The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 14 - Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Life in the Medical Office by the Training Grounds

The palace grounds were more than big enough to host several medical offices, and the busiest among them was the one that stood near the soldiers’ training grounds.

“Heeey! I’ve got a gaping wound in my head. Sew it up for me?”

“My shoulder’s dislocated. Pop it back in, would you?”

“One of the new recruits collapsed. Got any smelling salts?”

Such requests were the bread and butter of this office. Freshly minted physicians often found themselves assigned here for a baptism by fire. It was not somewhere they would send palace women who were assisting the medical office, at least not during their probationary period. There were too many rough customers around.

It was, however, precisely where Dr. Liu assigned Maomao when she returned from the western capital.

“At this point, I think it’ll be good experience for you,” he said. Maybe he was also hoping it would discourage the freak strategist from showing up all the time, as had been his wont at all Maomao’s postings thus far. “If you have any trouble, just tell Dr. Li.”

There seemed to be all sorts of potential trouble in assigning a woman to a place with so many roughnecks. Dr. Li had openly opposed the idea of having Maomao come with them to the western capital, but it had been clear that this had been out of concern for her. Dr. Liu seemed confident that Dr. Li would look out for her, even in this most rough-and-tumble of medical offices.

“Yes, just let me know if any problems arise,” said Dr. Li, who, unlike at first, now seemed to regard Maomao with respect.

Dr. Li’s actually a pretty good guy, Maomao thought. He could be a bit hardheaded, but he was also dedicated and resolute. Not to mention that these days, you could see his muscles even under his physician’s uniform—it was getting harder and harder to tell whether he was a doctor or a soldier.

“Then again, I don’t think anyone there will give you any grief, even if you don’t specifically come to me for help.”

Word had it that a specter with a monocle was forever looming just behind Maomao.

Maomao had probably been chosen for this assignment over Yao and En’en—who were quite capable, regardless perhaps of their personalities—because she seemed the least likely to get in any trouble. So it was that she found herself in a rather wild workplace.

Today, like every day, was busy, with urgent patients pouring in starting first thing in the morning.

“Goodness, what a lot of commotion for such an early hour,” one of the upper physicians chortled. He was an older man with a gentle demeanor and a bushy bundle of facial hair. He’d been on duty here the night before, and was sitting on one of the patient cots to eat his breakfast. One wondered whether he was really safe here in this place full of ruffians, but one didn’t have to see him at work for long to realize he was very good at his job.

“I’m going to go get changed. Go ahead and take a look at the cases,” he said to Maomao.

“Yes, sir.”

Maomao and Dr. Li were on morning duty. Maybe the other doctors had something else to occupy them on this shift, for they would be starting work in the afternoon.

“Excuse meee! This guy got a wooden training sword stuck in his belly. Can you do something about it?” asked a soldier who had brought someone in.

Of all the questions Maomao had thought she might hear that morning, this hadn’t been one of them. “A wooden training sword in his belly?” she asked.

She and Dr. Li looked at the man who had been carted in. Setting aside the mystery of how in the world this had happened, he clearly needed treatment.

“Hrrrgh! Hnnnngh!” the man groaned. He was a young soldier; he couldn’t have been more than twenty. He was crying out and sweating copiously.

“Can you tell me exactly what happened?” Maomao asked—not of the patient, who was in no condition to talk, but of the soldiers who had brought him in.

“I think it’s pretty obvious. He got hurt during training. What the hell else could it be?” one of them said. Then they all made their way smartly out of the office. Talk about irresponsible!

“What’s their problem?” Dr. Li grumbled, but he quickly turned to treating the patient. About the same time, the old physician with the facial hair trotted out, evidently having changed.

“He appears to have a broken wood sword in his belly,” said Maomao. That might have seemed perfectly obvious, but there was a reason for how she said it: not that the sword had pierced him and broken off, but that it had already been broken when he took the blow.

Dr. Li and the old doctor both understood what she was getting at and nodded.

There were a lot of questions about how a broken sword ended up in a man’s abdomen in the course of “training.” Had he simply fallen on top of a broken sword by chance? It seemed much more likely that someone had stabbed him with it.

“Let’s get ready to do surgery. You two, clean his wounds,” the old doctor said, taking some implements off a big shelf.

Maomao and Dr. Li transferred the patient to a cot and stripped off his shirt to reveal the wound.

“We’ll need to start by getting out the splinters,” Maomao said. She could take out the biggest ones by hand, but they were mired in clotting blood and hard to remove. The smaller splinters, she pulled out delicately with a pair of hair tweezers.

“He’s doing a lot of bleeding. We’ve got to do something about that,” Dr. Li said, then wrapped several bandages tightly around the man’s belly. It was a basic technique for stanching blood: all but bury the affected area, applying pressure to it.

“It’s going to be hard for him to heal with his skin in tatters like this,” Maomao observed. A good, clean cut would have been preferable.

“We cut off the excess skin and then sew him up. The question is how to do the closure.”

If they simply tried to connect one side to the other, it might not be long enough and the skin would stretch. They had to work with the wounded flesh to help it connect more readily. Sometimes that involved making a new incision.

“You think his internal organs are okay?” the old doctor asked, returning with the surgical tools.

“Judging by the amount of blood, I would say the wound isn’t too deep,” Dr. Li responded.

“Dr. Li and I will handle the sewing,” the old doctor said to Maomao. “You keep the bleeding down and get us any medicines we need.”

“Yes, sir. Will you be using anesthetic?”

“For this little scrape? Pfah.”

Despite his genial looks, the old doctor turned out to be quite merciless with his patients. Maomao felt for the young man, but it was hardly an unusual sight among the soldiers. The doctors frequently chose to forgo anesthetic—after all, these men might find themselves on the battlefield one day. They had better be used to pain.

All right, which herbs have coagulant effects?

Common horsetail, mugwort, narrowleaf cattail. There were some animal products with similar effects, including donkey-hide gelatin, which was, well, exactly what it sounded like.

There should be plenty of all of that right now.

Some herbs were harder to get at certain times of year, but from early spring through summer, they were comparatively abundant, which was a boon for the medical staff.

In the next room, another doctor had returned from a different job and set about helping Dr. Li and the old doctor. Cutting and sewing without anesthetic frequently resulted in a lot of thrashing—for which purpose the surgical table was designed with ties for the arms and legs. They must have put a gag in the man’s mouth to keep him from biting his tongue, because Maomao heard only muffled screaming.

Maomao was going to serve in this assignment for a while, and she assumed that eventually Yao and En’en would find their way here as well.

En’en’s probably going to be all right, but Yao?

Yao had guts, true enough, but Maomao couldn’t help wondering if she could really stomach this.

She was equally concerned about their two new junior assistants. It would be a shame to scare them off by giving them such ugly work, but then again, they couldn’t be babied either.

Maomao contemplated the future as she brought the medicines to the doctors.

The actual sewing of the wound seemed to have been taken care of fairly quickly. The floor was strewn with bloody bandages, and the poor young soldier getting sewn up had wet himself. That was hardly unusual; in fact, the medical office kept a supply of fresh underpants and trousers on hand for that very reason. Maomao left a change of clothes on the shelf along with the medicines.

“Will this do for herbs?” she asked. In addition to the coagulants, she’d brought antiseptics, painkillers, and antipyretics.

“Yes, good work.” The old doctor daubed some coagulant onto the freshly sewn wound and wrapped a bandage around it. “Dr. Li, if you two could transfer the patient from the surgical table to a cot? And Maomao... Let’s see. Help clean up the bandages and tools.”

“Yes, sir.” Maomao started tossing the filthy bandages into a basket.

“You know how to boil the tools to disinfect them? If so, I’d like you to go ahead and take care of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The old doctor seemed like quite a polite person. Maomao was grateful that he was willing to give specific instructions. There were plenty of people in the world who insisted that others should use their own brains to figure out what to do—then got angry when people didn’t do what they expected. The patients might behave badly, but there were a great many talented physicians. Maybe that was because the old doctor himself seemed to have it together so well. Maomao decided her current posting wasn’t bad at all.

Except, of course, for the fact that the freak strategist was never far away...

The parade of patients continued. Only when the sun was getting low in the sky did Maomao finally have a chance to rest. Ironically, it was precisely thanks to the fact that a monocled freak had begun to appear in the corners of their vision.

“Say, uh, Maomao,” Dr. Li said, looking from her to the freak and back.

“Please don’t say it, Dr. Li.” Maomao was preparing tea.

The old doctor must have finally caught a break himself, because he was sipping a cup of hot tea and breathing a sigh of relief. “Quite a day today, eh? As always,” he said.

“Yes, sir. I learned a lot.”

“Dr. Li, you truly do seem like a different person since you got back.” Dr. Li, with muscles built on a diet of soybean powder and goat’s milk, still appeared to be bursting with energy, like he could’ve gone on without a rest. Then the old doctor went on, “I must say, though, things have seemed awfully strange with the military lately.”

Maomao thought for a second about whether she should say anything, then asked, “Strange, sir? You mean the number of not-so-accidental injuries?” Dr. Li nodded along with her. The two of them hadn’t been there very long, but even they had already noticed—there were a lot of unusual wounds.

“I see it hasn’t been lost on you two.”

“No... Ahem. That man with the wooden sword in his belly today, well, it was hard to see it as anything but an intentional stabbing,” said Dr. Li, voicing exactly what Maomao wanted to say. “Do you think there’s some particularly brutal hazing going on?”

The soldiers who had brought the injured man to the office had scuttled out again with hardly a word of explanation—very fishy. You’d think they would have been a bit more respectful of their colleague.

“Hazing? I think it’s factional strife.”

“Factional strife?” Maomao and Dr. Li echoed. They gave tilts of their heads, then glanced at the suspicious figure looming behind them.

“Yes, my dear Maomao? What is it?” The freak strategist grinned openly.

Maomao ignored him and turned back to the old doctor.

“Perhaps we could say it’s essentially a turf war among the rank and file,” he said.

“What makes you say that?” Dr. Li asked, furrowing his brow.

“In nature, having a big apex predator at the top of the food chain can determine the power dynamics among its prey.”

“Yes...”

Maomao and Dr. Li glanced back again.

“But that predator has been gone for a whole year, so the prey started to fight over the feeding grounds.”

“Yes, sir.”

The old doctor hadn’t used any names, but his point couldn’t have been more clear.

“Prey are prey are prey, but they’re not all the same species. While the predator was away, the prey who got stronger became the one who eats the other prey.”

“And those who have gone over to that side feel they can do whatever they want...as we’ve seen,” Maomao said.

“Precisely.”

“That’s frustrating, but won’t it sort itself out eventually?”

“I’d like to think so. Yes, one can hope...”

Now that the apex predator, namely the freak strategist, was back, one might expect things to return to their original order, but the old doctor didn’t seem quite so sure.

Maomao crossed her arms.

That reminds me...

It made her think of something the patriarch of the U clan had said.

“It seems the new faction in the army doesn’t like me much at all.”

Did that have something to do with this?

“Is there something bothering you, sir?” Dr. Li said, voicing the question that the old physician seemed to want them to ask.

“You’re probably going to hear about this anyway, so I might as well tell you. The military is currently divided into two major blocs—the Empress Dowager’s family, and the Empress’s family.”

The Empress’s family would be the Gyoku clan. This was presumably the new faction to which the U patriarch had referred.

“Then again, I suppose you could say there are three factions, if you include the neutral group that aligns itself with neither side,” the old physician said.

“Hrk!” Maomao involuntarily made a strange noise.

The old doctor was looking at her and the freak strategist who secretly watched them.

“That’s very, uh...” said Maomao.

“A lot of trouble, isn’t it? Do you see, then, what I’m trying to tell you?” The old doctor looked straight at Maomao. “We need you to wrangle that predator as well as you can, to spare us even a little of the chaos we now find ourselves in.”

Maomao didn’t say anything, but, quite without meaning to, she gave the world’s biggest frown.