Inside the complex
Trowa
Barton gave his thanks to Abdul for cleaning up most levels with the
sentry guns. That allowed him to leave Quatre and Duo completely
unattended as he bedded WuFei and Hilde in the twin room across the
hall.
He split the remaining supply of Intravenous fluids, the salt water and plasma, between his new patients, and needled both right and left arms, doubling the output, while maintaining a modest drip.
He had to place Hilde on her stomach, because of the buttock wound, yet he was still compelled to elevate her legs, in order to slow blood loss. He didn't like it, because he might cause permanent back pain. He disliked the next step even more.
His palms perspired as he slid his arms under her, unfastened her pants. He mumbled a curse, and unpeeled the gooey fabric. Her legs looked like those of a fowl immersed in commercial barbeque sauce. He wrapped bandaging over the thigh, and padded the entry and exits wounds with sterilizing cotton. Next, he visibly gagged after removing her footwear. Trowa didn't know how to treat this type of wound, so he merged a cold pack with a foot wrap, and treated it like a major sprain, but first, he repositioned her dangling tendon the best he could, and set it with a bandage of its own.
Thinking, he puts miscellaneous objects under the posterior of her mattress, and removes the pillows elevating her legs. Now, her back is in alignment, and her blood is still localized around her vital organs. Trowa winces, and curses himself for not thinking of it before.
Now for the buttocks. With no other option, he breathes deeply, and removes his patient's privacy. The cheek is still dripping when he makes an incision with a razor. His explores under the skin and finds the bleeding canal, a big fat artery. He fetched two forceps, and clips them to both sides. A buildup of pressure resisted, but Trowa didn't give in. He tied it up, and sewed it together with holding sutures. Like the Army Corp of Engineers, Trowa didn't believe any extra protection should be dismissed as superfluous, so he took the extra step of tubing around the wound with some tape (with drops of glue) before removing the skin retractors, and sealing the skin shut with more glue. He then added some local anesthetic to the butt, and actually burned the top layer of skin on both the entry and exit holes.
Satisfied the worst was over, he wrapped her up for privacy, and reenacted the procedure on her thigh.
"My expert opinion is that you'll be fine," he whispered, keeping a clinical eye on her. Dr. Barton felt confident enough to set Hilde on her back, though flipping her over took some doing, but he triumphed without ripping out her IV tubes.
He walked over to WuFei and reenacted only the final stages of his operation with Hilde, administering local anesthetic, and burning the wounds shut. None of his arteries where hit, and the capillaries where healing on their own, after all.
Why scare them? He concealed the burns by wrapping more bandages. As mentioned earlier, 'superfluous' isn't part of his dictionary, so he saw no sense in being frugal.
"'A penny saved is a penny depressing the economy,' I always say," he explained, examining the EKGs.
WuFei looked good, but Hilde looked almost beyond reach.
"She's dying," he alerted, even as he swabbed his own arm, "Trowa's Log: The last drips of IV fluid are draining into my two newest patients, Chang WuFei, and Hilde Schbeiker. Abdul, since they are comatose, I'm drinking off most of their camel pack water supplies, and delivering the remainder to my two incapacitated wounded in the other room. I'm also forcing myself to eat their rations, and instructing my two waking patients to eat theirs. I'm eating for three because Hilde's dire condition compels me to siphon a large portion of my own blood into her veins. Once my two partially recovered patients and I are finished with our tasks, we'll work together to wheel the injured out through the Aries hanger. At that new op point, Duo and Quatre, will wheel down the service road to the extraction point, where they'll motorboat into Mogadishu. I'll then reenter the complex, and try to disable the manual firing station within the Noventa Cannon. As you know, Abdul, that is the only room isolated enough to require a man-sized ventilation shaft, so I'll crawl down that, and sporadically feed the team's handful of sedative and tear gas grenades in their until a mop up posse can be arranged to storm the room. Trowa out."
"Roger, Trowa. Nichol, Sally, Dorothy, and Townsend are all at the rally point of Maxwell House. I'm in the process of paging Townsend. Please stand by."
