Extra Shift 2

"I was told you declined the offer for an extra shift, sir."

I held hard on the urge to sit in a corner and laughed. Did she just call me sir?

Nancy Philips of all people, is the one I guess I know inside out. She was walking as fast as I was, her little legs making the rush-rush sound of a nurse's cover shoe on the marble floor of the hospital building.

"I changed my mind," I replied as we approached the ward.

"Very kind of you." She said with relief.

"I asked David to speak to you because I knew your mind was made to honor your shift and decline an extra shift."

"Very much unlike me." We scurried into the ward, and there, I found them, the patients whom David spoke of. They were waiting to be carried into their place for a quick survey and surgery.

"This is serious," I muttered as I stopped by one of the patients, to take a look at what I would deal with. His legs were badly bandaged by the clinic he was scooped out of by whoever wanted him to grab some professional touch.

"Was there a surgery on this?" I asked the patient.

I looked me in the face, his face riddled with pain and regret. Who knows what could be going on in his mind? He might regret ever stepping out into the streets the day the bad thing happened to him.

"Je lui ai dit qu'il y avait une balle dans mes jambes." He groaned painfully like he was losing his breath.

"Did you hear that?" I asked Nancy.

"He said he's got a bullet in his legs." Nancy interpreted.

Nancy had been here long enough to understand the French language. She was among the first batch of medical practitioners dished out from the shores of our country to Cote d'Ivoire.

That was about two years ago because she volunteered to stay longer than she should.

"The doctor in the clinic?" I asked.

"Le médecin de l'autre clinique?" Nancy repeated in French.

"Bien sûr, cette tête en os." The patient uttered in response.

"What did he say?" I asked Nancy.

"Sure, I won't say the rest," Nancy said with a smile.

I raised a brow, and offered her nothing other than a brow. On a normal day, I would have gone around to meet the rest of the patients, but this particular patient was mine and he needed urgent attention.

"Arrange for the nurses to bring him over for a quick bone surgery," I said and scurried off from the ward, not minding to turn and utter any more words at Nancy, or the man who could only communicate in French.

***

One hour and we were still stuck in the operation room, operating on the man's bones. The bullets weren't so wicked, though. It did just the little good of hitting neither the femur nor his tibia, but the metatarsals of his left leg were strangely crushed.

The local clinic that first attended to him must have let them take him because they knew it was big work bringing the shattered bones together and saving his foot from being sawed off his body with a bone sawing machine.

The veins were our greatest aids. They weren't torn apart, and if they were, I could easily gather them and have them connected properly enough to save the man's legs, by the way, the man was wrong, there was no bullet in his legs, we did the little exercise of cutting his stitched muscles to find bullets, but there was none.

***

"Finally, we can take a nap." Said one of the nurses in the room. She was tall and new to my ward, I guess, and her accent was almost like what I hear Nigerians speak when they don't wish to live in an American skin back home in New York.

I wanted to ask her if she was the new Nigerian nurse I heard of, but I swallowed my words as soon as she turned.

She had taken off the big clothes she wore into the operating room and was now donning the overall she wears for duty on normal days.

I hadn't had time to inspect them properly before they all gushed into the big operating room with me.

They were four with Nancy making them five. She was in fact, the one who saw to the nurses who were allowed in the operating room.

"Indeed, dear, you can go snoring all night long, but mind you, the anesthesia will soon clear off from that leg, and his cry will surely wake you," Nancy assured the nurse.

The Nigerian nurse laughed. I wanted to ask her what her name was and when she resumed, I sensed that would be too much of a query for the night, by the way, she was really that beautiful, but that's not what I should keep my night up with.

"Okay, take a good nap, ladies, I'll be off to my office," I said to the ladies.

"Thank you so much, doctor." Said the Nigerian nurse, she seemed to be the only nurse who bothered to talk, aside from Nancy.

"A regular doctor could have slashed off that leg and tossed it in the trash can, but you took your time and did the work of the Lord."

"Thanks for the compliment," I paused, "And what's your name?"

"Amaka." The nurse said with a smile, but then, she raised her fingers, maybe to warn me in case I ever dreamt of approaching her the way some doctors in the big specialist and teaching hospital do.

She had a ring, she was either married or engaged. I don't know much about rings and the fingers they belong to, but I hate seeing them on any lady's fingers, especially if I was nursing the intention to approach them.

"And you are Nigerian," I said with a broad smile.

"Confirm Naija babe." She replied in her Nigerian manner.

"Very good," I said and took off.

***

"Gosh." David whipped his face. He was standing by the door of my office which was locked. "I nearly lost that good boy."