The supply of sulfa powder that had arrived on the mercy ship Teia Maru a year ago was nearly gone. But the heroic camp committee always managed to scrape up medical supplies when the need was greatest. And they knew that sulfa was their only hope of escaping a morbid outcome.
Camp scuttlebutt had it that a supply of sulfa had been brought into the camp just the night before. If true, it was God’s timing at its best. But how long before the commandant would release it to the hospital? Any slight infraction of the half million rules he’d imposed on the camp might encourage him to withhold whatever he thought was most needed in camp. And the most needed thing right now was sulfa.
Once it was released to the camp, it still had to be pressed into pill form.
She was at the door about to leave, the sulfa dilemma uppermost on her mind, when a low whistling sound stopped her. She turned in time to see Jeanne Travay’s younger brother entertaining one of her little patients.
“Goodness, Saul, I was just leaving. Everything okay with you?”
“Hunkee-doree, Doc.”
Dorothy smiled, noting the small bundle he was tossing up and down. He caught it easily behind his back, then tossed it again, though this time he had to fumble for it.
The children loved it. Saul came up breathless.
He was an understandably scrawny fourteen-year-old with a winning smile. He lobbed the package one more time, raising his arm high enough that his shirt exposed some angry purple marks marching up his bony rib cage.
“Hold on there, Saul. Those are some nasty bruises.”
His smile turned sheepish. “Oh they’re fine, Doc. Not to worry.”
Something in his tone told her there was a story behind his cavalier dismissal.
“Out with it, young man. Did you fall?”
Saul stopped tossing the small package and held it out to her, clearly intending to change the subject. “These are for you, Doc. Sulfa pills. Not a full supply but I thought you’d want what we produced last night. Soon as the Japs released it we pulled a shift together to press ,em.”
The medicines received in camp came in their raw, lumpy powder form. Saul had evidently worked a shift grinding the powder to its finest form with mortar and pestle, then hovered over the ancient copper pill press to produce the round tablets. No wonder the boy looked weary.
He dropped the packet on the desk beside her.
“Well, you certainly didn’t get those bruises punching pills, did you.”
“Nah. Had a little dust-up with a guard last night.”
“You were out after curfew?”
“Had a pass, though. All on the up-and-up. Makin’ the pills for ya.”
“Well then?”
“Guard didn’t like it that I snagged a handful of turnips from the Jap stores on my way home, dontcha know.”
“He caught you stealing? Saul! You could be—”
He grinned. “Yeah, but I’m not. Ernest Stanley came along and saved my bacon.” Earnest Stanley was a translator on the Camp Committee. He spent so much time with their captors that some internees liked to call into question his loyalty. But those who knew the information he reaped from those informal chats with the Imperial Army understood how very valuable his hours among the Japanese soldiers truly were.
“But the bruises?”
“Ah,” he sighed. “Knocked myself into a stack of crates when that Jap guard jumped out at me with his bayonet. I think I woke him up. Scared the willies outta me.”
Dorothy shuddered at the thought of where Saul might be this morning if Stanley hadn’t come to his rescue. Whatever the British translator was doing out late at night was certainly good fortune for young Saul. It was God’s good timing all over again.
The boy saluted and ambled out the side door. But something about the rhythm of his exit was wrong. His shuffling gait surprised Dorothy. The boy was always on the run. But today he walked. As if he weren’t in any hurry. As if he couldn’t hurry.
Dorothy called him back.
“Up on the exam table, young man,” she ordered. He made a good stab at grumbling but gave in too easily. If she was reading him right, he wanted her to examine him.
She kept up an easy banter with the boy as her fingers traveled across his bruises. They were deep, but the damage beneath wasn’t critical, and to her relief she detected no internal bleeding. And no cracked ribs.
Dorothy covered the worst of Saul’s bruises with a poultice of brown paper soaked in hot sambong vinegar. It seemed to bring the boy measurable relief.
He and the other teens who liked to work the pill press had done her a huge service by working a night shift. But it was just too risky for them to be out at night. She would talk to his sister about his night’s escapade as soon as she had the chance. Jeanne was worth her weight in gold, and Dorothy would return the girl’s loyalty by looking after her brother.
. . . .
Jeanne Travay had become one of the stabilizing cogs that kept Dorothy’s world working. She washed the children’s clothes so Dorothy only had to look after her own and Fred’s. She found a ball of string so Dorothy could knit new underclothes for Carol and Bobby. Each week she came up with some small morsel that gave the children a meager addition to the horribly deficient line chow.
She had even introduced Dorothy to a woman who owned a washing machine and made it her personal mission to clean the rags that women had to use when “Aunt Flo” made her monthly visit. It was an act of kindness that meant more to these women than any could express.
But recently, many of the women had stopped visiting the kindly woman who laundered their bloodied rags. They needed fewer and fewer of her pristine, boiled, cleaned, folded and freshly stuffed rags as two years of malnutrition gradually robbed their bodies of that natural cycle.
For Dorothy, the day she no longer needed to visit the rag basket came and went with little notice. If she insisted on answering the call of her little patients at all hours of the day and night, her malnourished body would simply do what it had to do. It began shutting down unnecessary functions.
The fatigue she was feeling now intruded upon everything. It slowed her down, made her think twice, double checking every decision. Fatigue made every chore take longer.
Dearest Mother,
I’m whingy (whin-gee) today. That’s what my British friends call it. Means whiny. Please don’t think badly of me, but I’ve been whining a lot lately. Maybe not out loud. At least I hope not! But all I want to do is lie down and take this weight off my swollen ankles. I admit I’ve never been too empathetic with women who complain of swollen ankles. Now I take back every word I ever said. These huge clubs at the ends of my legs are sapping my energy and making me feel downright ugly. And the fatigue... Mother, sometimes I don’t know how I can put one foot in front of the other. And then I get caught up in looking after my little patients and I somehow forget about it. Until the next time I sit down, and it overwhelms me.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
WHINGY
Santo Tomás Internment Camp
Limited Private Edition - Frederic H. Stevens
© 1946 - page 454-460
September 21—The great day arrives at last! U.S. planes raid Manila.
September 23—Commandant’s office warns of greater bombing activities to take place in near future. Urges internees to continue constructing shelters.
September 24—Annex (children) has two meals a day plus rice and milk for lunch.
October 12—Internees warned not to enter closed area in front of Education Building or look at packages being stored there.
Internee Committee submits letter to Commandant asking for information regarding activities taking place on front campus, where soldiers are quartered and army stores being deposited. Point made that this is internment Camp and should be kept from becoming a military objective.
After a sweltering summer, the appearance of American planes in the skies turned every internee into
a mixed bag of hopes and fears. Surely liberation was imminent. But the constant explosions on the fringe of the city and incessant air raids intruded upon every task now, throwing any kind of schedule to the wind.
The children’s clinic was moved to the first floor of Main. Dorothy began hording small bits of food for her most critical patients, determined that when the skies turned brutal with smoke and flak and brought the kitchens to a screaming halt, her little ones would still eat. Parents of the little patients followed her example and somehow kept bits and pieces of shredded banana skins and the occasional batch of bomber bread appearing in the clinic’s small larder. There were even a few camotes, the Philippine sweet potato that had been a staple in the first years of captivity and now were nearly non-existent.
She kept Bobby and Carol with her during the daytime now, knowing they were safer on the first floor of Main than they were in the one storey Annex. She had to keep them as safe as possible from the bombs that seemed to come nearer every day. She had to keep them safe from the Japanese guards who threatened harsh retribution to any prisoner who dared to look at the sky in search of winged heroes.
Excerpt from Manila Goodbye by Robin Prising
© 1975 by Robin Prising. pp 146
Nearly a month went by before the American planes came back to bomb Manila. When the raids started up again in mid-October, we were strictly forbidden to watch them. Lieutenant Abiko made certain that the rule was enforced as he and his soldiers knocked about the camp trying to catch anyone looking at a plane. If caught, you were slapped and hustled roughly to the guardhouse near the Main Gate, where you were made to stand with folded arms, looking straight ahead, out in the open—despite stray bullets and shrapnel—for a twelve-hour stretch. As the raids persisted, glancing up at the sky at any time might incur such punishment, and some people grew so furtive that whenever they left their rooms they kept their eyes on the ground.
It seemed to Dorothy as if it took twice as long now to do everything. Even knitting a pair of string undies for Carol. She could no longer sit for a couple of hours, knitting through the evening’s enforced blackout. She was simply too tired.
She would sit on the bunk with her feet up, giving the edema in her ankles the ghost of a chance to recede, and then she’d wake up an hour later with only a half row of stitches done. And the last few stitches were such a cobbled mess she’d have to pull them out and start again.
The unorthodox knitting string was thin and coarse, but with the right stitch it made a reasonably comfortable pair of panties. Within minutes of starting to knit, Dorothy’s shoulders would begin to complain and she’d shift about trying to get comfortable. Moving without pain was a distant memory these days. The aching persisted, whether she was bending over a patient or harvesting her family’s meager share of weeds.
They weren’t really weeds, though in civilized times they were treated as such. No self-respecting yard or garden would tolerate what some called Philippine spinach. But here they were carefully grown greens, the only edible greens available now in the compound. Nobody would forego collecting their weekly allotment of talinum weed, no matter how much their shoulders hurt. An internee would no more leave talinum uncollected than a prospector would leave gold in the mine.
Knitting at night made gathering talinum in the afternoon that much more painful. And gathering talinum made knitting a simple pair of undies take an extraordinarily long time. But one day the process came to its successful conclusion and Dorothy tiredly but joyfully presented Carol with two new pairs of panties.
Carol held them up, then folded them to her chest. “Thank you, Mommy.”
“Change into one of them now and put your panties in the basket for Jeanne to wash tomorrow, sweetie pie.”
While Carol changed, Dorothy laid back on the bed. The effort of finishing the second pair had worn her out. She prayed she wouldn’t get an emergency call over the camp loudspeaker to report to the hospital. She doubted she’d make it across the yard.
Dorothy reached for the laundry basket to stow the old pair Carol had just stepped out of.
“Wait, Mommy.”
“What, dear?”
“Wait. I need those back.” Carol’s sad voice came as little more than a whisper. But a poignant note caught Dorothy’s attention and she sat up and turned to face her little daughter.
Carol stood in the narrow path between the bunk and the wall, a tear running down her cheek and her new panties hanging down around her knees.
Dorothy had made the very same size she’d made three months earlier. She was sure of it. But this pair was easily two sizes too large. And not because they’d been made differently.
They were too large because her precious daughter was losing weight more rapidly. Too rapidly. And now her tiny behind didn’t carry enough flesh to keep her panties from slipping to her knees.
The realization of it devastated in a way that sent Dorothy struggling to draw a breath. The sight of it broke her heart.
But she refused to let the truth of it break her spirit.
“Give them here, sweetie-kins. Mommy can fix them.”
. . . .
She watched Carol even more keenly these days. The happy child who had memorized every verse of every hymn rarely sang now. Her hair was thinner and curled less eagerly. Her brother’s antics no longer annoyed her, but simply passed without comment.
Carol’s plump baby cheeks had lasted well into her fourth year. But today there was no trace of them. Today they lived only in Dorothy’s memory.
Dorothy’s reaction to that realization was incredibly physical. She knew now that it was possible for one’s own heart to literally quake if the news were dire enough.
And the evidence of her daughter’s decline set her in motion. Within minutes of arriving at the children’s ward she began to examine Carol and Bobby thoroughly. Every vital sign and every limb, palpating carefully and listening intently.
“Does this hurt?”
“Nope.”
“This?”
“Nope.”
She kept eye contact with Bobby, searching to see if his answers matched the message in his baby blue eyes.
“Does this hurt?” Bobby asked as he poked her back.
“Nope,” she smiled, though in truth it had. He was a tough little tyke, resilient, like a marathon runner. Painfully scrawny but tough.
“Well, Bobby Chambers, you are the most fit four-year-old I’ve seen in a month of Sundays. I declare you champion of the universe.”
Bobby beamed and jumped down from the examination table. “What about Sissy? Is she champion of the girl’s universe?”
Dorothy laughed at his enthusiasm. “She may well be, brother bear. You run over to my desk and get the treat I left for you.”
“Salt?” he asked hopefully.
When she nodded he shot off toward her desk. She watched him wet his index finger, then roll it across the few grains of salt she’d placed in a metal dish. He stood there a moment, just looking at his finger, then with reverence he put his finger in his mouth to suck away its saltiness. Seconds later he plopped down cross-legged on the floor, then dropped his head back, eyes closed, his tongue licking his lips over and over so as not to miss a single grain of its goodness.
She turned to Carol, already sensing what was to come.
Before she even put the stethoscope to Carol’s chest she felt she knew what she would hear. The dark circles under her daughter’s eyes, the listlessness, both warning signs of the murmur she feared.
And it was there. Carol’s heart was literally beginning to break.
Dorothy’s own heart tripped over itself, thudding ominously in her breast. Carol’s little body had devoured all the fat it could find, every little morsel, and now, on the edge of starvation, it was starting to attack her heart muscle.
. . . .
Once she had confirmed her diagnosis, Dorothy sent an urgent message to Henry Waters. He was here,
now, and Dorothy felt her nerves calm merely by his comforting presence in the examining room.
“Open your blouse, Carol Joy. Let Dr. Waters hear your heart.”
Carol complied, her motions listless, her eyes dull. That was the hardest for Dorothy, seeing the inquisitive light dimming in her precious daughter. In the past, Carol would have been on a keen edge, begging her turn to listen herself, asking all manner of questions about hearts and veins and lungs and how did God know to make it that way.
But not today.
Today it wore her out just to undo the buttons on her blouse. Her little frame was birdlike, delicately boned, so fragile. When she exhaled on an exhausted huff, her ribs stood out in skeletal detail.
A panic she’d never felt before swept over Dorothy, thwarting her usually calm diagnostic process. She had to get more protein into this child. Starting now. Today. And every day she had to find more.
“Do you hear it?” Dorothy watched Henry’s face as he listened.
“I do!” he chimed. “Do you want to listen, Carol?” He didn’t even wait for her to answer and already had the stethoscope plugged into Carol’s ears. Once she was distracted listening to her own heartbeat he turned to Dorothy.
“You’re right, Dorothy. It’s a murmur. A fairly significant one, I’m afraid.”
He patted her hand, sympathy written fully on his face. He had known Carol since she was a toddler, and had delivered Bobby under perilous circumstances. Dorothy trusted him like no other with her children.
And he’d just confirmed her fear.
“Have her take meals at the hospital for three weeks. Bobby, too, I think. Then—”
“Henry, it...I...what I mean is...could you—”
“Oh goodness, yes! What was I thinking. You can’t really prescribe extra rations for your own children, can you? People will talk. Sorry! I’ll arrange Carol’s prescription and we’ll take a look at Bobby down the road. How does that sound?”
Relief covered her in waves of emotion that threatened to set her trembling. There was no doubt in Dorothy’s mind that he’d just saved Carol’s life, giving her permission to eat the more nutritious food that the hospital kitchen was allowed to prepare. In truth, hospital food was only marginally better. But better was better.
Courage in a White Coat Page 36