Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Amy Chief Nurse in the British Hospital in FranceStimson, Julia C. (Julia Catherine)
History
Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Amy Chief Nurse in the British Hospital in France
Stimson, Julia C. (Julia Catherine)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
About 7 o’clock a message came in from the connecting “Theatre Hut,” a
ward at the other end of the hut, where the operating room is, that a
man who had had a fearful hemorrhage from the wound in his shoulder that
morning was very much worse. It was decided to transfuse him, a
complicated job under the very best of circumstances. An up-patient was
sought to volunteer to be the donor of the blood, and promised as a
reward that he would be sent to England and not back to the Base (how
good a promise I do not know, but at least he might get a glimpse of
Blighty for a few days if our men send him there, but of course if found
fit there, he would be sent back to the front). He was brought,
wide-eyed and wondering, into the brilliant, messy operating room filled
with strangely garbed and bustling people and put on a table and his arm
prepared. Some doctors got busy with him and I went with another doctor
to get ready the vein in the patient’s arm. In a few minutes we were
ready and the other doctors came to insert the tiny point of their glass
tube into the hole in the vein we had ready. A nurse was holding a
droplight over the bed, another nurse was holding the arm, a doctor was
adjusting the tourniquet so that the vein would show up well, then the
two men who were working were bending over the arm, I was handing them
instruments, for I was scrubbed up, since everything must be sterile.
The patient was just gasping, rapidly growing worse, but the point went
in successfully and the blood began to flow into his vein, when all the
lights went out and the patient stopped breathing!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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