If you have not read the first part of
this story yet, please go back and read it here :
This is the ending I originally wrote.
This is the story that came to me and how it ended, but it was not what I
wanted it to end with. I wanted it to have a more positive ending so I wrote a
different one. The thing is, what is written below IS the original ending and I
cannot just delete it. I made a few alterations to that ending and this one so
that they would fit together as a continuous whole, but it is a good bit
bleaker. If you choose to continue reading you will come to a much darker
ending over all.
Again, it is your choice.
Dr.
Jonathan Statler looked up at the clock on the wall of his office and, seeing
he had a few minutes to spare, leaned back in his chair with a sigh and thought
about the five children who had filled his orthopedic ward these past three
weeks. He liked to think of himself as a simple country doctor and the small
hospital he worked in helped keep that illusion. But, it was times like these
that he was grateful for the knowledge and experiences he had gained as a
doctor in the military while serving during the war which made his current job
a bit easier to deal with.
Those
four boys had been his patients individually, or occasionally in pairs, more
than once as they grew up. This was the first time though that all four had
been brought in together, and this time they even managed to include the girl
in their antics and gotten her hurt as well. Although, once he had been handed
the girl’s medical records by her parents he would have thought her a boy going
solely by her history of injuries and ignoring the name on the file. It would
seem the girl was quite the tomboy despite the impression of a very sweet young
lady he had first gotten when he saw her at the beginning of summer social. The
family had bought the old Johnson farm and moved to town due to her love of,
get this, bull riding of all things. The girl had shown an exceptional
fortitude in going for help that he doubted most of the other children in town
would have managed to do.
Three weeks
ago, the girl, Amanda, had come stumbling into the home of Josiah and Alice
McKinney through their back door into the kitchen, half scaring Alice to death. She was
extremely pale and sweating, half delirious and barely able to keep herself up
from the pain of her own injuries. She was still able to keep herself together
long enough to let Alice know that the four boys were lying injured out in the
pasture and needed immediate attention, two of them in very serious condition.
Then she collapsed on the floor. Alice
immediately called the hospital for help which brought Dr. Statler running with
a couple of other doctors and a pair of nurses in tow along with their two
paramedics in the town’s ambulance and one fire truck. It had taken Amanda over
an hour to make her way through the field to the farm house, and it took
another twenty minutes for the rescue trucks to arrive at the McKinney’s before
they could go out and get the others in the field and bring them back.
While
only one of the five had not required actual surgery to repair the damage to
their bodies, two of them had been in critical condition. Dr. Statler had
performed more than enough times in the operation room to handle what was need
for two of the children, but the other two needed specialist surgeons to be
brought in to perform the operations they required.
Once
everyone had been brought back to the small hospital the entire staff were
quite busy dealing with the multiple injuries all at once. With the treatments
needed it was decided to keep all five of them together in the same ward which
meant moving an extra bed into the room that was only meant to have four beds
in it, making things a little crowded but they had worked it out. All five
children had been confined to bed with traction to one degree or another
pulling on their broken bodies. The last time Jonathan had seen that many
ropes, pulleys, and weights in one place had been back in the war.
John
and Steven had been the least injured of the five, with John being the one boy
who did not need surgery. Both of John’s fore-arms had been broken in several
places and both elbows had been dislocated. Fortunately they were able to
realign the elbows and straighten the bones with manual manipulation and a
couple weeks in Buck’s traction on both arms. John had been quite helpless with
both arms handing in the air, and once the casts were put on he was not much
better. Long Arm Casts has been put on both arms from the knuckles to the
armpits to properly immobilize his arms so they could heal. The way his arms
had been broken though were a bit odd. The left arm required the hand to be in
full supination while the right needed to be in full pronation to keep the
bones properly aligned. While he could actually get out of bed now, he was
still quite reliant on someone else to take care of him for everything so he
was still in hospital this week while arrangements were being made with his
family for a care taker as he would be in the full casts for around two to
three months, probably closer to three, then they would be able to cut them
down to something shorter for another one or two months after that. John was
also the only one who would probably make a full recovery from this and not be
left with some permanent damage.
Steven
had needed surgery on his knee followed by gentle traction for over a week. The
goat’s hoof had hit him squarely in the side of the knee dislocating it and
tearing several of the tendons and ligaments in the joint which Dr. Statler had
to sew back together. The kick had also broken or cracked all three bones
around the knee to some degree with the most serious break being to the growth
plate at the distal end of the femur. The tip of the femur bone had actually
been floating loose in two pieces and two screws had been used to put them back
in place. Once they had put him in a cast that went from his toes to just below
his groin he had stayed on the ward for a couple more days to make sure
everything was going well then he had been sent home which allowed them to move
the extra bed out and relieve the clutter in the room. The boy had been back
almost daily though to visit with his friends still on the ward. He would be in
the cast for the next three months and would probably be left with a permanent
limp to some degree. If his recovery did not go as well as planned he might
wind up needing a cane to walk.
Amanda’s
injuries were serious, but not beyond Jonathan’s skills to repair. Her elbow
had essentially been shattered by the goat’s kick, all three bones in the joint
broken and a good bit of soft tissue damage to the tendons ligaments and
nerves. The impact with the rock had not only dislocated her shoulder which
tore several ligaments, but also cracked the proximal end of the humerus, broke
the distal end of the clavicle, and broke both the coricoid and the acromion
off the top of the scapula. The three bones in the shoulder that were broken
required some small plates with only three or four screws each to put them back
together and a single screw in the humerus pulled the ends of the split
together well enough to allow it to heal. Sewing the torn ligaments was the
last part of the surgery to repair the shoulder. The elbow required more work,
with three more plates being used with anywhere from five to seven screws each
to pull the bones back together and a lot of sutures to sew things back
together. After two and a half weeks of traction following the surgeries to
repair the arm they had finally put her into a shoulder spica cast a week ago.
The cast covered her entire torso, leaving the right shoulder free, ran up over
the left shoulder and on down to the knuckles of the left hand. She would stay
in the hospital until Monday when she would be cleared to go home again and
remain in the spica cast for three months followed by a long arm cast for
another couple of months. Amanda’s prognosis for the future had her losing five
to fifteen percent range of motion in the elbow if all went well, and there was
concern about some permanent nerve damage in the elbow as well since her hand
still had numbness or a constant tingling feeling from her fingers to her wrist
with trouble fully closing her fingers. They would have to wait and see what
physical therapy could do for that.
The
two needing specialists were Theodore and Allan. When they had arrived in the
field to assess the boys and bring them back, Theodore, or Ted, had been seen
as having the most critical injuries of them all initially. Ted was unable to
move on his own and barely breathing, let alone not being able to communicate
with the emergency responders, indicating a high level spinal cord injury. He
was handled with extra special care to bring him out of the field, and once
they had been able to do a proper examination of his injuries it was determined
he had suffered several broken vertebrate in his spine in the neck and the
lower back. The surgery done by the orthopedic surgeon they brought in for him
required his spine be exposed from the base of the skull to the top of the
buttocks. After getting a close first hand look at the damage they had decided
to insert rods running the entire length of the spinal column with extra screws
in several vertebrate to pull everything back together and into proper
alignment again. Ted was then placed flat on his back in traction from his head
to his knees to keep the spine still. He had been on a respirator initially to
help him breath and his bodily functions for waste removal had to be handled by
the nurses. As the swelling to his spine went down Ted began to show regular signs
of improvement. While a stoma had been cut open and a tube inserted in his
neck, they had started being able to remove the respirator for a few hours at a
stretch during the day last week, and this week he had been off the respirator
for the majority of the day and only back on it at night. Hopefully the tube
would be able to be removed and the stoma closed in about a month.
Slowly
but steadily he was regaining feeling and movement in his arms; and just
yesterday there had been an improvement with the boys legs. His bowels had
settled down quite a bit late last week so that Ted now had a mostly regular
bowel movement the staff could more easily predict and it looked like the
improvements there would hopefully continue. His bladder on the other hand was still
a problem which required continuation of the use of a catheter and it was not
clear if that would ever improve. He had been placed in a cast just yesterday that
went from just above his knees all the way up to the top of his head which he
would keep for around three months to completely immobilize the spine while it
healed. After that they would probably switch him over to one of those new Halo
Cast contraptions for a couple more months to protect his neck while it
continued to heal. Theodore’s long term prognosis was somewhat promising at
this point, although recovery would be a long road. With the steady and
continuing return of function to his body, it was felt that he would most
likely recover as much as eighty percent from his injuries, although that might
be a bit optimistic. They were fairly positive he should be able to walk again
and take care of himself, although he would definitely need some degree of support
in the form of braces and a cane or two for balance.
Allan
had been determined to be in critical condition initially as well, but that had
been due to the bleeding from open wounds along with the visibly obvious nature
of his injuries and the fact he was still unconscious. Steven had crawled over
to Allan and done his best to put pressure on the bleeding before the rescuers
had arrived; which slowed the bleeding but did not stop it. Dr. Statler had to
perform some emergency field surgery to get the wounds closed enough to stop
the blood loss before they could move him. After getting him back to the
hospital and examining him, the list of injuries was extensive. The goat
jumping up and down and stomping on Allan had caused damage to his pelvis,
hips, abdomen and internal organs, thighs, femurs, knees, lower legs, and even
his feet. Pretty much the entire lower half of Allan’s body had been damaged.
Allan had turned out to be the most seriously injured out of the five, and
still had a long way to go. Multiple surgeries had been needed for Allan, The
first couple to simply stabilize him and stop internal bleeding to save his
life. Once he was stable and they gave him a few days to rest, they did a
series of several more surgeries to repair the damage that had been done. The
last one had been just a week ago. When not in surgery Allan had been in
traction to try and realign broken bones, using a veritable spider web of ropes
going all over the place to get the right angle of pull for different parts of
his body. The good news so far was that his bones were responding well and they
would probably be putting him into a cast from the armpits to the toes later
today. He’d keep that cast for several months, but hopefully not the six months
they had initially thought. Possibly it would only be about four months or a
little long if his bones continued to heal like they were doing now.
Unfortunately the bad news outweighed the good. The specialist they called in
had to do some work on Allan as well to repair the pelvis and hips along with
the sacral spine. And the soft tissue and organ damage was even worse. The
bladder and a substantial portion of the large intestine, the descending colon,
had been ruptured and damaged badly enough they had to be removed which would
have permanent results for Allan. A Sigmoid Colostomy had been performed for
the removal of fecal waste which would drain into a colostomy bag on the left
side of his abdomen, and a healthy portion of the remaining descending colon
had been used for a Kock Pouch to create a Continent Urostomy in the lower
abdomen near the groin through which a catheter would be used to drain urine.
On top of all this, Allan still had no feeling or movement in his lower body.
At this point it was believed with a high degree of certainty that Allan would
be permanently paralyzed from the waist down and need a wheelchair for the rest
of his life.
Dr.
Statler shook his head and sighed. All this because a group of kids had gotten
bored and run afoul of an ornery goat while playing a silly but dangerous game.
And the parents were not giving the children much sympathy either. School
started up from summer break on Monday, and the parents had vowed that all five
of them would be going back to school just the way they were, casts and all as
soon as it was allowed, as a lesson to the other kids. He looked back up at the
clock and realized they needed to start getting the cast room ready to place
Allan in the Dual Hip Spica Cast he would be wearing for the next few months.
Jonathan stood up from his desk and went to gather the doctors and nurses
needed for the job about to be done.
