#14 To Save a Man's Life

"Jules, get him rigged up to the vitals monitor," she said as soon as they'd settled the stretcher on the operating table.

"On it," he grunted back.

Goose hurriedly hooked the patient's blood bag onto the IV stand, then started snipping off the bandages. She was relieved to hear the beeping from the heart rate monitor once it was engaged, but his pulse was still thready. With great care, she peeled the now-solid coagulant out of the wound and angled one of the OR lamps to get some more light on it.

"Oh, kark," she sighed as she surveyed the damage.

It was a remarkably clean cut, and she could tell just by looking that it was also very deep. It was thin as well, no more than perhaps a half an inch wide. There would be no way for her to help him without extending the incision for a closer look.

"Scalpel," she said, holding her palm out for the instrument.

"Scalpel," Jules echoed, passing it to her.

Goose flicked the on switch, and the vibroscalpel hummed to life. She extended the incision on both ends, but was still unable to see much of anything. Blood started flowing afresh, and IV or not he was going to bleed out soon.

"Drok it," she swore softly. "I'm going to have to crack his chest. Rib spreader."

"Rib spreader," he said back.

She really hated to do it, especially given his fragile state, but there was no way around it. She had to get a visual on the damage. It wasn't very difficult to spread the ribs, in fact all one had to do was insert the arms between two ribs and turn the handle. The instrument would ratchet the ribs apart, and that was that. Of course, the procedure was invasive and might very well do him more harm than good if she didn't hurry up.

With the ribs out of the way, Goose could finally see it. The blade must have just nicked the edge of the left ventricle, then gone on to pierce the nearby lung. It had also gone in at a bit of an angle, meaning that while the heart had been largely spared, the lung was in ruins. No wonder it'd filled up with blood so quickly. Under better circumstances, she would have attempted a lung resection, but with the primitive resources she had to work with it would be all but impossible.

She probed the wound, trying to think of the best way to repair it. The heart was the major concern, because a gush of blood poured out with each beat. She'd used her fingertip to put a stop on it, but that was only temporary. There was no way a glue-stat was going to hold a moving muscle like the heart, so Goose would have to use dissolving sutures. Sutures were hardly difficult for her, but at this point it was all a race against time. She worked with the speed of desperation, his vitals taking a nose dive even as she secured the last stitch.

The only thing she could do was wait and hope the sutures held, and that his blood pressure would go back up to a safer level because of it. Her eyes were transfixed on the monitor as she stood with bated breath, not daring to move for fear that it would make something go wrong. The seconds crawled by, and the monitor continued to beep erratically. It may have only been her mind playing tricks on her, but she could have sworn that it was getting weaker.

"Come on," she murmured shakily, "Don't let the bastard get you. Fight it…"

Then slowly, ever so agonizingly slowly, his heartrate and blood pressure climbed up and stabilized. Goose whooped and laughed with relief. It was far too soon to celebrate, since she still had his lung to contend with, but at least he was out of the woods.

"Okay, Jules," she sighed. "Let's see about closing up here. Spong-"

She never got the chance to finish her sentence. Somehow, against all odds, the patient was awake. He was thrashing on the table, writhing in agony and choking on his tube. Goose swore violently, trying to hold down his shoulders to keep him from flopping off the table. She stared into his eyes, which were wild with fear, as she tried to get her voice to work again. This was impossible. With all the blood he'd lost, she would have been surprised if he'd woken up at all within the next day or so. But here he was, fully awake and without anesthetics. She was in shock. Had restoring blood flow really been enough to draw him back to consciousness?

"Get him sedated, now!" Goose finally shouted.

Jules fumbled around, then plunged a hypo into his neck. His whole body slumped back down on the table. She hoped that Jules had gotten the dosage right, but at least the patient was unconscious. It wasn't unheard of to skip anesthesia in an emergency, and it wasn't the first time she'd had to do it, but this was just too close. Who knew what damage had just been done to his already weakened heart? Goose waited for the vitals monitor to start beeping like crazy again, because she was sure there was no way he could've survived that intact.

But his heart was fine, somehow. It was something else that was the matter. Sometime when he had been awake, his tube had gone askew. Now it was twisted up in his airway, probably asphyxiating him. Goose cursed some more while carefully extubating him. With a compromised airway, it would not be safe to continue surgery. All of this was going terribly. Nothing had gone right since the moment she'd walked into those showers, and now she didn't know what else to do.

Had she been on a core world, she'd probably be facing the worst malpractice lawsuit of the century for this. But this wasn't a core world, and if this patient died, she likely wouldn't even be reprimanded. That's how little anyone seemed to care, and that's what made it worse. She had to save this patient, for her own sanity at the very least. Trouble was, she hadn't a clue what her next move was. Without intubation, continued surgery was just too risky. He'd never make it. Putting in another tube wasn't an option either, since his airway had swollen up so much she'd never get it in. But she couldn't very well leave him like this.

There was only one thing left to do. She ground her teeth in frustration, trying to see another way, but there was none. He was simply too weak to undergo surgery at the moment. They would have to wait until he was stronger, maybe tomorrow sometime, and they had restored his blood volume. He was already at risk of bleeding out anyway.

"Jules, get me a chest tube," Goose sighed.

She supposed he looked at her quizzically, though there was no way to tell through the helmet.

"What are you planning?" he asked as he handed it to her.

Goose hesitated a moment, still unsure about her plan, then forged ahead.

"If I keep operating, he'll die of the table," she explained slowly. "So I'm going to close him up and wait for him to recover a little. With any luck, he'll be strong enough by tomorrow and I can finish what I started."

She didn't mention that he might die before then, but there was really nothing more for her to do. The chest tube would drain the excess blood from the lung in absence of the pump, and the IV would help replace what he had lost. It was by no means a perfect solution, but what else was there?

"So who did you tell?" she asked Jules, trying to keep her mind off what she was doing as she went about the easy task of inserting the tube.

"Commander Cody," he said after a while, probably not sure what she'd meant at first. "He said he would look into it right away."

Then why hadn't anyone come down to investigate? It certainly hadn't felt like it, but it must have been nearly ten minutes since Jules had made the report. Surely someone should have stopped by already.

"Do you think something's the matter?" she asked as she taped the tube in place.

He didn't respond for a moment, and she assumed that it meant he was trying to contact Cody again. She knew that clones could control the external audio on their helmets, so that they could be screaming curses at you a foot away and you'd never hear it.

"I can't seem to raise him," he answered with trepidation. "All the comm channels are full."

That was not good. This only ever happened during the day, when the army was on the offensive or under attack. Never during the night. Her stomach clenched, worrying over what had happened. It could be nothing important, or it might mean hours of more surgery. She was closing up the wound with a bacta patch when she heard noise in the hallway and pre-op.

"Go check on that," she told Jules. "I'll finish up here."

The IV bag was nearly empty, so she replaced it with a new one. She did one last check to make sure everything was as good as it was going to get, then threw a few blankets over the patient to keep him warm. He was naked, after all. There was also still blood all over him, but she could deal with that later, once she had everything straightened out. She was about to push him into post-op when Jules burst back into the OR. She could tell without even seeing his face that he was distressed, and her heart skipped a beat. What could it be?

"Goose, there's….there's at least a dozen wounded out there," he stuttered a bit. "They're Rex's men."

She stared back at him in shock. This never happened at night. Something was very, very wrong here.

"What?" she all but demanded.

"The…the 501st, was leading and they were ambushed," Jules continued breathlessly, "But the enemy couldn't have known. It's impossible…"

Goose let him be distraught for just a moment longer, knowing full well that he was worried most about his squad. But if there really was a dozen wounded out there, it meant there would probably be even more coming later.

"Jules, it seems to me everything that's been happening lately is impossible," she sighed. "So let's just get down to business."