Triage

"Doc! We got some more!"
Major Kevin Mathurin looked up from the operating table, his hands still moving by muscle memory, slowly pulling a fragment of shrapnel out of the bloodied head of a Gilgamesh Free Army soldier. Setting the piece down on a side table, he looked at the nursing student across the table from him. "Bandage him up and clear the table." he said, backing away and pulling down his mask as he moved towards the source of the voice. 
"How many more? We're packed in here." he said.
A Sergeant looked over his shoulder at him, then wheeled about. "Too many. Ten more soldiers, six peppered with shrapnel and concussed from an artillery burst, 2 with more grievous torso wounds, one leg amputated below the knee with a tourniquet we applied. And one pilot, bailed out from his jet, shattered his left leg."
Mathurin motioned over to a medic. "Sergeant! Get the six men with relatively minor wounds outside, administer first aid to their shrapnel wounds, cover the eyes of those with concussions."
"Bring the pilot and three with grievous wounds here. What's the status of the one with the tourniquet?"
"Relatively stable as a man who's lost his leg below the knee can be."
"And the pilot?"
The sergeant motioned to the pilot, who was glassy-eyed and letting out whimpers and moans of pain as he was carried in by four olive drab clad GFA privates. His jumpsuit was torn, stained with brown splotches of blood, his left leg was limp as a noodle, his shin dangling down lifeless below the hand of one of the privates, and his right was still somewhat stiff, but it was obvious it could not be moved.
He pulled up his mask again. "Set the pilot here. Nurse! Trauma shears, biofoam, and materials for a splint, now!"
As the soldiers laid the pilot on the makeshift operating table, Mathurin looked up at them. "Get a nurse and start tending to the one with the tourniquet and other two with torso wounds."
They nodded and turned around. He sighed. Those three wouldn't make it. It was a waste to even try to save them, but having a nurse help tend to them may at least ease their pain and fright in their last moments. Mathurin looked down at the pilot. He was young, likely in his mid-20s. As the nursing students crowded around him getting the materials ready to start putting back together his leg, Mathurin looked him over. Besides his leg, he had some abrasions and cuts on his torso. "Paper cuts." he thought.
Leaning over, he picked up a set of still-hot, once-silver, now stained red, trauma shears, and began tearing away the pilot's clothes from the hip down. Had he been lucid, he likely would have protested at his prized flightsuit being torn apart by scissors. But all he did was look up, occasionally back and forth, at least proving that he was still alive.
"Nurse, get the legs off his suit."
Placing the trauma shears back down, he next grabbed a canister of biofoam and leaned in to get a closer look at his leg wounds.
Category:Safe Havens