Navy Guantanamo Bay Part IV

The Guantanamo Bay Naval Hospital is located right on a little peninsula that juts out into the Caribbean.  

I arrived at the hospital toward evening, so normal day shifts were over. As I was sitting waiting for them to round up a surgical team, I was thinking about, you know, things. Of course it's my right hand, I thought, after all, I'm right handed! What else? I speculated about whether spending so much time inside a cannon would affect my hearing in later years. Oh, and would I be able to play the piano with only nine fingers, I wondered? That would be cool, since I couldn't play the piano at all before all this happened!

Finally the surgeon came in and went to work. My hands had been dirty, the line had been dirty, the speeding, surging line had gone through our hands burning them a little, the wound was ragged, everything was bloody and the metacarpal head was in tiny bits, some of it was just gone. They hosed it all down, confirmed that the tendons and nerves were abused but not severed, rebuilt the knuckle with some of the bits as well as possible, inserted a long pin through the second metacarpal, and sewed the whole mess up with fifty-five stitches in the palm (inside and out) and another eight over the knuckle on the other side.

Later, I could feel the head of the pin under the stitches because eventually, it would have to be removed.

Then they installed a weighted stainless steel finger trap on my index finger to keep it stabilized. That's this thing over on the right there. 

The way the finger trap is devised, the more you try to pull your finger out, the tighter it gets. There are toys called 'Chinese Finger Traps' that do the same thing. So my immensely traumatized hand filled with stitches was now hanging by my nearly severed and broken finger. Go on, picture it! Whee!   

OK, so you couldn't picture it. Then use slightly less imagination with this image on the left and pretend it's just the index finger involved. I can't do everything for you, it's been fifty years! We didn't have fancy-dancy smartphones with us that could photograph every step in our lives. We were just experiencing things as they actually happened!

Then came the best stage of all, the administration of the Morphine. Morphine is great! I mean really, really great. Three days went by and when they started to wean me off the stuff, I got all huffy until they gave me some Darvon. Darvon is good, too, but it's no Morphine! 

After a couple more days, maybe five total, or six? who knows? the doc came in and said they were going to have to reset the knuckle because piecing it together hadn't come out as planned. But this time, the anesthetic would just be local. So back into the surgical theater. They set the screen in place between my head and the work area and he started setting my hand up. I told him, "You know, I can feel that." And he said, "No, that's just psychological because you know I'm working on your hand."  

Then he re-breaks my knuckle which I felt perfectly and of course I screamed like the proverbial stuck pig. The surgeon gestured a 'downward motion' with his finger to the anesthesiologist who turned a valve on my IV and away I went. I got yur 'distant ship smoke on the horizon' right heer!

When I arose from this round of purple haze, they installed me in a bed on the surgical ward. It seemed like a lot of beds to me at the time but I imagine it was perhaps sixteen Sailors and Marines. 

My doc comes and gives me the news that my hand is infected. Uh, yeah, with all the dirt and grease and nylon fibers and burning and a wide, wide world of other things that were introduced into that wound, it would have been a shock if it wasn't. 

He tells me we're going to have to work on that infection because after all, "we wouldn't want to lose that finger... or the hand." Oy.