Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [41]
Nurse Paquet, a sallow and sullen girl not much older than Olympia, interviews the patients while Olympia functions as a nurse attendant, fetching bandages and medicines and tonics, cleaning instruments and returning them to the boiling water, and, once or twice, holding a limb or a child’s hand while Haskell goes about his business. The first patient he sees that day is a man who has lost his arm to a spinner, which mangled it up to the elbow some weeks before. Haskell begins to unwind the man’s dressing with the most careful of motions. He speaks in a soothing voice, trying to distract the mechanician with queries and jokes, and Olympia deduces that securing a patient’s trust and cooperation is the first order of business in any treatment. Haskell is, she observes that afternoon, a gentle, not to say tender, physician.
“Olympia, fetch me some clean dressings,” he instructs. “There, in that metal cabinet.”
She finds the gauze and torn strips of cloth where he has said she would and hands them to Haskell.
“Contrary to established medical opinion, there is no intrinsic value to pus,” he says, unwinding the filthy bandages and gesturing to the exudation of a purple stump that emits such a powerfully noxious odor that she involuntarily puts the back of her hand to her nose and steps away. “It does but tell us that the patient is suffering and that the wound is infected,” he continues. “I have given orders that any person who walks into the clinic with a malodorous dressing should be seen to at once, but it is sometimes difficult to convince a provincial nursing staff who have been taught otherwise.”
Olympia looks over at Nurse Paquet, whose sullen expression does not change. Olympia watches as Haskell removes instruments from the pots of boiling water. After he has thoroughly cleaned the wound with carbolic acid, he begins to scrape away at the infection. The patient, despite Haskell’s soothing words and deft curettage, cannot keep himself from crying out at the pain. Olympia does observe, however, that Haskell is quick and precise in his gestures and that when the pain seems to be intolerable, he stops and administers laudanum by a teaspoon to ease his patient’s distress — which, miraculously, it does. The man, who ceases his shouting and trembling, lies still as Haskell finishes the job and bandages up the wound again.
That afternoon Haskell sets a broken leg, gives numerous injections, uses a pulmotor on a young man in the last stages of white lung, and treats another man who complains of a parched tongue, fevers in the night, and pain near his nipples. He diagnoses a case of scarlet fever on the basis of a telltale, ash gray patch on the palate, he cleans an abcess, he thumps a child’s back for pleurisy, and he dispenses tonics. One of the boys who fell into the river dies that afternoon as a result of his injuries, and the woman who was grunting in the waiting room is delivered of a healthy girl (though not by Haskell himself).
Through all of this, Olympia is watchful, as though she were being introduced to a second language and must pay close attention. Several times she feels her stomach rise toward her throat, but she is determined to betray no weakness. Occasionally Haskell bids her don a mask in the presence of highly infectious disease, and he constantly reminds her to wash her hands, which she makes nearly raw by the time the afternoon is over. And though she seeks