Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [124]
Others hurried to hospitals, hoping to find medical care. Most found disappointment. Of the city’s forty-five civilian hospitals, only three were sufficiently undamaged to accept and help patients. Both military hospitals were uninhabitable. Over 90 percent of Hiroshima’s doctors and nurses were killed or injured by the bomb; a month after the attack, only thirty doctors were healthy enough to resume their duties. Medicines, supplies, and surgical equipment had been destroyed, patients who had already been in hospitals now needed urgent care from wounds caused by broken glass or fallen plaster, and within days whoever could stand up long enough to help was forced to confront the perplexing phenomenon of seemingly healthy survivors suddenly sickening and dying as if by some evil magic—radiation poisoning, though it took weeks for Hiroshimans to understand what it was. (When Ogura’s wife, Fumiyo, died from radiation on 19 August, the death certificate he obtained for her listed the cause of death as heart failure.) Makeshift aid stations around the city were overwhelmed. The healthy, or relatively healthy, or walking wounded, administered to the injured, swabbing wounds with iodine but leaving them otherwise uncleaned. Workers established a system of triage, as they tried to save those who seemed to have hope of surviving. To the consternation of family members, the most severely injured were left on the ground to die.29
Michihiko Hachiya, the doctor who had been lifted by the blast off his living-room floor, found himself naked and bleeding from wounds in his neck and thigh. He yanked glass splinters out of his flesh, located his wife, Yaeko, who was also hurt (and who tied an apron around her husband’s waist), and headed for his hospital, several hundred yards away. Hachiya’s wounds were too much; he sank to the road, urging Yaeko on. Soon colleagues appeared and hoisted him onto a stretcher, on which they bore him, to the Communications Building adjacent to the hospital, which was already too crowded to admit more patients. They passed him through a window into a janitor’s closet, now an emergency aid station. ‘The rooms and corridors were crowded with people, many of whom I recognized as neighbors,’ Hachiya wrote. ‘To me it seemed that the whole community was there.’ A nurse bathed his wounds in iodine, a treatment he endured through clenched teeth. Then fire broke out in the hospital next door and everyone was evacuated. Drenched with water from a fire hose, providentially working, and dragged into an open area to escape the flames, Hachiya passed out. He came to and looked around. ‘Hiroshima’, he observed, ‘was no longer a city, but a burnt-over prairie.’ The fire spared the hospital’s first floor and Hachiya was now moved there. A colleague closed his forty wounds with sutures and he fell asleep.
When he awoke he saw the apocalypse. Patients were crowded into the ward ‘like the rice in sushi’, the overflow under the stairway and in the front garden. Most were burned, and many of these, Hachiya could see from his bed, were gravely ill. His wife lay in the next bed, her face and body white with ointment. Food and water were as scarce as medicine. ‘Disposing of the dead’, Hachiya observed, ‘was a minor problem’—corpses were trucked off by an army detail to be cremated—‘but to clean the rooms of urine, feces, and vomitus was impossible’, raising fears that disease would spread. Hospital employees who made it in to work over the next several days told harrowing stories of death and grief. Patients, who continued to stagger in, touched Hachiya in their gratitude for a straw pallet on the noisome floor, a spoonful of rice gruel, and a kind word from a nurse. Confined to his bed by his wounds, consumed with guilt while he watched his colleagues attempt to cope with the human tragedy that grew worse each day, Hachiya found