The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the man was only lightly injured and didn’t need a surgeon. Three minutes to set a broken wrist and splint it with a strip of cowhide and a piece of wood from a sycamore tree. Two minutes to tourniquet a leg, then extract a piece of wire deep in the meat of it. A minute to peek under a pink, saturated bandage several inches below a slender belly button; he saw thin, red water leaking from a hole and smelled urine, knew the ball had breached the bladder. It would either heal or it wouldn’t, but nothing to do about it so he set the soul aside, a case not to be operated upon. He turned a man’s head looking for the source of a trickle of blood and had ten terrible minutes trying to stop torrential bleeding from under his clavicle; frantic moments during which he could get neither a finger nor a clamp around the pulsating source. All bleeding stops eventually though, and the case did not violate the rule. He took two minutes to settle his own breathing, then four minutes sewing a torn scalp, and half a minute saying a prayer over a fat, cigar-shaped dead man. After awhile, he had the impression he wasn’t seeing men, but parts–an exploded chest, a blood swolled thigh, a busted jaw with its teeth spat to the wind or swallowed. It was more than a man could take and a lot less than there was to be seen. Edison McDaniels
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who... - Mother Teresa
  2. After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting. - Chuck Palahniuk
  3. It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family... - Mary Roach
  4. The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope... - Lance Armstrong
  5. Frostpine made a face. Lifting the cup, he dumped its contents down his throat. “Auugghh! ” he yelled, his voice stronger than it had been since his return from the harbor. "Are you trying to kill me, woman?"" If I mean to kill someone, I... - Tamora Pierce
More Quotes By Edison McDaniels
  1. A large piece of lead floated out of Bobby head, followed by dark chunks of what could only be pieces of Bobby's brain. The torrent started up again. It flowed steady rather than pulsed with his heart. I knew from that, and from the amount...
  2. There are monsters among us. I mean this quite literally.
  3. I had seen that once before, bleeding water. A little baby I worked on as a resident in training. That poor kid had been shot as well–his father had blasted away the top of his head with a shotgun–and we couldn't begin to stop the...
  4. Hundreds of men crowded the yard, and not a one among them was whole. They covered the ground thick as maggots on a week old carcass, the dirt itself hardly anywhere visible. No one could move without all feeling it and thus rising together in...
  5. The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the...
Related Topics