Cherry Ames Boxed Set 9-12

by Helen Wells

  Dr. Watson told Cherry that an X ray of the patient’s leg had already been taken. It was a simple fracture of the lower leg, the tibia, and Dr. Watson had pretty well decided how to set the fractured bone.

  “His leg is scraped and dirty. Clean it up and dress it, Miss Ames. You’d better remove his shoes and socks while you’re at it.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Cherry turned toward the dazed man.

  “Now see if you can get him to talk to you,” Dr. Watson said. “Maybe I’m too gruff. I’ll be just outside the doorway.”

  Cherry approached the young man. He looked straight at her but apparently did not see her. His eyes seemed to be full of tears or glazed, and he lay on the bed stiff as a wooden puppet. Cherry said in a low voice:

  “Hello. I’m your nurse.”

  This time his eyes focused and he saw her. But he might as well have been staring at a ghost.

  “We’re going to take good care of you here,” Cherry said. “You’re in a hospital now.”

  He closed his eyes for an instant. Was it an answer? Cherry felt something sad, tense, and remote in this young man. He was gaunt and wind-burned; about twenty-five years old. Not a tramp; the face was that of an intelligent if distressed man. Cherry bent over him and whispered:

  “Are you in pain?” He seemed to be.

  No answer. In back of them, Cherry heard Dr. Watson’s heavy breathing. She wiped the leg clean with sterile gauze and covered it lightly with a sterile dressing. She noticed the young man’s broken shoes; they must be uncomfortable. Removing them and the worn, clean socks, Cherry found that his feet were blistered.

  “You must have walked a long way. Your feet look awfully sore.”

  Cherry gestured to Dr. Watson to come look at the blistered feet. The orthopedic specialist stepped into the cubicle, looked, and shook his head.

  “Bathe his feet with a warm, weak sterile saline solution, then with green soap and water.”

  Cherry made the solution and in silence gently bathed the patient’s feet. She glanced up to find that Dr. Watson had left them alone, and the patient was looking at her gratefully. She smiled at him.

  “Won’t you tell me your name?”

  His lips formed the words and then the sound came out with difficulty. “I think it’s Bob Smith.”

  I think—! Cherry was careful not to show her shock. She told him her own name, and said this was Hilton Hospital. They conversed in whispers.

  “Are you from Hilton, or around here?”

  “No.”

  “Where are you from? The Admitting Office will want to know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Never mind. You’ll remember later.”

  “I can’t remember anything. I don’t know who I am, or where I came from, or where I work, not even what my work is—” He struggled to sit up, in panic.

  “It’s all right. Rest, now.” Cherry eased him back against the pillow. She heard Dr. Watson’s voice outside the room. “The doctor will help you. And I’ll stay with you, if you want me.”

  “Yes.”

  Cherry signaled and Dr. Watson entered. Cherry murmured one word: “Amnesia.” It meant loss of memory, and was as real an illness as the man’s broken leg. The doctor gave her a quick look, nodded, and began to examine the patient’s general physical condition. Cherry stayed, ready to assist the doctor. She smiled encouragingly at their patient.

  The young man did not speak when they questioned him, and they did not press him. When the examination was over, Dr. Watson called Cherry out of the room.

  “Nurse, I want you to stay with this young fellow while we set his leg. You’re the only one he’ll talk to, so far. We’ll set it right away, because he’s in pain—there’s no swelling, so no need to wait. We’ll probably be able to get Dr. Hope over here by tomorrow.”

  “Dr. Hope, sir?”

  “We haven’t any Psychiatric Pavilion here, but I’m sure Harry Hope will come over. A young man and a good doctor. He used to be a resident medical doctor here at Hilton Hospital, got interested in—fascinated, I should say—in curing people’s minds and emotions as well as their bodies. They’re all linked together, you know. He left us to train further.”

  Dr. Hope was now a junior psychiatrist on the staff of the University College of Medicine, not many miles away. He and his young family still lived in Hilton.

  “He’ll come over. If Hope says it’s necessary, we’ll move this boy to a special hospital. But with that leg and low vitality of his, I’d rather not move him at all. Hey, Miss Ames, you don’t feel any qualms about a loss-of-memory patient, do you?”

  “No, Doctor. I just hope I’ll be a skillful enough nurse for him.”

  “Good girl. Looks like a nice young fellow, doesn’t he? Now you see why I wanted that quiet room off your ward for him.”

  Cherry took a minute to telephone her ward and ask Mrs. Peters to get an orthopedic bed ready. This bed had boards under the mattress, and hand straps for the patient to pull himself up to a sitting position. Then Cherry and an orderly took Bob Smith on a wheeled table upstairs to the side room. There the orderly undressed him and put a hospital gown on him. Cherry went along with the patient to the Cast Room.

  Dr. Watson gave a local anesthetic: he injected Novocain into the fracture area. Then, with great care, he reduced the fracture; that is, he placed the two ends of the broken bone together, under the skin. Bob Smith was nervous. He kept looking at Cherry, who wiped his forehead and murmured encouragement.

  “There, young fellow, we’re all done!” Dr. Watson said. “You’re lucky this is a simple break, without swelling. No traction for you! We’ll put this leg of yours in a lightweight cast, so you can be up on crutches before you know it.”

  The young man broke into a sweat. Dr. Watson was too hearty, too noisy; Cherry dropped her own voice to a whisper. A plaster of Paris cast was put on the patient’s leg. His badly blistered foot was not enclosed in the cast, but left exposed to avoid infection. Then another X ray was taken to make sure that the alignment of the bones had not been disturbed when the cast was applied.

  Cherry accompanied Bob Smith while an orderly wheeled him back to the private room just off Men’s Orthopedic Ward. The head nurse looked in and offered a few words of welcome. But the young man was too exhausted and dazed to notice her.

  Cherry instructed George, their ward orderly, who had changed Bob Smith into a hospital gown, to keep his ragged garments here until tomorrow. She wanted a chance to examine them carefully for any clue to his identity. For now, Cherry encouraged him to eat and to nap. Her efforts were useless. At three, when Cherry was scheduled to go off duty, she went to the head nurse.

  “Mrs. Peters, I’d like to stay with Bob Smith. At least until he relaxes enough to eat or sleep. I could stay on duty straight through the evening.”

  “I know you’re concerned for this patient, Miss Ames, but Dr. Watson says we’ll give him medication to help him sleep. No, you’d better go home and get some rest.”

  Cherry wondered about her patient as she changed from white uniform into street clothes. Who was he? Where was his home? Where was his family, if any? What tragic happening had caused such distress that his memory was a blank? How could he be restored to the present?

  Cherry went home and for the first time in her life did not say a word about her day’s nursing work. Her parents and twin brother, Charlie, were astonished.

  “Something special is happening,” Cherry apologized.

  That evening she took out her textbooks and looked up amnesia. “Functional amnesia is a purposeful forgetting of things too painful to remember. It is generally not due to any brain injury or disease, but is a memory disturbance. It is not faking or pretended illness; it is as definite and actual an illness as pneumonia.”

  Cherry closed her textbook. How did one cure a lost person who remembered nothing at all of his past? How did one solve a mystery with no clues?

  Preview of Cherry Ames, Island Nurse


  CHAPTER I

  A Call from Dr. Fortune

  CHERRY STOPPED IN FRONT OF HILTON HOSPITAL AND glanced at her wrist watch. She was not due to be on duty for twenty minutes. She stood for a moment, enjoying the sunshine and the fresh, sweet air of spring. What a glorious morning!

  In the sky overhead a small plane was circling about. Shading her eyes with her hand, Cherry watched it descend slowly in widening spirals and bank to come in for a landing at the new private airfield outside Hilton.

  “I wouldn’t mind being up in a plane myself this morning,” Cherry thought dreamily.

  “Nurse Ames, you have a very bad case of spring fever,” she heard a voice boom.

  Startled, she turned her head and saw Dr. Watson, a wide grin on his face, beside her. “Check that fever at the door,” he told her, laughing. “It’s highly contagious.”

  “Good morning, Doctor. You sneaked up or I would have heard you,” she accused him as he started up the walk. Her eyes followed his clumsy, bearlike figure to the entrance. She had a warm spot in her heart for Dr. Ray Watson who was in charge of the Men’s Orthopedic Ward. He had been patient, understanding, and always cheerful when she was a nurse on his ward.

  Cherry was now one of the emergency nurses and was often the nurse on one of his cases. Dr. Watson handled accident cases involving orthopedics, such as fractures and other conditions that caused interference with the use of bones and joints.

  Cherry forgot the sunny sky and the plane and walked through the door into the antiseptic smell of the hospital. The quick change from the air outside made her nose prickle as always, but the odor quickly became familiar and she felt completely at home.

  “Good morning, Miss Ames.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Peters,” Cherry returned the greeting from the head nurse on Orthopedics.

  “Whenever you’ve had enough of Emergency,” Mrs. Peters said with a smile, “remember, I can always use an extra nurse.”

  “I’ll say we can,” declared Nurse Ruth Dale, as she came in the door and fell in step with Cherry. “We’re always short of nurses, you know that.”

  “Hospitals are always short of nurses,” agreed Cherry. They went on down the corridor toward the section where the nurses had their lockers. “It’s a complaint as common as the common cold, or haven’t you heard?” Cherry asked airily.

  Ruth made a face at her, taking the teasing in good nature. She and Cherry had been on duty in the same ward and had been good friends for a long time. Ruth was frank to say that Cherry was shining proof that beauty and brains went together. Cherry’s dark-brown, almost black eyes, black curly hair, and red cheeks, which had won her the name of Cherry, always called forth admiring remarks. Her patients appreciated her cheerful presence.

  The doctors and head nurses recognized Cherry’s ability and skill as a nurse and her deep interest in nursing. She could use her head when clear thinking was needed. And she was as good as a detective about getting at the facts of anything.

  On her part, Cherry never seemed to be aware that she was special and that is what endeared her to her fellow nurses.

  She and Ruth reached the lockers and put their handbags, and the light sweaters they had worn around their shoulders, in their lockers. As they adjusted their caps, Ruth said, “You know, Cherry, I miss you. I guess we all do.”

  “Why, Ruth, what a sweet thing to say!” exclaimed Cherry. “But why be so sad?” She grinned at her friend. “I may not be on the same ward but I’m right in the same hospital, so we just might arrange to lunch together sometime.”

  “What a creature!” cried Ruth. “Taking my kind words and turning them into a feeble joke.” She peered over her shoulder to see if her petticoat showed below her uniform. “But, Cherry, honestly I envy you sometimes. No, I don’t think envy is the right word. Admire is better. You are always, it seems, on interesting cases. That last case you had … Tom … Dick … oh, that young man with amnesia.”

  “Oh, you mean Richard Albee,” Cherry said. “Yes, I’d never been on a psychiatric case before, and working with Dr. Hope was a wonderful education for me in a new field. Before that, the mind always seemed to me to be rather a separate thing. But now I realize just how interrelated mind and body are—how the mind can actually affect physical well-being.” Cherry hung her head in mock chagrin. “Sorry, Ruth,” she apologized, “my mind must be back in nurses’ training at Spencer School. I really didn’t intend to give an early-morning lecture.”

  “Now, I know what your next job is going to be,” Ruth announced solemnly. “You’re going to be a lecturer on psychosomatic diseases, or in simple plain English, those diseases that can be traced to emotional disturbances.” She smoothed down her uniform. “Well, I’m off to the bones-and-joints department. See you later.” Ruth went bouncing off.

  Cherry turned down the corridor leading to Emergency. Here interns were on duty round-the-clock. In addition, there were a head nurse and assistant nurses and doctors quickly available on call. Medical help had to be on hand day and night to take care of any casualty that came in.

  An ambulance with a driver was always ready to answer an emergency call.

  In Emergency, the staff was on the move all the time. Seldom more than an hour or two passed without a call. It sometimes seemed to Cherry that for as small a city as Hilton, Illinois, there was an unusual number of people who were just plain accident prone.

  Walking along the corridor, all the familiar sounds of the hospital greeted Cherry’s ears: the whisper-like tread of feet, glass gently clinking, nurses speaking low or crisp, a child crying or laughing, the anguished voice of a patient. Over the intercom came repeated calls for one of the doctors to call the chief resident physician’s office.

  Before Cherry reached the door of the ER, she heard the motor of the ambulance start up outside and saw one of the young doctors come hurrying down the hall, clutching his bag in one hand and buttoning his white jacket with the other.

  “You’d think people would give a man time to get dressed,” he complained, “before they started getting sick or burned or smashed up or something.”

  “Where are you off to?” Cherry asked.

  “That new private airfield,” replied the doctor and dashed out to the ambulance, which took off at once.

  Trouble at an airfield usually meant only one thing—a crash of some sort, with people broken or burned or both. Cherry recalled the plane she had seen in the air only minutes ago. How sad if something had happened to it or anyone in it.

  Emergency at Hilton Hospital consisted of a large room and three cubicles for patients. It was near the wide doors for receiving stretcher cases. A head nurse and assistant nurses were on duty there at all times. Cherry was one of the nurses on duty from eight A.M. to four P.M.

  Cherry was just entering Emergency when she heard her name called. Dr. Phipps, one of the assistant resident physicians, came striding through the Emergency entrance, carrying a sturdy-legged boy across his outstretched arms. The boy’s face was streaked with blood and he was unconscious. Two boys in T shirts and blue jeans, their faces almost as white as the patient’s where it was not coated with blood, trod upon the doctor’s heels.

  “Is Chuck hurt bad, Doc? Chuck isn’t going to die, is he, Doc?” the boys kept repeating like a refrain.

  “Of course not. Of course not,” Dr. Phipps told them. With a nod, he directed Cherry to one of the cubicles and she helped him lay the youngster carefully on the narrow bed.

  Chuck’s two jean-clad friends would have barged on in, but Cherry captured them and got them seated, assuring them in a clear, confident voice that their friend was going to be all right. “Dr. Phipps will take good care of Chuck,” she said. “The doctor let you come in with him because he knew you wouldn’t make a fuss. Now, you just wait right here quietly.”

  They obeyed her, sitting straight in their chairs and staring out of big, round eyes, rather like two owls.

  Cherry returned to the cubicle. While she cleaned the blo
od from the boy’s face, the doctor continued to examine him. Then she fixed cold packs which Dr. Phipps applied to the bruised and swollen, but unbroken nose.

  Upon regaining consciousness, Chuck was frightened. Cherry soothed him and in a few minutes he began to touch the pack on his nose softly with his finger, his freckled face crinkling up as he sort of grinned around the pack.

  “Guess I broke it,” he said tentatively.

  “No. Lucky you,” said Dr. Phipps. “But a fine way to start spring training for the baseball season is all I can say.”

  “My brother Charlie had the same thing happen to him when he was a kid,” Cherry said. “Stood right in the way of a bat and got clipped.”

  “That’s right, how did you know?” asked Chuck. “But it wasn’t Mickey’s fault. You see, Johnny was pitching, Mickey was batting, and I was catching …”

  “And you stood closer to the batter than a catcher ought to,” interrupted the doctor. “Result: you were knocked unconscious and got a bloody nose. You don’t have to tell me—I was passing in my car and I saw the whole thing. How did you think you got here so quickly?” he asked with mock gruffness.

  “Does my mother know?” Chuck asked.

  Dr. Phipps nodded. “One of the ballplayers raced off to tell her.”

  Within a few minutes, Chuck’s mother arrived.

  “His nose is swollen. Don’t be alarmed if it bleeds a bit more,” Dr. Phipps told her. “Take him home and keep an ice bag on it.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “And on my way home with Chuck, I will drop these two members of Hilton’s all-star ball team at school,” she added, nodding at the two boys, who, relieved to find their friend’s injury was not serious, went whooping out to the car.

  Cherry saw Chuck and his mother out into the hall. “Don’t be surprised,” she warned, “if Chuck has a real beaut of a black eye.” She went back inside.