“Not necessarily.”
Lucas stood up straight.“All right.You’re a doctor.Fix her.”
“To fix her, I have to open the wound again.”
“But you said you took the bullet out already.”
“There may be something else in there that is causing it to fester.”
“Why the blazes didn’t you take it out the first time?”
Doc heard the anger in the outlaw’s voice, but he was feeling his own temper heat up.
“It was an emergency situation.I extracted the bullet that I saw, using what I had.”
“What youhad?”Lucas snapped.There was murder in his eyes.“You had your damn bag with you.What else did you need?”
“My surgical instruments.”
In one motion the outlaw picked up Doc Burnett’s bag and dumped the contents on the floor.Scissors and clamps and tweezers, two scalpels, and a saw clattered out.Doc quickly snatched up the bottle of morphine, relieved that it didn’t break.
“What are these, then?”
“Not what I need, imbecile,” Doc barked back at him.“You don’t use a bullwhip to cut your bread, do you?I need different tools, depending on the surgery I need to perform.”
“Why didn’t you bring what you needed when you left Elkhorn?”
“I don’t carry all of my surgical instruments every time I’m called out.”
Doc picked up his things one by one, piling them on a cloth under the cot.The instruments glinted in the light, reminding him that he could inflict a mortal wound on this outlaw with half of them.
The thought came and went swiftly, but it shamed him, nonetheless.He was not a soldier.He was not there to kill.He was there to keep this woman alive if God granted him the means.
He softened his tone.“When that fellow came to me, he told me there’d been an accident.He said nothing about any bullet wound.I rode up here with the medicines that were in my bag.But I had no way of knowing what I was facing, who I was seeing, or what the injuries were.”
Lucas ran a hand down his face, glanced at the woman, and then turned his glare back at Doc.
The woman groaned, and her pain was evident.Doc wasn’t surprised.He’d had to cut back the amount of laudanum he was giving her to make the medicine last longer.Lucas’s attention focused on her face again.
“I am trying to save her life.”
“Are you?”
“I am adoctor.That’s my job.”Doc’s voice was sharp, his eyes reprimanding as he glared at Lucas.
And perhaps it was more than his job.Perhaps, in this miserable shack, with death waiting so close, it was the only thing still anchoring him to the man he wanted to be.
The young man let out a frustrated breath.“If you cut her open again, what do you think you’ll find in there?”
Doc shook his head.He was glad to be past the outlaw’s temper.“Hard to tell.There may be shreds of her clothing that were embedded when the bullet entered the body.There may be dead skin that is putrefying inside the wound.There could be a tiny fragment of bone.In any case, the bullet that I dug out was complete.There were no pieces that broke off.But for all I know, there could possibly be another bullet in there.Iwon’tknow until I’m in there.”
Wound infections were always a serious problem.During the war, he and other doctors working close to the battle lines were constantly improving operating protocol and sharing successful techniques with one another.Despite what the newspapers printed, the first choice of the surgeon, notwithstanding the overwhelming and horrific conditions of the battlefield, was not amputation.
But in trying to save a limb, infections were unavoidable.
Doc Burnett could only speak for himself, but by the war’s end, his standard procedure was to cut away dead tissue and inject the wound margins with bromine—while the patient was under anesthesia, if possible.He’d then pack the wound with a bromine-soaked dressing and isolate his patients in a separate tent with their own bandage supply.Doc’s assistants dressed the wounds, and he insisted that they wash their hands in chlorinated soda between patients.
He’d learned a great deal in those bloody days, but he hadn’t had the luxury of applying any of that knowledge here.
