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Doc

Written by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

"Get out of the goddamned way, Little Ferdie!"

Ferdinand Bader got out of Sergeant Sandler's way as quickly as he could. Not that he was really in the way, but it was typical of Sandler to shout, just as it was typical of Captain Lehrer to look down his rather pointed nose at "Little Ferdie."

"Look at the mouse jump!"

Ferdinand carefully didn't look in Corporal Melman's direction. Melman was just plain mean and looked for excuses to make Ferdinand miserable. The mouse comment was, again, typical. Ferdinand had been hearing comments much like it for most of his life. His voice was high and squeaky, commanding neither obedience nor respect. It never had. Further, by inclination, Ferdinand avoided conflict.

He wouldn't even have been in the Army, if it hadn't been for getting drunk that night in Jena, after Papa cut off his funds for the university. The life of a student had suited him just fine. Thankfully, for once the Army had gotten it right and sent Ferdinand to medic school, where he'd finally found his calling.

Not that the calling was easy work. Especially with a pissed off captain, sergeant and corporal. Which wasn't at all fair. Ferdinand hadn't known that medics were a separate corps, not part of the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines.

****

"No!" Ferdinand shouted. For the first time in his life, he was obeyed. "Don't try to move him. He may have internal injuries!" The shocking bit was that his voice, as squeaky as ever, had suddenly been obeyed. Or maybe it was that he had given the command in the first place, or that he was running into the middle of a battle. Ferdinand was dealing with a number of shocking occurrences at the moment. Mostly by ignoring them. He had a patient and that was all that he could allow to matter.

He knelt in the mud outside of Luebeck in the spring of 1634, after a sortie against the disintegrating Danish and French armies. With a pair of medical scissors, he cut away the heavy woolen cloth that was worn as much for its ability to slow a musket ball or pike thrust as for its warmth. That it didn't stop musket balls, he had clear evidence. In the form of what was almost a sucking chest wound.

"You!" Ferdinand pointed at one of the men standing around. "Hold him!" He didn't realize until later that the person he was ordering about was his sergeant. "Unless you want him to bleed out into his lung. Keep him still!"

Not exactly his sergeant. In theory, at least, the Medical Corps had a different chain of command. Sergeant Sandler had apparently not studied the theory. "Little Ferdie," since arriving at Luebeck, had been assigned every midnight guard duty and shit detail the sergeant could come up with. And "Little Ferdie" had had the good sense—or lack of guts—to put up with it. He was fully aware that the captain had a similar opinion of the medics' separate chain of command.

Not that that was the primary reason Ferdinand had failed to complain. It was more in the way of an excuse he gave himself, but even he didn't really believe it. Ferdinand simply wasn't a very forceful person. Never had been. He pulled a biter out of his bag and shoved it into the patient's mouth. "Karl, bite down on this and try to hold still. What I'm about to do is probably going to hurt worse than getting shot did, but we can't move you till I stabilize that rib. The musket ball broke your number four left rib in two places. It's a miracle it didn't rip your left lung apart. But if you move too much, the busted pieces of your rib are going to do the job the ball didn't."

As he was talking, Ferdinand was pulling stuff from the medic bag. Including the alcohol. That was where he had drawn the line with Sergeant Sandler, and with Karl and the other troops in the company. They had wanted to drink the stuff. But he had had it drilled into him in medic class that it was a bad idea. Not just because it would be needed for sterilizing wounds like this one. Pure alcohol was bloody dangerous to drink.

The ball had cut a crease in Karl's chest. But to do what he was going to have to do, Ferdinand was going to have to cut some more. First the alcohol, then the scalpel, then the tweezers to grab bone fragments.

Ferdinand didn't hear the shot, but he felt the flinch as one of the men holding Karl in place instinctively tried to duck. "Hold steady, damn it!" Alcohol on his hands again, then reaching into Karl's chest to carefully pull a large chunk of bone away from his lung.

Someone made a retching sound. Ferdinand didn't even look up. "Johan, if you're going to throw up, let somebody else hold his arm and get away from here!" A suture used to tie the fragment of rib in place, then another to repair a nick in the lung that Ferdinand had caused while he was pulling the large fragment of rib, away from the lung. All the time, praying that Karl hadn't lost too much blood. That he wouldn't die of an infection caused by the muddy ground on which he was lying. That Ferdinand had guessed right about what to do. That the pieces of gut he'd used to get Karl's ribs together wouldn't break. Ferdinand applied the sterile bandage and called for a stretcher. Karl had lost consciousness about half way through the procedure. Which went to prove what Ferdinand had already known; that Karl was one tough son of a . . .

"Gently now! Gently! We can't afford to put stress on the body." As the stretcher bearers were carrying Karl away, Ferdinand looked around for another patient, only to see that the battle was over. He guessed that it hadn't been that much of a battle in the great scheme of things. The Danish forces were back where they belonged. And apparently casualties had been fairly light. There hadn't been any other calls for medics in his area anyway.

Which is what he should have been praying about, he realized. It had taken him. . . Ferdinand didn't know how long it had taken him. But it was more time than a field medic was supposed to spend on a patient. His job was supposed to be simply to get them stable and transport them back to a real doctor. But Ferdinand knew that if he tried to do it that way, Karl would've been dead before he got back to Luebeck.

****

The doctor was Jena trained, with six months in the Grantville teaching hospital. He was surprisingly good for a military unit. And he questioned Ferdinand about every step he had taken. The issue was how much damage would have actually been done transferring Karl back to the aid station that had been set up in a converted beer hall in the town. Then, once he was clear on what had happened, the doctor had dumped all over Ferdinand. Not because he disagreed about the effect on Karl, but because performing that kind of treatment in the field meant that Ferdinand wasn't available in case someone else needed him.

They found someone with Karl's blood type to give him a couple of pints. And the doctor went back in and ...