Hi there.
Its been a while. For the new readers, welcome.
For the old ones, welcome back and I am very sorry.
Excuses can run a page long, maybe even more.
But guess the oldest in the book ought to do for now: Life happened.
I got caught up in a vicious circle of making it too accurate.
This is to tell you that even though I won't promise YOU I'll finish this story by the 4th of July, I do solemnly swear that I'll do my best to finish it nonetheless.
It's a good story and deserves a good end.
Its readers are great, and reviewers, simply the best.
They deserve nothing less.
So here I am, back at my laptop, opening the ginormous file I labeled 'I Think Too Much' because that's what I did do and figured, so would Pierce.
He might get his answers when I do.
Chapter 104
Frank simply didn't deserve any courtesy or decency. And after the hell he put me through- continued to put me through- the request from Colonel Potter to show any of that to him simply wasn't worth the effort. He was going to make me pay for making him look like the incompetent ass he was. There were no two ways about that.
But maybe Potter was more worried than he let on. Desperate times, desperate measures kinda worried.
Exhaustion and wariness had settled deep in my bones. I was moody and all over the place with the swings, one day elated and high, the next down in the dumps, surly and negative. I knew that it was part the illness, part exhaustion and part where I was and what I was forced to do. Being nice to Frank seemed like something beyond my grasp.
It took us over 13 hours to finish the work. Not all of it could be blamed on Frank alone. We were all slower than usual. Nobody had rested properly in the whole of last week, with the whole Christmas push adding more casualties than was necessary, even by the indecent standards of a war.
Potter wasn't finished with the discussion from earlier but exhaustion claimed him as well. I decided to catch a few winks myself. We had an outstanding argument to take care of.
I was surprised to find BJ, Margaret and Father Mulcahy in the office with Potter. That was oddly reminiscent of an intervention, not unlike the one that took place all those weeks ago when I decided to leave the unit and got yelled at by them all on my return.
I stood at the door, somewhat belligerently, watching them all look at me.
"We need to stop meeting like this. People would start talking. Besides, it's getting old, all this 'interventioning'…"
"That's not even a word, Pierce!" Margaret must have been an excellent teacher's pet in a previous life.
"Take the load off, Pierce."
I kept standing. Sitting meant I was going to let them gang up on me and I had enough of that. Despite having rested, I was so not up to this.
"I am not going to beg Frank to let me off the hook. I am not letting that sniveling, scheming, no-good… Well, he's not going to mess with me like this. I can take a personal attack. Hell, I may have earned a few. But not a professional attack. I may have slipped or done less than was expected of me but I'm a damned good surgeon, better than Major Ten Thumbs on his best day, with my eyes blindfolded and right hand tied behind. So no, the answer is 'No'. One last time, I did NOT nick the Pulmonary Artery. I didn't miss a shrapnel in his heart. I saved that boy's life. Four times. The only thing that failed was done by Frank. THAT'S what killed that young boy. I performed one anastomosis and two repairs AFTER that and one of them was on a major vessel. Somebody wants to blame the prolonged hypotension for the leak that killed him, well, it didn't hurt my work.
I suggest you guys stop wasting your time trying to convince me of doing something that has less than one percent chance of working and instead, gather the facts and see them for what they are."
That was one hell of a long speech and left me winded and would have been more dramatic if I had about-faced and left the office. But I wanted to see the effect of that speech.
They all seemed unfazed.
What a waste of such brilliant eloquence.
"We know all of that. Now sit your ass down. This wasn't an intervention. We need a strategy. And we need to go over the facts once more, as you suggested.' Again, that was Margaret.
That was when I noticed the huge file lying on Potter's desk.
"Oh-kay. You should have mentioned that before I, uhhh…"
"Shut up, Hawk!" BJ had an almost smile under his mustache.
"You didn't give us a chance, Hawkeye." And what was Father Mulcahy doing here?
"So here are the facts: Pierce got hepatitis. He became friends with Lieutenant O'Hara. Then they stopped being friends. She instead started seeing Frank Burns…" Margaret opened the file which had a neatly typed page on top.
Who ever had the time or inclination to do that kind of work?
"Hold on a second, Margaret. She wasn't seeing me. Can we stop insinuating?"
"Fine! So she was friendly with Pierce and more than friends with Frank. Then she stopped being friends with Pierce. Hunnicut left for Seoul, Pierce did triage for the intake after Thanksgiving, labelled a patient named Private William Johnson priority 1 and ordered radiographs for chest and abdomen, which we have confirmed with the tech in X-Ray were done, wet films handed over to…"
"Oh God! Lieutenant O'Hara. She saw those films. " BJ suddenly spoke before I could.
Reality dawned on me. Gotta love the Army, and for its penchant for keeping logbooks and paper trail for even the smallest, most inconsequential things, like who signed over for the radiographs.
I just might get vindicated.
"I don't understand. What the hell is going on? Why is she doing all of this?" BJ was still in a bit of shock.
I, on the other hand, felt some weight lift off. But not much. She was negligent. And her folly caused a young boy to lose his life.
"We'll come to that later, Hunnicut." Margaret sounded solemn. Potter was quiet. But the worry lines on his forehead had lessened some.
"That patient, Private Johnson, developed cardiac tamponade after a coughing bout in post-op. Pierce did needle pericardiocentesis and saved his life. First of four times," Margaret looked pointedly at me. "When Frank saw Johnson, he had recovered and Frank couldn't pick any signs of distress in him and dismissed Pierce's concern about a piece of shrapnel in his chest cavity, particularly near his heart. Immediately after that, Johnson went into tamponade again, and that was observed by the on-duty nursing staff. Pierce paged Burns and took Johnson to the OR where he performed a midline sternotomy, relieved the pressure around the heart, discovered a rent in the Pulmonary Artery, repaired it despite having to do it without an assistant as Frank hadn't shown up yet. He had to cross-clamp Johnson's aorta for 19 minutes..."
They all looked at me funnily enough and if I weren't a better man, I would have blushed.
"What about the claim O'Hara made about Pierce nicking the Pulmonary Artery?" Potter was the devil's advocate, even if his heart didn't seem to be in it.
"He went into tamponade, twice, before his chest was opened or his PA even touched. That blood surely came from somewhere. Something had already injured the pericardium and possibly, the PA near its root. As later radiographs showed, there was NO shrapnel left in the chest cavity and only one in the abdomen, in the left iliac fossa, so that piece of shrapnel Hawkeye pulled from the chest caused both pericardial and PA injuries." This time, it was BJ.
Whatever I had done to deserve this kind of support and strength, I'd really like to do it again.
I could have kissed them all. On the mouth. If only I had the strength…
"Cate O'Hara is lying. And Frank Burns has bought into that lie, if he didn't coerce her into it to begin with. Why?" I was curious and furious. I was feeling way too many emotions right now to really understand what I was feeling. But the most striking was my curiosity about the reason behind Cate's actions.
"Because of you?" That was BJ.
I smiled, despite.
Potter grimaced.
Margaret scowled.
Mulcahy grinned.
And then I just laughed out loud.
TBC
PS: Read and review!
I will post soon as I write.
PPS: The whole UI is changed and I'm trying to figure out how to post this chapter without, ya know, blowing up the whole thing.
PPPS: Fanfiction dot net rogered me. Spliced things in the documents editor that was just... Anyway, I have reposted it.