This Is Where We Stop novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: Triage
On my third day, a bus went off the mountain road, and the whole valley started coming through the gym doors.
Seven patients arrived in forty minutes.
Padraig stood in the middle of the floor with a marker and wrote letters on foreheads.
R meant red, now. Y meant yellow, soon. B meant black, we could not help.
He worked fast and he did not argue with himself.
"Bess, the chest goes to Kincaid," he said. "The head injury waits. The girl with the leg is mine."
I looked at the girl.
She was about nine, with a long braid and a very steady stare, and her right leg below the knee was a ruin.
The bone had come through. The foot was white.
"Can I see it?" I asked.
"There's nothing to see." Padraig did not look up. "No vascular surgeon, no blood supply for a repair, and a four hour crush. We take the leg and she lives."
"The femoral is intact."
"Below the knee it isn't."
"Give me forty minutes."
His head came up.
"I'm not asking you to trust me," I said. "I'm asking for forty minutes. If the foot isn't pink when I'm done, you can take it yourself."
"We have six more patients."
"And Bess has hands, and so does everyone else."
He held my eyes across the table.
Around us the gym kept moving. A nurse called out a blood pressure, and somewhere a baby was crying.
"Forty," Padraig said.
I worked.
I had done a graft like it twice in my fellowship and never in a gym with a hand light.
I took a vein from her other leg. I cleaned the torn ends back to healthy tissue.
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