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Authors: Richard Gordon
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injection went by error into the skin of Bluey’s elbow there would be an abscess, and a terrible row with Graham. ‘There, you didn’t even feel the needle, did you? Now count, out loud....’
Bluey reached fifteen, yawned deeply, and fell asleep. John plucked out the syringe, simultaneously freeing Bluey’s breathing by holding up his chin. ‘This stuff was invented by our friends the Germans,’ he told the nurse. ‘I ought to use it as a routine. The boys get pretty browned off, being suffocated every time with gas. That can’t be much fun when you have to face a dozen operations on the trot.’
Like all specialist anaesthetists, John Bickley brought to his work the artistic touch of an experienced chef. First he held a triangular padded mask tight to Bluey’s patchwork face, and concocted a delicately proportioned mixture of oxygen and nitrous oxide gas. Then he moved a lever on a bottle of blue liquid to add a trace of trichlorethylene vapour—a more powerful anaesthetic to deepen Bluey’s unconsciousness. John edged across the lever on another bottle to admit the pungent vapour of ether, the main ingredient of the dish. Bluey coughed fiercely. He always did, John reflected. He should insist that Graham stop his patients smoking for a least a week before their operations. But Graham objected that would be bad for morale, and they’d smoke in the lavatories, anyway. Graham objected to almost everything he suggested, it struck John wearily, ever since he had started calling for Sunday lunch.
Two coloured bobbins already danced up thin vertical glass tubes on John’s anaesthetic trolley, indicating the volume of oxygen and nitrous oxide flowing to his patient. When he judged the anaesthesia deep enough, he sent a third bobbin spinning by adding carbon dioxide to the mixture. This stimulated Bluey’s breathing, until he was heaving away as though finishing some desperate race in his sleep. With economical movements, John laid aside the face-mask, reached for a narrow, stiff, greased, red-rubber tube, and inserted it into the remains of Bluey’s right nostril. He edged it inwards gently—an unsuspected nasal polyp would bring blood all over the shop and an even worse row with Graham—listening to the breath-sounds as it slipped behind Bluey’s flaccid tongue, then finally through his widely open larynx into his windpipe. It was a technique invented by Harold Gillies’ own anaesthetist, Ivan Magill, to deliver the anaesthetic directly into the patient’s lungs while leaving his face and mouth as a sterile unoccupied battlefield for the plastic surgeon.
‘That looked prety easy, I must say,’ observed the nurse, who like all nurses had long ago ceased to be impressed by her medical overlords. But her remark pleased John. The trick was rather like playing darts in the dark, not easy at all. Only the experience of twenty years made it seem so.
As Bluey himself knew, the operations was to be a simple affair. Graham cut a thin graft of skin from Bluey’s thigh with a Thiersch knife like an oversized razor, then stitched it along his chin where a former one had failed to take. Bluey was back in bed within the half hour, struggling to consciousness through dreams about flying, which were always unpleasant but soon forgotten. He woke up deciding he didn’t feel as bad as usual. The Gasman’s injection was a winner. The next night he’d be fit enough to finish the bottle of rum in his locker, then slip out with half a dozen others to The Oak.
Knowing the habits of his patients, Graham made a point on Saturday nights of taking a bus to the pictures in Maiden Cross. That Saturday he queued to see an American film about the war, in which all the Germans conversed in villainous guttural undertones, all the British officers had Oxford accents, and all their men talked like Sam Weller. The star was Stella Garrod, the woman Graham had made a fool of himself with before the war. He wondered wryly if she ever
Bluey reached fifteen, yawned deeply, and fell asleep. John plucked out the syringe, simultaneously freeing Bluey’s breathing by holding up his chin. ‘This stuff was invented by our friends the Germans,’ he told the nurse. ‘I ought to use it as a routine. The boys get pretty browned off, being suffocated every time with gas. That can’t be much fun when you have to face a dozen operations on the trot.’
Like all specialist anaesthetists, John Bickley brought to his work the artistic touch of an experienced chef. First he held a triangular padded mask tight to Bluey’s patchwork face, and concocted a delicately proportioned mixture of oxygen and nitrous oxide gas. Then he moved a lever on a bottle of blue liquid to add a trace of trichlorethylene vapour—a more powerful anaesthetic to deepen Bluey’s unconsciousness. John edged across the lever on another bottle to admit the pungent vapour of ether, the main ingredient of the dish. Bluey coughed fiercely. He always did, John reflected. He should insist that Graham stop his patients smoking for a least a week before their operations. But Graham objected that would be bad for morale, and they’d smoke in the lavatories, anyway. Graham objected to almost everything he suggested, it struck John wearily, ever since he had started calling for Sunday lunch.
Two coloured bobbins already danced up thin vertical glass tubes on John’s anaesthetic trolley, indicating the volume of oxygen and nitrous oxide flowing to his patient. When he judged the anaesthesia deep enough, he sent a third bobbin spinning by adding carbon dioxide to the mixture. This stimulated Bluey’s breathing, until he was heaving away as though finishing some desperate race in his sleep. With economical movements, John laid aside the face-mask, reached for a narrow, stiff, greased, red-rubber tube, and inserted it into the remains of Bluey’s right nostril. He edged it inwards gently—an unsuspected nasal polyp would bring blood all over the shop and an even worse row with Graham—listening to the breath-sounds as it slipped behind Bluey’s flaccid tongue, then finally through his widely open larynx into his windpipe. It was a technique invented by Harold Gillies’ own anaesthetist, Ivan Magill, to deliver the anaesthetic directly into the patient’s lungs while leaving his face and mouth as a sterile unoccupied battlefield for the plastic surgeon.
‘That looked prety easy, I must say,’ observed the nurse, who like all nurses had long ago ceased to be impressed by her medical overlords. But her remark pleased John. The trick was rather like playing darts in the dark, not easy at all. Only the experience of twenty years made it seem so.
As Bluey himself knew, the operations was to be a simple affair. Graham cut a thin graft of skin from Bluey’s thigh with a Thiersch knife like an oversized razor, then stitched it along his chin where a former one had failed to take. Bluey was back in bed within the half hour, struggling to consciousness through dreams about flying, which were always unpleasant but soon forgotten. He woke up deciding he didn’t feel as bad as usual. The Gasman’s injection was a winner. The next night he’d be fit enough to finish the bottle of rum in his locker, then slip out with half a dozen others to The Oak.
Knowing the habits of his patients, Graham made a point on Saturday nights of taking a bus to the pictures in Maiden Cross. That Saturday he queued to see an American film about the war, in which all the Germans conversed in villainous guttural undertones, all the British officers had Oxford accents, and all their men talked like Sam Weller. The star was Stella Garrod, the woman Graham had made a fool of himself with before the war. He wondered wryly if she ever
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