She hit him. Right on the jaw. Just to get his attention.“No, it is not okay, Sergeant. You stay with me, you hear?”
“I... can’t... I...”
“You’re not dying on me, mister. You hear that? I forfeit points if I lose a sergeant, and I’m behind too manypoints today as it is.”
He grinned. He actually grinned. “Sorry to... disappointyou... I’m just... tired.”
“You are not dying on me.” She didn’t know why this onemattered suddenly. After all, she’d already been on duty forfourteen hours. She didn’t foresee introducing herself to abed anytime soon. It was monsoon season, and today thatmeant mass casualties. She’d been handling one patient after another as long as she could remember, blasted, bleeding bodies that had once been strong and healthy and alive.Silent ghosts that disappeared behind the yellow partition and never came out.
So she couldn’t say why this one fired her up, but he did.“You are not dying on me,” she said even as his blooddripped steadily to the floor, as his fever skyrocketed, asthey inserted tube after tube into him and flushed him withantibiotics and more than thirty units of blood. Even afterthey lost him and brought him back four different times inthe OR.
“You hear me?” she demanded to his silent, swathedform as it lay in ICU three days later, racked with the feversof massive infection. As he woke later to find the extent ofhis injuries and tried to pull out all those tubes himself in his delirium.
Every day for two weeks, while he tried to slip silentlyaway, she cuffed him on the shoulder, she patted his cheek,she argued with him and pleaded with him and laughed withhim. And she kept saying, “You are not going to die on me today, Sergeant.”
And for those two weeks, the sergeant did not die. Butthen, as the next wave of mass casualties filled the Quonsethuts to overflowing and the nurse was taping chest-tubebottles and starting IVs and trying to stay awake into hertwentieth hour on duty, the sergeant was rotated out to Japan, and the nurse never knew whether he listened to her ornot.
