Comes a Time for Burning by Steven F. Havill Read Free Book Online

there, but nothing else. Yet the damage to the fragile brain inside had to be immense. An ampoule of ammonia held under his nostrils or the prick of a pin on the bottom of his foot produced not the slightest twitch. With no obvious depression of the skull, no lesion, no laceration, there was no single, isolated spot that Thomas could point to and say,
“Aha! Here
lies the source of hemorrhage.
This
is where to begin.
This
is where we should open the doorway into the skull.”
    Thomas opened his eyes and regarded the textbook again, a current edition that professed the very latest in medical advances. But the author—and one of Thomas’ favorite professors at the University of Pennsylvania—had been skeptical of treatment.
    “The measures appropriate for the first few hours’ treatment of contusion of the brain are diametrically opposed to the line of treatment required after reaction has been induced,”
Dr. John Roberts had written, then added—and Thomas could imagine that wry smile that he remembered so well from lectures—
“It is a nice question to know when the change should be made.”
    A nice question indeed, since no discussion of initial treatment for blast injury had been mentioned. A contusion of the brain generally resulted from a blow, and a blow left marks that said, “
Open here.”
Thomas had no such sign.
    After reaction has been induced
. But there had been no reaction induced. Sonny Malone lay comatose as his life’s blood leaked from a thousand tears in his concussed brain—a thousand lacerations, the text called them.
    Thomas snapped the book closed and pushed back from the counter. He glanced at his watch and saw that lunch had passed him by an hour before. He walked through the main ward to the three small rooms that had been partitioned off in the back. Sonny Malone lay in the first, curtains drawn over the single window and the gas light turned down to a tiny, quiet flame.
    For a long time, the physician stood at the foot of Malone’s bed. The “ice pillow” was in place, cushioning the patient’s skull from the nape of his neck to his eyebrows, the chill of the ice helping to constrict blood vessels, slowing the deadly seep of blood that would suffocate the brain.
    A nice question
. At what point, then, should healing be encouraged by gentle heat or stimulation?
    Should the patient be bled as a means of releasing pressure on the brain? The textbook had mentioned such a measure, but to be used with great caution. That meant that Dr. John Roberts, despite his years of experience, was just not sure
what
would work. Yet Thomas could not bring himself to believe that draining the body’s very life source would be anything but counterproductive.
    Sonny Malone’s bashed hands lay bandaged and splinted. The three great knuckles for the first, second and third fingers of each hand had been smashed by the spruce, but that was of little concern now. Thomas had rearranged the bones into a reasonably straight line and splinted them, but at this point, he would have considered it a triumph if Sonny Malone had howled out in conscious agony.
    “Will you talk with Mrs. Schmidt now?” Bertha Auerbach’s voice was a mere whisper, and he turned.
    “Yes, I suppose so. When was the ice changed last?” He found it difficult to tear his mind from this case, to wash the slate clean, to direct his attentions elsewhere.
    “Every twenty minutes, as you instructed. Twenty on, then rest for twenty.”
    “You’ve seen no reaction?”
    “None. But the body has great resources.”
    Thomas sighed. “A daring rescue, and here he is, under our roof. And there’s nothing we can do to save him. Nothing.” Thomas ran a hand through his hair, pausing with his palm on the crown of his head. “What could we have done within the first few minutes? What if the rescue hadn’t taken so interminably
long
? Should I have climbed up to him myself and tried to administer some relief? Sometimes I think that I should