|
THE WORM
I was a platoon leader with Co D 3/187th Abn Inf, 101st Airborne Division
in South Vietnam. I was wounded on August 8 '70 while on patrol with my platoon.
As a result of these wounds I was medevaced to the 85th Evac Hospital near Hue.
Having been in the hospital ward for a couple of days, I was allowed to
roam at will. One morning I heard a lot of laughter and loud excited talk coming
from the ward nursing station. Upon approaching, it became clear that all
attention was focused on a pill bottle that one of the nurses was holding. She
handed it to me and I found myself looking at a worm a couple inches long. I
could not see anything exciting about this worm and said so. The nurse then
focused my attention on what looked like several small pieces of thread attached
to the worm. On looking closer I could see that these pieces of thread also were
knotted. The nurse proudly informed me that these threads were surgical sutures.
This again left me puzzled, so the nurse began her story.
The worm had been found in a stool sample collected from a wounded
Vietnamese boy there at the hospital. The nurses checked the samples to see if
the Vietnamese patients had worms and thus needed medication for it. It seems
that this was a very common problem for many Vietnamese as well as some American
patients. This one worm had really gotten her attention when she noted the
sutures.
As it would happen, the doctor that had operated on the child arrived for rounds
and was presented with this prize. I guess since he was not sure of what to say,
he commented on how professional his sutures were. A lively discussion then
followed. The doctor's final opinion: that during surgery on the boys intestinal
and stomach area, he must have thought that the worm was a vessel and had tied
it off by mistake. As the surgery had been long and hard, this was the best that
anyone could come up with.
So ends the mystery of the sutured worm.
Copyright 1999 - William Dean
Photo by William Dean
William Dean's website:
http://www.geocities.com/grandaddydean/
RETURN TO COMBAT STORIES MENU
PAGE
| 
