Days Like This

[Luka Balmore]

Blood squirted out of the open chest and sprayed the young healer in the face, he quickly took his left hand and wiped the warm red liquid away from his eyes, he did not have time to clean anything else up. He pushed past the normal urge for any form of sanitary procedures there just was not enough time. This chest was a mess and that wasn’t even the entire problem, but it was certainly the focal point of his attention. He quickly reached into his bag and grabbed a clamp he let the force guide his hands and his minds eye to the main bleeder, she did not have long if he could not find it, but the problem was that there was more than one which is why he was resorting to the use of a clamp. He could do multiple things at once with the force sure, but it looked as if someone had set an explosive off in this young girl’s chest. There was just no way he alone could focus on every single detail it was not possible. Finally in what had only been a couple of heartbeats the clamp found the internal thoracic artery. The center of it was shredded and he would need a second clamp, which levitated itself out of the bag and found his spare hand. Carefully he clamped both ends of the artery down to stop the bleeding. He then could focus on the other wounds for a few moments. There was so much wrong here that it was difficult to find his center.

He took a deep breath in and calmed himself, there was always a starting point. He focused on the trauma near the lungs and pulmonary arteries. This would be what would kill her first, he wished he was in a hospital with proper equipment, but that was never a guaranteed part of being a doctor and a healer, he knew that, still it would have been nice. He focused on slowly working on the perforated tissue of the lungs with art of the small to mend the effected tissue, as quickly as he could, perfection was not needed in this exact moment, he did not have time for perfection. He could mend the tissue to a point where it would do it’s job adequately and then when he was done with everything else he could come back and touch up to the point of perfection.

He took a deep breath as his eyes settled on a piece of shrapnel lodged in her trachea near the lungs and nicking the pulmonary atery. It was oozing blood which was no doubt leaking into the lungs, she was going to need a chest tube too eventually, but he could control her breathing to a certain point with the force and he could also tell that there was not a ton of fluid in the lungs, not an amount that posed an immediate danger anyway. What did pose an immediate danger was the bleeding from the pulmonary artery and the hole in the trachea, that would explain her breathing sounds and why he was having to focus so much of his energy on assisting in her pulmonary functions. He breathed out through his nose and focused on delicately removing the small piece of shrapnel from the trachea, slowly the metal was pulled gently out of the trachea and then cast aside. More blood sprayed out at his face in a thin high pressure stream, it had to be the nick in the pulmonary artery. Without the shrapnel resting against it and leaving it semi sealed, the leak revealed it’s true severity. He focused on mending the nick in the artery with art of the small, carefully closing the wound and sealing the tissue around it to the point of perfection, arteries unlike other tissue could not be rushed or problems would be worse later. He took a deep breath in and focused on the trachea once again employing art of the small to start to close the wound, but as he did so the girls body convulsed and she gasped for air. He felt her heart go into an erratic rythm.

“Vfib!”

He shouted to know one except for maybe himself, the young girl was going into ventricular fibrillation due to blood loss. He focused all of his energy on getting the heart beating in a normal manner again, her chest rose and fell and all of the sudden she was no longer breathing and her heart was no longer pumping blood. Luka dumped as much of his own life energy into the girl as he possibly could. In addition to using the force to massage her heart into beating again. He tilted her head back and pinched her nose shut and administered rescue breaths.

“Come on, stay with me Janice.”

Sometimes speaking to the patient had more effect than anyone could explain, it was almost as if it had the ability to do more than all of the force healing and surgery in the world, willing the patient back to life to give the physician just long enough to save the patient.

“Think of your little brother, who will he play with if you leave?”

He pinched her nose and give her another few rescue breaths never once stopping his massaging of her heart with the force and then her young eyes opened and seemed to look the young Jedi directly in the eyes. Her heart beat for moment and she seemed to smile at Luka in acknowledgement before her pupils widened and breath escaped her body never to enter it again. Luka shook his head, and resorted to physically compressing her chest in addition to everything else he was doing in the moment.

“NO! STAY WITH ME! COME ON!”

He pumped her chest vigorously for a few moments, but it was no use, he had felt her life force drain out of her completely the moment she looked at him. Finally Luka stopped, a tear rolling down the young man’s cheek. He had lost patients before, it was part of the game, but never one so young and so full of life, she was only nine. He raised his hand and gently smoothed her features and closed her lifeless eyes and collapsed to the floor next to her drained of a great deal of his own energy and it still was not enough.

“I’m so sorry, please rest well young one, I’ll speak to them for you and tell them you love them. You were so very brave Janice, you fought until the end. I’ll never forget you my young friend.”

He took another deep breath in and let out a quiet sob, he had to pull himself together. He still was not in what could be called safety, and he needed to conserve some of his energy for himself. The nearly seventeen year old Jedi Padawan laboriously pulled himself to his feet and wiped his face. He looked down at his robes, soaked in nearly as much blood as she was. He clicked his jaw and centered himself in the force allowing it’s warm and never ending supply of grace and peace to flow through his aura. He knew she would find her everlasting peace and he took solace in that fact. He needed to get himself cleaned up, but a proper burial was in order as well, but first he needed to restore energy, he needed to rest or he may well wind up like her and then this planet would be fresh out of Jedi Healers.

He pulled his bload soaked tunic over his head and cast it aside on the ground. From his survival pack he took a bottle of water, he pressed it to his lips and drank the majority of it but saved just enough to wet his face and wash away the dried blood. He nodded quietly at the situation, Master Kariime had told him that there would be days like this, he was prepared for it, but the biting sting of the reality of the situation was still on unpleasant feeling that he would have to deal with.