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Gulnar wiped the back of her forearm across her forehead, soaking her sleeve with more precious moisture. “I thought as much. The damage was to the tail of the liver’s right lobe. If the bullets had hit its blood vessels network, I doubt he would have lasted an hour.”
“It’s a relief. I wasn’t looking forward to performing a laparotomy under septic conditions. There’s nothing more I should do, at the moment, about his abdominal injuries, now that bleeding has stopped.”
Gulnar nodded and began cleaning the wounds. He helped her wrap the man’s abdomen in bandages again, and found himself asking, “I know the main info from the news and the officials. But I want you to tell me what happened here, in detail.”
She looked at him, her eyes impassive. “You see the result. What good are details?”
He didn’t know why he was asking either. He just needed to know. Then something else occurred to him. “If you’d rather not repeat what happened, relive—”
“It’s not that! It’s just…” She hesitated for one more second. Then she told him. All the details of the raid, the indiscriminate killings, the monstrous treatment afterwards.
He shouldn’t have asked.
But it blasted everything into perspective, made whatever he’d thought he’d suffered insignificant.
And made whatever he did pointless?
No. What he did couldn’t be pointless. He had to make it count. One life at a time snatched out of the jaws of death and cruelty. One lesser defeat, one less than total disaster.
He had to believe that. He had to.
It was all he lived for.
Gulnar closed her eyes against the sunlight slanting through the building’s high windows. Against Dante’s searing turmoil. There was no shying away from his frustration, his rage. Somehow, sharing distress with him halved it this time, as if he was absorbing it, diffusing it.
She opened her eyes and saw hi
m in control again, removing the pressure bandages around the top of Mikhael’s thigh.
She clung to his hand. “If he’s stabilizing now, shouldn’t we just inject him with a massive dose of antibiotics, give him a tetanus booster and monitor him?”
Those eyes still crackled with aggression, unmeant for her yet still daunting. They ignored her and her protest, turned to his task. Her eyes followed his exploration. Her stomach quivered at the fist-sized wound blasted in Mikhael’s thigh. Handling it in the heat of the moment, bathing in his blood, she hadn’t had awareness enough to dwell on the horror. Three days since it had happened, it looked far worse. How bad did Dante think it was?
Whatever his diagnosis, his lips twisted on it. He reapplied a fresh pressure bandage, announced his verdict. “I have to tend to his vascular injury now or he will lose his leg even if we save his life.”
“Oh.” A flash of agony seared her. “I guess I put off thoughts of complications and prognoses, knowing there was nothing I could do about them.”
“It’s lucky his leg isn’t gangrenous by now. But there’s a lot of damage to his common femoral artery and vein.”
Every catastrophic complication reared its head now she’d let herself think. “But if there is the slightest chance intervention could dislodge a clot and cause an embolism, shouldn’t we choose between life and limb?”
“No.”
Just no? “Care to elaborate?”
Evidently not. He started spreading his surgical instruments on a pre-sterilized surgical towel. She tried again. “What can you do here?”
“I’ve done vascular repair in worse conditions.”
Her eyes darted to the filthy floor, the limited instruments. “Worse conditions?”
“A trench with raining shrapnel, with your operating arm almost out of order are worse conditions, don’t you think?”
She had to agree.
He continued. “And I didn’t have a grade-A surgical nurse to assist me then.” He turned away, produced disposable surgical drapes, large swabs and a bottle of povidone-iodine. “Help yourself. I need both his legs prepped down to his feet.”
It took her only seconds to comply, all the time hearing Mikhael’s lover’s rising sobs. Seeing her man reduced to a draped body, with only the field of surgery exposed, must be adding to her indelible trauma.
