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Don Bennett's War

Chapter 33 - Field Hospital

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At the field hospital we were taken into a big surgery room. I remember three tables with wounded on them being operated on. Other wounded were on other tables and on the floor waiting their turn. I can remember being placed on a table, and the aid man removing most of my clothes. A doctor looked at me and said shock condition, but that some plasma would put some color back in my face. They gave me the plasma. Then I was placed on one of the three operating tables. The other two were in the middle of their operations. They gave me ether, but it didn't take much to put me out. Before they put me out, I had the feeling that I would come out of the operation minus my arm. I woke up in the midmorning in a room with about four other soldiers, and the first thing I noticed was my right hand in front of my face. I thanked God for the saving of my arm. I had one cast around my body from the hips up over my chest, and over my shoulder and covering all of my right arm. My arm being out from my body and curving out in front of me. It was hard to move around, but of course I didn't feel like moving yet. I was pretty sick from the shock and ether, and didn't eat or do much that day. That night I was very uncomfortable and couldn't sleep. About midnight I couldn't stand it anymore and awkwardly got up and shakily walked down the hall. I went into the nurses office and was promptly told to go back to bed. I told her I couldn't sleep because of the pain, and discomfort of the cast. She gave me some pain and sleeping pills which helped me get back to sleep.

The next day I was transferred to the General Hospital at Epinal - the town where we had just thirty seven days previously changed from trains to trucks on our way to the front. At this hospital I was assigned to a ward and to a doctor. The ward held about fifteen wounded. The man next to me, a wounded paratrooper, and in the comer was a groaning Negro soldier with a folding screen around his bed. He died the next day. We were given penicillin shots every three hours day and night. At night the ward man would slam on the lights, wake everyone up (though few could sleep) and make his rounds. Sometimes we would just get to sleep before he came around again. They gave us pain and sleeping pills every night, which would help us for a while, and we would get a couple hours sleep. I would wake up in the night, sometimes before the first shot, and would sleep little the rest of the night. I couldn't lay on my stomach or right side, and the cast was uncomfortable and my back hurt when I lay on my back, and my arm would hurt too much when I turned over on my left side.

My second night there I asked the nurse to check behind my left knee where I had noticed a persistent pain. She looked and found a shrapnel wound about one inch long and about 1/3 inch deep. She bandaged it up and it healed in about two weeks.

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