They Come Marching, Parts 1-3, complete story

They Come Marching, Part 1, Jack

Jack

I move out from behind the blue, paper curtain and the glare from the military-issue wall clock, roughly the size of a wagon wheel and fixed to the wall just below the ceiling, makes me have to adjust my glasses. The same paper curtains section off pieces of the enormous circular room in more than a dozen other places, making the chamber a hive of semi-private recovery spaces. Doctors are shuffling across the expanse without looking up, absorbed in clip boards and writing orders to waiting interns and various RNs and LVNs, all trailing behind like baby ducklings.

I walk directly across the room, weaving between lab coats and scrubs, to reach my next patient for the shift. As I put my body through the opening in the curtain I know from the delicate, rotten fruit scent hanging above the bed that an infection has taken root under the man's skin graft. If he weren't so strongly affected by the painkillers, antibiotics, and various other fluids pouring through his IV, he would be suffering outwardly.

The border space where the man's wound meets the graft shows that it is not taking. The slight little valley where skin won't quite meet skin is sticky and angry looking, making a bumpy wet circle around his chest. I go about my duties, noting the progress of the graft on the chart. Before I can replace his dressings, I have to clean out the exposed flesh. When I set down my bag of disinfectants and gauze and other supplies, I notice the ants again.

In a military hospital, everything is seen in terms of wars. If life can't be won or lost, it can at least be stabilized, triaged, evacuated, etc. For the last four months, the hospital has been fighting two wars over its usual one. The first was always understood to be the never-ending war against infection. The attending doctor had told me in my first week that most patients that die here don't die of what they come in for, they die of subsequent infection.

"The war never ends," he said.

The new war was with the ants. A civilian hospital would be too concerned with malpractice suits to stay open, but I had my orders, and every week I cleaned out and refilled the coffee tins all the bedposts sat in with fresh poison. So far, this had kept the ants from crawling up the posts and onto the patients, but I didn't feel good about it.

I force myself to look away from the crawling trail under the bed, saying in my head that it's just a delicate line of hair and to tell the floor janitor to sweep. The fruit smell comes a little stronger as I clean out the border around the graft. Most would expect a smell of meat if they saw an image like this. Such a meat smell would tell me decomposition, more a sign of something like gangrene. Infection is lighter, sweeter, and generally more like an old fruit drawer. The shuffling of the doctors outside the thin curtain mixing with the scent of infection and preservative antiseptic gives me a vague feeling of nostalgia for country stores I bought candy from as a boy. I let my mind drift with the memory for a moment before moving on.