Chapter 3
Jess found himself floating in a huge inner tube on the lake some six feet from shore. The water was refreshingly cold compared to the sun's rays. He was soaking up the summer sun, listening to the laughter of his wife and daughter playing water bumper cars in their inner tubes close to the shoreline.
He had found a way this year to take a week of vacation time that matched up with Angelyne's leave from her unit at Watertown. They had rented one of the many summer cabins along Skaneateles Lake that dotted both sides of the lake's shore. They both had long loved the Finger Lakes Region of Central New York. As kids, they had enjoyed many years of summer camps in the area. That was where they had met and pledged eternal love. It was a love story that had played out in real life, much to their hearts' content.
Shift change came. Sanchez walked with the fresh shift's nurse, "Sandy" Sanderson, a diminutive, slender man in his 40s.
"This is Jess LaCroix who was brought in last night," she began. "He was blown up in some kind of FBI raid gone sour. Our biggest concern continues to be with his O2 sats. They remain in the high 80s but don't seem to budge from there. Heart and BP are stable. His fever is also up, but we don't think that it's anything other than the usual post-op fever."
She pulled back the sheet covering Jess's right leg.
"Oo, Girl!" Sandy remarked. "What have we here?!"
"Like I said, blown up in a botched raid," Sanchez pulled over the dressing and bandage cart to the side of the bed.
"Is he the good guy or the bad guy?" Sandy inquired.
"You see him handcuffed to the bed?" was her tart reply.
Sandy laughed, "Okay, good guy. So, what happened to the bad guy? He's the only one in the Unit at the moment."
Sanchez shrugged. They both began to cut away the bandages and gently remove the dressings beneath.
"Lemme guess...Dr. Brown knitted this guy's leg back together," speculated Sandy.
"Naw, crocheted it back together," giggled Sanchez.
"Well, he's going to be making some more fancy stitching later," Dr. Brown's baritone inserted itself. "I wanted to see how the leg is looking."
The pair of RNs moved aside, exposing Jess's bare leg. Dr. Brown drew close and sniffed. The nurses looked at each other.
"You can smell infection before you can see it when wounds are this deep," he said nonchalantly. "Infection is our constant enemy."
He pulled up his procedure mask then pulled out a magnifying glass from his pocket and began to examine the tissue carefully. He pulled the sterile paper off a vascular clamp and poked around in one deep laceration. He inspected it looking for any hint of trouble. Next he picked through the dressings that had been removed. He looked at the jar that contained the goo that had seeped out the drain in his leg.
"Okay, these look good. The wounds generally look clean. He's good to go to redress the wounds," he concluded. "If he stays stable, we may go back and fix the broken femur this afternoon. For now, keep the light traction on the leg."
Dr. Brown headed out of Jess's ICU "room." The two nurses finished the redressing of the wounds and rebandaging of the injured leg. Dr. Brown stopped at the desk and wrote his notes into the computer file on "LaCroix, J" who remained heavily sedated.