Mash by Richard Hooker Page B

Trapper close a tracheo-esophageal fistula.”
    “Oh, I say,” Colonel Cornwall wanted to know, “what’s that?”
    “It’s a hole between the esophagus and the trachea, where it doesn’t belong,” Hawkeye explained.
    “And you chaps can repair that?”
    “Well,” said Me Lay. “We can try.”
    At the 25th Station Hospital, the Officer of the Day received a call from Captain Marston saying that an emergency was coming in for X-rays. Soon after, Hawkeye and Trapper, in Papa-San suits and followed by Me Lay carrying the baby, entered the X-ray department.
    Captain Banks, the O.D., arrived and asked, “What’s this all about?”
    “It’s all about this baby,” Hawkeye informed him. “We want to X-ray him and we want to do it right now, and we do not wish to be engaged in useless conversation by officious military types, of which you look like one to me.”
    “But, we can’t …”
    Hawkeye sat Captain Banks on thre edge of a desk and handed him the phone.
    “Be nice, Captain. Call the X-ray technician. If you give us any kind of a bad time, me and Trapper John are going to clean your clock. We are frustrated lovers and quite dangerous.”
    Captain Banks called. While awaiting the technician, Trapper and Me Lay placed a small catheter in the baby’s esophagus. A few minutes later, radio-opaque oil was injected through the catheter. It revealed the abnormal opening between the esophagus and the trachea but no significant narrowing of the esophagus. This meant that anything the baby ate could go into his lungs but that, happily, once the opening was closed, the esophagus would be able to accommodate the passage of food. It required careful preparation, proper anesthesia, early and competent surgery and good luck.
    “Me Lay, let’s you and me get a needle into a vein,” Trapper said, and then, turning to Captain Banks, he said, “You there, in the shiny shoes, tell the lab to do a blood count and cross-match a pint. We won’t need that much, but it’s a term they’ll understand. Then tell the OR to get set up for a thoracotomy. We’re going to operate in about two hours. Hawkeye, you stick close to Alice, or whatever his name is, and see that he performs efficiently.”
    The Officer of the Day had no choice but to perform efficiently. The nurses were routed out, not at all pleased at the prospect of operating a second time with the pros from Dover. There was, in fact, outright grumbling which Hawkeye Pierce brought to a rapid conclusion.
    “Ladies,” he said, “we are sorry to get you out at this time of night. However, we stumbled upon this deal, and we can’t walk away from it, no matter whose rules are broken. This baby will die if we don’t fix him, so let’s all be nice and just think about the baby.”
    Fortunately, nurses succumb to this kind of pitch. They gave up any show of resistance, particularly after they saw the baby, but Hawkeye caught Captain Banks calling Colonel Merrill.
    “Now, Captain,” he chided him, “I may give you a few lumps, but first I must call the Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse.”
    So doing, he talked to Colonel Cornwall, explained their situation and made a few suggestions. Fifteen minutes later, as Colonel R. P. Merrill stormed into the hospital, he was met by four British officers who loaded him unceremoniously into their Land Rover and returned to the FKPH&W.
    After Captain Banks had been stripped naked, and locked in a broom closet by the two Swampmen, the operation was finally started. Me Lay’s anesthesia was excellent, the nurses cooperated completely, and Trapper and Hawkeye indulged in none of the by-play that had marked their first local appearance. After an hour and a half of careful work, Trapper had closed the fistula. They shed their gowns and discussed the postoperative care.
    “I think we better leave him here,” said Trapper. “You can’t take care of anything like this in that whorehouse hospital of yours, can you, Me