderlies had wheeled the man to a private room, Cherry had a shock. Miss Schwartz came sauntering back wearing a fresh apron. She patted the pert bow into place, humming.

  “Does it look all right from in back?” she said to Cherry. “I do like a crisp clean apron, and a big bow.”

  Cherry looked from the bow to Miss Schwartz’s casual face and gasped out, “But that poor man—he’s in a bad way! A bow!” Then she caught herself, “I beg your pardon.”

  Miss Schwartz’s alert eyes softened. “Don’t you think I’m praying for him as hard and fast as I can? But a nurse must translate her pity into action. And we have to keep calm and cheerful for the other patients.” She smiled as if she were a thousand years old. “Working on Emergency Ward makes you a realist.”

  “Makes you tough?” Cherry asked hesitantly.

  “Goodness, no.” Miss Schwartz shook her head emphatically. “A tough nurse is a bad nurse. I mean—let’s see——”

  But at that moment the reception room nurse popped in again. “Women’s side. Looks like a heart attack. May be a suicide attempt.”

  Cherry felt a cold sensation in the pit of her stomach. She followed Miss Schwartz into the Women’s Ward. Sweat broke out on her upper lip. The unshakeable head nurse had not turned a hair.

  On the bed lay a beautiful blonde young woman, wrapped in a luxurious fur coat. She was still and white and cold. Her hat had fallen off, and her hair fell across her lovely face.

  “Oh, the poor thing,” Cherry whispered, brushing the soft fair hair off the pale cheeks. “The poor little thing.”

  “Save your pity,” Miss Schwartz snapped. “Please phone the Intake desk and ask them to send us this patient’s purse.”

  Cherry went to the ward phone, thinking, “She is hard-boiled at that.” When she returned, the young woman’s large eyes had fluttered open and she struggled to speak. Cherry could not quite make it out. “He doesn’t—No, no——”

  They worked together for several minutes over the young woman. A maid brought in the patient’s purse. Miss Schwartz examined its contents and handed Cherry a tube of nitroglycerin pills from the woman’s handbag.

  “Do you know what these mean?”

  Cherry’s eyes widened. Nitroglycerin—she could hear the instructor’s voice and see the textbook page as memory flashed into place. “Disrupts heart action! Oh! Miss Schwartz! That means she tried to kill herself!” She looked down at the struggling woman.

  “Does it?” Miss Schwartz said indifferently and began to administer a counter-serum. “Miss Ames, I am leaving the patient in your care.” She gave a few instructions, turned on her heel, and strolled away.

  “She’s as hard as nails,” Cherry changed her mind angrily, looking after her.

  A little color slowly drained back into the patient’s delicate face. Cherry was chafing her cold hands when three men appeared at the door of the ward. Cherry rose to bar their way, but Miss Schwartz miraculously turned up.

  “No reporters,” the head nurse said firmly. “Sorry. Really we can’t——”

  Cherry turned back to her patient and found the young woman sitting bolt upright on the bed. Her violet eyes were no longer fluttering, but blazing. “And why can’t I see reporters?” she demanded. “When Linda Royce tries to commit suicide, her fans call that news!” She was still a little giddy from the nitroglycerin, but she declared loudly, “Nurse! You can’t cheat me out of my publicity!”

  Miss Schwartz got the whole troupe out quickly and with deft tact. Cherry just stood there and blinked.

  Miss Schwartz came over to her, as cool as ever. “You forgot one little word,” she said, her eyes dancing. “Nitroglycerin disrupts heart action temporarily. That tells you at once the patient is trying to get sympathy or publicity or avoid some responsibility or make somebody sorry by putting on an alarming act. It never works, either.” Cherry looked at Ruth Schwartz with mute apology in her eyes. The young head nurse grinned back at her. “Now you’d better have a glass of milk. Miss Ames. You’re looking a little pale.”

  Cherry sat down alone in a deserted examination room and drank her milk thoughtfully. Miss Schwartz was a revelation. Cherry recalled now that she and Miss Mac were close friends. That was not surprising. The two nurses were much different on the surface—the one solemn, the other gay, and they were of different nationalities—still, both young women had the same devotion to nursing, the same zest for people, the same open-eyed sense of humor.

  “Ruth Schwartz says her poise is just an Emergency Ward product,” Cherry chuckled to Ann and Gwen, telling them about the Linda Royce episode later.

  The trio was in Ann’s room, really studying this snowy late afternoon. Besides some of the old studies, they now had classes in ethics, psychology, and pharmacology.

  “Wonder whether we’ll ever be as good nurses as that,” Ann said as she labored over a chemical formula.

  “Well, I know one thing,” Gwen declared. “Getting out of the probie stage and getting into blue and white and a cap has done my self-confidence an awful lot of good.” She put down her book and ran her fingers through her red hair. “And I know something else, in case anyone wants to hear it.”

  “Speak up,” Cherry encouraged, “you know we love you.”

  “We hang on your every word,” Ann assured her.

  Gwen made a face at them, then continued seriously, “Now that we have our caps, haven’t you noticed something different about the doctors and the older nurses? They trust us! We’re no longer nitwits to them. Which reminds me, Cherry, how’s your Dr. Jim Clayton?”

  Cherry stuttered and felt her face turn pink under their teasing eyes. “My Dr. Clayton? He’s not mine—Of course I like him but it’s nothing—” She had not dreamed that Gwen and Ann might guess how much she liked that young man. “Why, I don’t know what you mean!” she added unconvincingly.

  “Uh huh,” Ann said sympathetically. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested to know that he’s going down to Emergency Ward to take care of a tuberculosis case.”

  The tuberculosis case arrived before Dr. Clayton did. A dirty, cross, skinny old lady who refused to let Cherry get her into a nightgown for X-ray. Her clothes were ragged and filthy, faded past recognition, sagging in a witch’s folds. She stood arguing with Cherry in one of the dressing rooms.

  “These clothes are mine, the only clothes I got in the world, and I ain’t letting anyone steal them!” she told Cherry accusingly.

  “But it’s for X-ray—you know, inside information,” Cherry coaxed.

  “I don’t trust these here hospitals!” the old lady scolded. “Why, I know somebody once who died in a hospital! That proves hospitals are no good, don’t it?”

  Cherry s
ighed, she was acquainted by now with this ignorant attitude. She knew, too, that only as far back as the 1860’s hospitals really had been terrible places, where patients were lucky to come out alive, and resorted to only by the helpless poor. But that was before antiseptics and sterilization had been discovered, and before Florence Nightingale had founded the first training school for nurses. Perhaps it was this outworn reputation that stuck in the back of this old woman’s mind. Whatever it was, Cherry and even Miss Schwartz argued in vain.

  “All right,” the head nurse told her in despair. “You can be X-rayed with all your clothes on. Gloves and overshoes, too, if you like.”

  “Watch her,” Miss Schwartz warned Cherry under her breath. “Patients sometimes try to run away.” But the trip to X-ray went off safely.

  When Cherry showed Dr. Jim Clayton the X-ray plates later, he burst out laughing.

  “What’s funny about tuberculosis?” Cherry chided him. “I thought the poor woman hadn’t a chance.”

  Dr. Clayton looked down at her, his warm brown eyes still full of laughter. “Don’t believe in bogies, Cherry. Tuberculosis is curable, if you catch it early enough, and this old lady has come in in time. She came in to have an infected finger treated and fortunately we heard that cough. We can save her years of suffering and give her a peaceful old age. But—but—” He burst out laughing again.

  “X-ray insisted she take off those filthy clothes. The nurse peeled off layer after layer, like an onion. And do you know what? In the hems and seams of that old woman’s clothes, even in her stocking tops, she had sewn rolls of bills! A walking bank!” Dr. Clayton chuckled. “A miser, I guess. We get one every so often. Well, Social Service will send her upstairs to Dr. Wylie and charge her whatever she can afford.”

  Cherry’s mouth and eyes opened at the same time. Dr. Clayton gently yanked one black curl. “You’re learning, aren’t you, youngster?”

  Cherry smiled and felt better.

  One rushed morning, when all the beds were full and the whole E.W. staff were working like demons and Cherry was wishing she were triplets, Dr. “Ding” Jackson strode in and said, “Urgent. Come on.” Cherry was in the midst of giving the patients their morning care, but she turned over the task to the other student nurse immediately.

  “A third-degree burn,” he explained briefly as Cherry hurried to keep up with his long, lanky strides. “One of those home accidents. A hot water boiler exploded in his face. He won’t have any face for the rest of his life, unless we act fast. We’ll clean it up now and pray that Dr. Sutton can do a series of plastic surgeries later. May have to come back to the hospital at intervals for two or three years.”

  Cherry steeled herself to look upon not a face but a painful red pulp. “How old is he?” Cherry asked as they wheeled around a corner, just missing a stretcher. No face for the rest of his life, “Ding” had said.

  “He’s seven years old.”

  Cherry gasped. “His—his eyes?” she whispered.

  “No, he won’t be blind. But we mustn’t let Winky grow up disfigured. It would warp his soul as well as his body.” Dr. “Ding” brushed back his sandy forelock unhappily. “He’s horribly frightened, Miss Ames. And—he has no mother.”

  Cherry was glad then that she was a nurse. Even a student nurse. Glad to the very bottom of her heart.

  At the door, she faced Dr. Jackson. “Let me go in alone.” He nodded.

  The boy’s figure looked very small in the high hospital bed. His face was swathed in medicated gauze. Only two round, bright blue eyes flickered, birdlike, in what once must have been a lively little face. Cherry suddenly remembered her own brother, when Charlie was just as young, and how he always pretended bluffly to be afraid of nothing.

  Cherry went over to the side of the bed. “Hello, Winky,” she said softly. “So you’ve come to pay us a visit here at the hospital. I’ll bet your teacher is surprised you aren’t in school this morning.”

  The childish eyes looked up at her forlornly, waiting for her to say more, Winky could not talk.

  Cherry swallowed hard and laid her hand lightly on his shoulder. “We’re your friends here and we’re going to take good care of you, Winky. You’re going to get well. You know that, don’t you? And you’ll have loads of fun here. I’ll play games with you and you shall have your own private radio and——”

  She stopped, halted by the expression in the little boy’s eyes. He looked up at her trustingly enough, but he was pleading with her, anxiously asking her something. Suddenly she understood. The child realized his face was burned away.

  “And you are going to be just as nice-looking as ever. You won’t look a bit different, you’ll be the same old Winky, just like you always were. Honestly.”

  Such a look of relief came into his eyes! And then they relaxed and closed for a moment. Cherry felt something plucking at her hand. Winky’s grimy small hand had found hers and curled tightly around her cool fingers.

  The door flew open and a heavy-set man, apparently Winky’s father, burst in past the doctor and the head nurse. He was hatless, his hair was flying, and he was weeping. “He’ll be a freak—no one will want to look at him—” he sobbed. “He’s better off dead——!”

  So that was where Winky had got his fear! Cherry whirled the man around, and Miss Schwartz and Dr. Jackson seized him and pulled him out into the hall.

  “Never offer a patient worry or pity or even too much sympathy,” Miss Schwartz’s voice echoed faintly in Cherry’s memory. But all Winky’s hope had died again. Cherry went back to the bed and stubbornly, patiently, fought with the child’s fear. She explained very simply, and entirely honestly, how the wonderful surgeon would heal his face. She told him of other people who were severely burned and who got well because they were brave and cooperated with the doctor. With both his stubby hands tight in hers, Cherry promised him that he too would recover. Winky was finally satisfied enough to close his eyes and at last he went off into an uneasy sleep. Cherry knew he believed in her, and through her, in himself. She gently withdrew her hand from his uncurling fist and tiptoed away from the bed.

  She had barely stepped into the glistening corridor when Dr. Jim Clayton hailed her. “Please send up the tuberculosis patient’s Intake report to Dr. Wylie at once.”

  “Miss Ames! Miss Ames!” the head nurse called. “Your fracture patient is asking for you. Don’t forget to look at Mrs. Knox’s dressing, too.”

  “How’s Winky?” Dr. Jackson asked, coming up. “I’ll want you to be on hand when we feed him by intravenous infusion.”

  “Miss Ames! Miss Ames! Telephone. Take it on the south ward!”

  “Yes!” said Cherry. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Laughing a little in her bewilderment, she broke into a run. Never before had she felt so thoroughly alive!. “What a day!” she thought in exhilaration. She grabbed the receiver and said crisply into the phone, “Emergency Ward, Miss Ames speaking.”

  “Why, Cherry! You don’t have to speak that way to me!” said a woman’s voice. The voice sounded far away and poignantly familiar. Cherry was startled and puzzled. One of her former patients? A patient’s relative? Who else could be phoning her? And then——

  “Oh, darling, it’s you!” Cherry shouted into the phone. “Mother!”

  They laughed together over the miles.

  “I was worried, Cherry,” her mother said. “Your letters have been so brief recently. Are you unhappy there? Or not feeling well? Is it too much for you?”

  Cherry simply roared. “Oh, no, just the opposite! Mother, it’s wonderful—marvelous—” Winky, winning her cap, and chumming with Ann and Gwen, and the excitement of Emergency Ward, and Christmas “Candle Walk” coming—Cherry wanted to pour out all this to her mother.

  “I’ll write you all about it soon!” she cried into the phone. “And I just want to tell you this—I’ve never been happier in my whole life!”

  CHAPTER IX

  Candle Walk

  CHERRY TURNED OVER IN BED AND LUXURIOUSLY snuggled
into the pillows. She was busy thinking. It was still dark outside her window, quiet in the Nurses’ Residence—too early to get up, thank goodness. This was the only chance she had to think over all that had happened. She still felt out of breath from her three weeks on Emergency Ward. She had suddenly been transferred, ten days ahead of time, because Bone Deformities Ward lost a nurse and needed someone in a hurry. T.S.O. considered Cherry good enough to meet this emergency. So here she was already on the new ward—Bone Deformities. High time she took a few minutes to catch up with herself!

  There was Winky, for one thing. Cherry was still a little stunned. Winky was better now, much better, eating and talking. She had popped into his room every day, sometimes only for a minute, but she had come faithfully. The round, bright blue eyes smiled gaily at her now, for she and Winky were fast friends. When she came in to tell him she was unexpectedly being transferred upstairs, the little boy looked woebegone. Then he set up an awful howl.

  “If you go, I’m going too!” he insisted.

  His R.N. came running in to see what the awful noise was about. “But, Winky dear,” the registered nurse explained, “Miss Ames is going to a part of the hospital where they don’t fix faces.”

  “Why can’t they fix my face just as good in one room as in another?” Winky demanded.

  Cherry interposed tactfully and hastily, “Your own nurse will take very, very good care of you, right here in your own room.”

  “I don’t want anybody to take care of me but Miss Cherry!” Winky wailed. “I’m going with Miss Cherry!”

  And he wore himself out insisting and fretting until Dr. Sutton had to be summoned. The surgeon, when he learned that Cherry was going to Orthopedic, was doubtful about sending a plastic surgery case to a completely unrelated ward. But the little boy pleaded so earnestly and so long that finally Dr. Sutton said:

  “We-ell, it’s all wrong, but I guess we’ll have to put Winky in a private room just off the Orthopedic Ward.”