For being nearly a century old, my little French patient was quicker than I expected.
I had barely placed the walker in front of her 4-foot-something frame, when she practically hopped out of the chair and took off at a fast-paced shuffle. I darted after her and opened the bathroom door just before she ran into it with the walker.
"You're quicker than I am!" I laughed. "I bet you can grocery-shop like a pro. I always wander around aimlessly and take way longer than I should." I mentally kicked myself as I thought this over and wondered how long it had been since she'd grocery-shopped. But my patient was unfazed.
"Oh, yes," she lilted with her charming accent. "I used to be so quick. We all had to be, in the War you had these cards you used to get groceries, but you had to be quick or the good things were gone. I remember this one time..." She had reached that season of life when storytelling and chaperoned bathroom trips were ordinary and not mutually exclusive.
"...I remember this one time when my sister and I were walking to get groceries. You always walked quickly in the streets because the Germans were in our town and the British would fly over with bombs, and you never knew when they were coming. We did this thing when the British planes came, the French people would wave a piece of white fabric so the pilots would know we weren't German. That way they would not drop their bombs near us.
"Well, this one time we were walking to the market and suddenly the sirens went off and the planes were over us." Her face lost its crinkly smile. "We did not have a piece of white fabric. We were in the middle of the street." Memories etched her face. She broke into a sudden laugh.
"So do you know what we did? I was wearing white linen pants. And I took off those pants and waved them like a flag for all I was worth." She laughed again. "Oh, what a sight it must have been for those British boys in their planes... a French girl waving her pants in the air like a flag! Oh, dear!"
I laughed with her. It was a story for laughing.
I wonder what other stories that face held. It took a broken hip and surgery for me to hear this one.
***
"Can you try to drink the rest of your water?" I pleaded after my patient swallowed his pills with a generous half-ounce of liquid. "Your blood tests this morning showed you're still dehydrated."
He looked into his cup and considered. "I will take four more sips. Four sips; say, that sounds like forceps. Did you know I used to be a surgery tech in the War?"
"Wow," I said absently as I tried to satisfy my computer's demand for documentation so I could save my screen. A minute later I became aware of what he had said and of the pause that followed.
"A surgery tech," I repeated, drawing on images of the sterile-masked dwellers of our Operating Room and trying to reconcile that with World War II medical care. "What kinds of things did you do?" His eyes lit up.
"Well, I had this belt. And it had all kinds of tools, a forceps, a hemostat, and I would go into wherever the boys were fighting, and I would find the guys who were injured and try to get them out. Sometimes I worked in the tents, too, but those boys were mostly ambulatory. Walking wounded, and such."
(Ambulatory? I thought. Ten minutes ago I would never have guessed that was in my patient's vocabulary.)
"Where all did you go?"
"The Pacific, Guadalcanal, a little in the European Theater later in the war..." He shrugged and dropped his hands back onto the bed sheets. It was hard to imagine those hands, now loose-skinned and spotted with age, gripping a hemostat in effort to save bloodied American boys under a merciless Pacific sun.
I weighed up the wisdom of my next question. "Is it hard to remember those things?"
He considered. "Well, some things, yes. But it was satisfying work. I think maybe I even enjoyed it sometimes."
***
