A little shiver ran over Kazy, then she pushed ahead with the needle. Once it punctured the skin, Daussie’s ghirit showed the needle immediately proceeded on into the vein just beneath the skin.
Eva said, “Great. Hold still.” She reached up and pulled the cork out of the bottle. Saline started pouring into the man’s vein. She said, “In the old days, they had ways to swap out the needle for a flexible plastic tube they’d tape in place. Since we don’t have either the tube or the tape, you’re going to need to hold that.”
The man moaned and started to lift his head.
Eva said, “Or, maybe I should hold the needle while you calm him down.”
Eva sat down to hold the needle in place and Kazy went back to the head of the table.
Daussie turned her attention to what Tarc was doing in the liver. Much of the surface of the wound inside the liver seemed crusty. Wow, he’s really cauterized a lot of it. Daussie could tell the bleeding was far less than it had been, but there were still a few tiny spots they were oozing blood. Her ghirit sensed another flare of heat.
She looked up at Tarc. His face was drawn. I’ll bet he’s got the mother of all headaches, Daussie thought. She sent her ghirit back into the wound, But he shouldn’t have to do much more.
Daussie sent her ghirit around the abdomen looking for any more collections of blood. She only found a little bit that wasn’t clotted, up by the liver. It’d obviously just come out of the wound. She moved it into the portal vein.
Daussie noticed Eva and Daum had finished running the saline into the man’s arm and taken the needle out. Daum was carrying the glass bottle and the coiled glass tubing back to the kitchen.
Eva leaned close to Daussie. “If we leave all that clotted blood in his abdomen, it’s going to turn into scar tissue. Do you think you can port it all the way out of his abdomen?”
Daussie nodded, “I’ll go get a pan to port into so it doesn’t make a mess.”
“One with a lid,” Eva said as Daussie was getting up, “so those men don’t see the blood.”
Daussie nodded again.
Eva called behind her, “Get one of the girls to start heating the pressure cooker so we can make more sterile saline.”
Daussie came back out and placed the shallow pan with its lid under the patient’s flank. Before she started, Tarc leaned close and whispered, “I’ve been squeezing the clots. The liquid floating on top is the serum I’ve squeezed out of them. Port that back into his veins before you start removing the clots.”
Not sure that that was a good idea, Daussie looked up at Eva who was talking to Vyrda. “Um—”
Tarc interrupted, “I already asked mom if it was okay to do it.”
“I’m glad you understand I can’t just do it on your say so,” Daussie said looking up at her brother with a grin. The grin faded when she saw how exhausted Tarc looked. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Tarc said with a wince. “I feel like someone stuck a knife in through the center of my forehead and started twisting.” He closed his eyes part way and slowly shook his head, “It’s even worse seeing you still smiling after you ported all that blood. Can’t you at least try to look tired?”
“Oh, sorry. It isn’t hard for me to port stuff short distances when I’m close to them. Maybe you shouldn’t be trying to squeeze the clots?”
“We all have to do our part. I’ll just have to take revenge on you later for making your part look so easy.”
Hiding her grin, Daussie leaned down and started porting the serum Tarc had freed up into the iliac veins. More of it kept gushing down as Tarc squeezed clots in different areas. After a while, she realized he was doing her a huge favor because it left less clot behind for her to have to port all the way out of the abdomen.
Once she’d moved as much serum back into the veins as Tarc could free up, she started porting the clotted blood out into the pan, Daussie looked up to see her mother watching her with an anxious look. Eva said, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Porting fluid a couple of centimeters is pretty easy.”
“Great,” Eva said, lifting a large stoppered jar up onto the table at the man’s right flank. “No rest for the wicked. It’s time to wash out the man’s wound.” She grabbed the stopper.
“Wait!” Daussie said. “Why’re you pulling out the stopper?”
“Um, to pour the saline into his wound. Tarc will slosh it around and you can port it back out.”
“I can port the saline into the wound with less contamination,” Daussie said, thinking about how the saline would be pouring over the unsterile lip of the jar and picking up a few bacteria. “And I can port it at a speed that’ll slosh it around. Tarc’s exhausted, don’t have him do any more than he absolutely has to… Besides, doesn’t he still need to put a stitch in that incomplete bowel laceration?”
Eva chewed her lip, then looked at Tarc, still looking grey around the gills. “Which is harder for you Tarc?”
“Doing both of them,” Tarc said listlessly. “But pulling the needle’s pretty easy. It doesn’t weigh much.”
Daussie said, “And if that hole in the intestine opens up…”
Eva’s expression turned grim at the thought. “You’re right. Can you get one of your needle and suture packets and some moonshine?”
As Daussie walked toward the kitchen, she saw Nylin leaning out to see what was happening. Or to look at Tarc.
Or, maybe to get away from the heat, Daussie thought as she stepped into the kitchen. Nylin and Grace had built a large fire in the stove to heat Eva’s big pressure cooker sterilizer and the kitchen was hot.
Daussie was glad to get out of there with one of her suture packets and another little bottle of moonshine. She splashed some moonshine on the packet and used the wet side of it to rub down the skin over the patient’s abdomen then turned to Eva. “Why don’t you position the packet as close to the laceration as possible so Tarc doesn’t have to pull the needle so far?”
Eva shrugged and moved the packet, then spoke to Tarc, “There’s a bowel loop with a partial thickness cut right under the packet. Pull the needle down near the bowel and I’ll tell you which way you need to move to find it.”
Tarc moved his head so it was almost touching the man’s abdomen. It looked like he was taking a nap. Daussie moved in fairly close on the other side and started using her ghirit to search for the cut in the bowel herself. It was surprisingly hard to find amidst all the other loops of bowel coiled in the area. She knew her mother must’ve followed the bowel from one end to the other, carefully looking for any defects.
In fact, Daussie hadn’t found the injury by the time Tarc had poked the head of the needle out of the abdominal wall down near the intestine.
Eva said, “A little bit superior—toward the head—and a smidgen to the patient’s left.”
With this guidance, Daussie suddenly found a loop with a thinned wall. It didn’t have the shape of a slice as she’d expected. When the blade had parted the muscular outer layers of the intestine, they’d retracted, leaving the inner layer seeming somewhat thin but without an abrupt edge to the cut like she’d expected.
Tarc evidently saw it too. The tiny bit of needle moved towards it and caught in the thicker retracted tissue. Tarc managed to have it catch the outer layers of tissue without entering the lumen of the bowel, which would have released contamination, Tarc pulled the needle over to the outer wall on the other side of the injury and caught some of the tissue there as well. He pulled it back to the first side, pierced a little more tissue and started tying one of his knots.
Once the knot was tight, the wall of the intestine no longer seemed thin. He glanced at his mother, “I think that’s good enough, what do you think?”
Eva nodded.
Daussie cut the suture and Tarc pulled the needle with its trailing suture out of the abdomen. A few seconds later, the other tail of the suture moved off to come out through the big knife wound that’d created the injury in the first place. “That was amaz
ing,” Daussie breathed, in awe of what her brother’d done.
Daussie started porting saline out of the jar and into the actual knife wound. She was having to port it about six centimeters, so she could only move about fifteen ccs every second, but that was plenty. If she’d had to keep up that rate it would have given her a headache but ten seconds and 150cc seemed to give everything a pretty good wash. Some of the saline splashed up out of the wound where Eva caught it with a towel. The rest splashed down into the abdomen.
Though Daussie thought the porting of fifteen cc increments had done enough splashing around, Tarc put his head right down on the man’s abdomen and splashed the saline around a little more, giving things a bit of a wash. Once he leaned back, Daussie started porting the excess saline—which had picked up some remnants of clotted blood—into another pan by the man’s flank.
Eva came out with her suturing kit and sewed up the wound in the man’s skin. “What about the deeper tissue?” Daussie asked.
“Tarc can do that tomorrow when he feels better,” Eva replied, giving her son a pitying look.
Daussie looked over at the two men who’d brought the patient in. She could hear a little but partly understood by reading his lips as the one said to his partner, “He must be dead. Didn’t even move when she was stickin’ him with that big-ass needle.”
Eva turned to the two men and said, “Let’s get him upstairs to the room we keep for patients.”
As the men took away the stretcher, Daussie noticed the jar of sterile saline they’d used to wash out the wound. She picked it up and took it with her.
It was a struggle getting the stretcher up the stairs with a hefty man on it. Daussie thought it would’ve gone a lot smoother and easier if Tarc and Daum had been carrying it, but Tarc looked far too tired. And, by the time it was evident the men were going to have trouble, it was too late for Daum to do any more than help the trailing man carry his end.
Once they had the patient off the stretcher and onto the bed, Eva gave Kazy a nod. A few minutes later their patient moaned and started trying to lift his head. One of the stretcher bearers startled back in dismay, “Is he comin’ back from the dead?!”
Vyrda patted his arm and said reassuringly, “No. He’s only been asleep. Being hurt so bad wears you out and makes you sleep. He’s just starting to wake up. I think there’s a chance he may live.”
The other stretcher-bearer grimly shook his head. Quietly, he said, “A man don’t come back after getting stuck in the gut. ’preciate what you all tried to do, but I don’t think all that praying and mutterin’s gonna do no good.”
Daussie took a breath to explain that the wound hadn’t punctured his intestines—which is what so consistently killed men after they were wounded in the gut—but she stopped herself even before Eva touched her arm to restrain her.
As soon as the men left the room, Daussie showed her mother the jar of saline. “I could port the rest of this into one of his veins.”
“Oh, that’s a great idea!”
Daussie set the jar on the man’s groin and started porting the saline out the bottom of the jar and into his femoral vein.
By the time they got to sleep there wasn’t much time left before they’d have to be up starting another day.
***
Despite still feeling very tired, Tarc was the first one down to the kitchen the next day. Once the total exhaustion had worn off, he hadn’t been able to sleep because of the persistent remnants of his headache. He’d decided to brew some willow bark tea.
He stirred the coals and placed some tinder on a hot one. As it flared up he fed in some wood.
He was putting a pot of water onto the hottest part of the stove when the door to the kitchen creaked open. Nylin stepped in, then—seeing him—her eyes dropped and she started to back out.
“Nylin,” he said.
She stopped backing out, frozen, eyes still on the floor.
Uncomfortable, he spoke slowly. “Kazy says you don’t hate me as much as I think you do.”
Her eyes shot up to give him a momentary, disbelieving stare, then dropped back to the floor. She shook her head, though the shake was tiny and hard to see.
“You see, I’ve been thinking that you won’t look at me because you think I’m a terrible person. Or, maybe, just that you find my appearance repulsive, or ghastly, or vile.”
Her eyes widened, then raised some, wandering across the room toward him. They finally focused on his chest. “No,” she said. Her voice crackled. “I can… Are you making tea?”
Tarc nodded, “Willow bark tea. I’ve got a headache… from… last night.”
“I can make it for you.”
Tarc produced a gentle chuckle, “I can make my own tea.”
“Oh.” Nylin’s eyes dropped and she started to back out the door again.
“Wait.” When she paused, Tarc continued, “Stay. Talk to me.” Having a stroke of insight, he realized she might not feel comfortable staying without a reason. “We could get the bread started for the day.”
“Okay,” Nylin said, fully entering the kitchen and closing the door behind her.
Tarc got down the sourdough. While he was checking on the water for his tea, Nylin saved some starter out of the sourdough. Tarc got out some flour, took the starter, stirred in water and flour, then put the freshly fed starter back up on the shelf. When he turned around Nylin had started to knead some dough. He separated a big section and started to knead as well. Turning to Nylin, he asked, “How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“That’s great. I think most people would be… pretty traumatized by the time you spent with the Ragas, and then by Farlin wanting to force you to marry someone you didn’t know.”
Nylin said nothing, just continued to knead her dough—perhaps a little more forcefully than she’d been doing it before.
I shouldn’t have brought up her time with the Ragas! It was traumatic. She probably doesn’t want to think about it. And, she might be embarrassed about what happened there! I’m probably the last person she wanted to talk to about something like that. After a moment, Tarc said, “Um…” then tried to think what he could say to moderate such a horrific faux pas. When he couldn’t think of anything to follow it with, his “um” seemed to just sit there.
Tarc was still desperately trying to think of something to say, when, in an almost calm voice, Nylin said, “Thank you for your concern.” Her eyes stayed down on the dough she was kneading.
Tarc wondered whether the response was sarcastic. Her tone hadn’t suggested sarcasm, but Daussie might’ve used just those words if she was pissed off about what he’d said.
Tarc’s inner self was practically screaming at him to say something but then Nylin continued. “For some reason, being around Kazy seems to calm my worries. You might’ve guessed that I’m… shamed by what happened with the Ragas, but the time I spend around your cousin seems to be dissipating that.”
Nylin’d stopped kneading. Tarc felt like her eyes were on him, and when he turned she’d actually turned her head and looked all the way up at his face. Then her eyes were actually looking directly into his.
She took a deep breath and said, “I’d like to express my gratitude that you… that you, at great risk to yourself, came to save me from the Ragas. And Grace too. Farlin told me about that night and you certainly owed us nothing after… after all, Farlin’d had your sister at knifepoint.” A tear welled up and ran down her cheek, “No one else would’ve… would’ve… been brave enough to try to rescue a complete stranger from those men.”
“Oh, come on, there was only one and he had a broken wrist, didn’t he?” Tarc said, trying to make light of it. Then he realized Nylin’s shoulders were shaking despite her efforts to suppress her weeping. He stepped closer and put an arm around her, squeezing gently at first, then more firmly. Almost in her ear, he quietly said, “And you shouldn’t be ashamed of anything. Angry maybe, but never ashamed. It wasn’t your fault what happened.”
Tarc awkwardly patted her back, resolving not to say anything since everything he’d said so far seemed to have made such a hash of things.
He heard someone coming down the stairs and realized their time alone was about to come to an end. He expected Nylin to hear the same sounds and pull away, but she didn’t. Expanding his ghirit, he decided—because the person was small—it had to be Kazy. She seemed to be trying to walk quietly.
Though Tarc could still hear Kazy’s footsteps, Nylin seemed not to notice them so they were still holding one another when Kazy gently pushed the door open. Kazy hadn’t brought a light, so she must have used her ghirit to find her way. Once Kazy’s eyes found his, she grinned, rolled her eyes, and used both hands to make an exploding motion over her head.
Telepath (A Hyllis Family Story #4) Page 25
