(7 of 10)
Later, the most famous patient of the war lay under a sheet, three of her limbs in bandages, and cried. It was not so much the pain but the feeling, the desolation, of being alone and helpless. She had never been alone. She had slept within reach of her baby sister. She was from a family where her mother would pull one of her teenage daughters into her lap and hold her just because it felt nice. Even after she had left home there had been Lori and Ruben.
She knew that her family would miss her, that they would be worried. But she would have been amazed at what was happening in the place where she grew up, where it seemed that no one could drink a cup of coffee, eat a piece of pie or pump a tank of gas without talking about her and wondering if she was alive or dead. That night, a nurse, an older woman, came to the room and sang her a lullaby, and even though Jessi did not know what the words meant or what it was for, the woman's voice was warm and soothing and loving, and it calmed her, for a while.
The orderly did not say anything as he rolled her down the hall. She asked the orderly where they were going. He wouldn't answer. Then he pushed her into the operating room.
At Saddam General, surgeons had continued the treatment begun in the military hospital. They inserted a steel rod to stabilize the bones in one of her shattered legs and tried to keep her wounds clean of infection. It was delicate work, done even as their emergency room and hallways began to fill with casualties.
There were doctors and nurses in the operating room, waiting for her. Jessi was confused. She had thought that they were through, that they had done all they could.
Why was she here? "We are going to have to amputate your leg," one of the doctors said. They lifted her onto the table.
"No! Don't!" she screamed.
A nurse tried to cover her face with a mask. She fought. She whipped her head from side to side, to keep them from clamping the mask down on her nose and mouth. It slipped from her face again and again, and all the time, an unseen child screamed and screamed. Jessi screamed with him as the nurse tried to put her to sleep. "Stop," she heard one of the doctors say. The nurse lifted the mask from her face.
"Don't do it," the doctor said.
The nurse put the mask down and walked away. The doctors wheeled her gurney back to her room. She does not know why they stopped. Maybe it was pity. Later, she would hear that the doctors tried to cut off her leg so she could be more easily transported to Baghdad, probably for a propaganda video; that her pieced-together legs would be too cumbersome--and could become infected if Iraqi soldiers tried to transport her by ambulance. She does not know if that is true or not. She just knows she was afraid to sleep, afraid to be awake. Sleep was her friend and her enemy, and she had no place else to go.
She was afraid Saddam's agents would bang through her door and torture her, or strap her to the gurney, mutilate her and carry her off to Baghdad. But even though Iraqi men she did not believe were doctors came into her room and stared down at her as they spoke to her caregivers, she was never beaten. "No one even slapped me," she said.