-Extrication

Dad paused briefly to think over this new dilemma, then got up and went to the suitcases at the nose of the plane and dumped out another one.  He grabbed a handful of clothes and  selected a couple of t-shirts that he could use as a real tourniquet once the pressure from the plane was relieved.  Then he returned to the hatch and slumped to his knees, setting the shirts off to the side.  He held the pen light between his teeth and began to carefully remove the dirt around my knee and shin, trying to dig it out a little.   

The top layer of churned up earth came out in cold, clay-like clods.  He continued to remove the most prominent chunks until they stopped coming and turned instead into slick, icy soil that slowly turned to mud the friction of his fingers as his digging became more frantic.  He scraped it away from my leg as best he could, scooping it out of the excavation handful by small handful until he could see under the plane a little. 

He could see in the small cavity that the jeans I had been wearing had been completely ripped away from my leg, and the flesh revealed by his excavation was bare and exposed.  He saw some large scrapes and gouges on my shin, but the initial look indicated that the leg had somehow stayed attached.  This surprised him.  He had expected it to have been torn clean off, if not hopelessly mangled.

After some more fierce digging, he got to where he could look at my calf pressed tightly into the riveted underbelly of the plane, and could see that my leg appeared to be impaled just below the bend of my knee by a stump of metal on the belly of the plane.  When the plane was still intact, it had served as a step to get up to the wing and the main hatch.  That had been ripped mostly off and the 2-inch wide jagged nub of solid aluminum that was left now protruded deep into my flesh and held it firmly in place, snug against the fuselage.  He could not yet see my foot, or even tell if it was still attached. 

            Dad renewed his digging, reaching as far into the excavation as he could, until he could finally feel my bare foot.  My sneaker and sock had been pulled off too, and my entire leg was bare, wet, and cold as a dead fish, but seemed to be all there.  He gripped the front of my knee and shoved his shoulder against the plane.  It groaned and budged slightly.  He felt the leg loosen on the impalement behind it.  He carefully pushed again, lifting the plane ever so slightly while he gently worked the leg off of the metal that stuck deep into it.  With one more hard shove my leg dropped off of the jagged chunk of metal with a sickening sucking sound.  Holding the fuselage with his shoulder, he grasped my leg and pulled it towards him.  The limb slid limply out of the hole from under the plane like a wet piece of thick rope. 

He grabbed one of the shirts from beside him and prepared to tie it tightly around the leg to stop the spurting blood he knew was about to erupt like a geyser from the ghastly gouge that he saw had been ripped into the back of my knee from the bottom of my thigh to half way down my calf.  He watched and waited, adrenaline pumping, waiting to spring into action to attack the bleeding like he was back in the emergency room. 

But the bleeding never came. 

His immediate thought, and shockingly so, was that I had already bled out while he was working to extract me, so there was no more blood to bleed.  But when he reached through the hatch and grabbed my wrist, he could still feel my pulse - which was not only strong, but wouldn’t have been there at all in the absence of blood. 

I simply wasn’t bleeding.   He was amazed.  He’d seen people die from less severe looking wounds in the ER at Lincoln General Hospital.  But he wasn’t going to question it right now.  He unfolded the rag and wrapped it loosely around my knee and shin to cover the worst wounds, then secured it the best he could.

            Dad then reached into the plane to pull out my other leg and position it next to the injured one.  He reached around me and gently unbuckled my seatbelt, grabbing my limp body by my hips and sliding me through the hatch and onto my back on the cold ground.  As I lay there, he placed his hand on my neck and could feel my pulse again. 

It was good and strong.  He bent down and listened to my chest and could hear my thumping heart.  My breathing was regular and deep.  I was deeply asleep, but I was alive.  He was amazed.  He thought for sure I was either dead or would be shortly.  But I seemed to be stable for the time being. 

He quickly looked over the wound on my head.  Three large flaps of skin flopped off in different directions.  It looked bad, but could be superficial.  He couldn’t see any sign of skull fracture.  It hadn’t killed me yet, at any rate.  But all of this could change. 

He gently positioned the flaps of skin back into place on my head and wrapped another  shirt around it to hold them roughly in place.  Then he cradled me in his arms and lifted me up.  Finding and negotiating the same path he had used to exit the mess before, he carried me to the relative safety of the pitch black field to lie beside what remained of my family.

When he found them he set me carefully down next to Rick and draped clothes over both of us.  He stood and looked around.  Chris sat on the ground next to Kim and stared wide-eyed at him.  Dad took a deep breath, and surveyed the limp bodies of his children illuminated dimly by the pen light.  Mom was still out there in the dark and he would have to look for her now.  He didn’t want to leave us alone but he had no choice.  He looked back at Chris, centered in the dim beam.  Dad had him, at least.  He was just a boy, but he’d have to be a man tonight.

“I’m going to look for mom.” He said. 

“You stay here and look after the kids, okay?” Dad said to Chris.

            Chris nodded toward the light and dad turned back toward the plane again, took a deep breath and trudged away.  As he staggered toward the wreck, he rubbed his hand across his face.  His finger pierced a hole in his right cheek that he hadn’t even noticed before.  It had been punched through presumably when he had slammed into the instruments on the initial impact.  He thought for a moment that it was strange that it didn’t hurt, but in reality he wasn’t acutely aware of any of the serious pain he should have been experiencing from a multitude of injuries. 

He just wasn’t thinking about pain.  The truth was that it was masked by the surging adrenaline that was flowing through his veins and was actually all that was keeping him going now.  But he could have cared less about all of that at the moment.  Besides, he had other things to worry about than pain.

He wiped the blood out of his good eye again and felt his head wound again.  He could feel the small flap of skin half way up his scalp was loose and flopping around, releasing a steady flow of oozing blood over his face.  It didn’t feel really severe, but it seemed to bleed a lot.  Annoyed with the pestering sting of the slick fluid in his eyes, he pressed it firmly back into place, holding there as he walked until it stuck.  His left side dully throbbed with something uncomfortable jabbing around inside his abdomen. 

He knew what that was…he was a doctor after all.  His rib, or maybe more than one was snapped off and floating around in there.  The jagged ends still connected to his rib cage were now in physical contact with his internal organs, most significantly his spleen, and were rubbing across it with every movement he made, making it a very dangerous injury indeed. 

It didn’t hurt too bad, masked by the adrenalin and shock, but he knew that if one of those ends poked the spleen hard enough and it ruptured he would be immediately immobilized and would die most horribly and painfully within a matter of hours. 

And as he died, so would his kids out in that field without anyone to help them.  He couldn’t do anything about the injury now except try not to aggravate it, and he also knew that there was nothing that he could do out here that would stabilize the effects of his bursting spleen it if it did go anyway.  It was a matter of chance, he supposed.  He didn’t particularly like the odds, but he shook off the thought.  He couldn’t think about that right now. 

 
          Right now, he had to find his wife.