THIS harrowing account comes from the memoir of Captain Kenneth Ainslie, who was tasked with towing four old ships across the Pacific in 1947. With no surgeon aboard his small ocean tugboat, he had to take matters into his own hands.
“Two days earlier one of the firemen had come to me with an injured thumb. He had cut it down in the engine room; one of the engineers had dressed it after a fashion, and he had gone back to work. But the wound had been neither cleaned nor disinfected, and oil and dirt had soaked into it through the bandage.
“He had complained that it was giving him great pain. I pulled the filthy bandage off and was horrified to see that the thumb had become swollen and festered. ‘My God, man, why didn’t you report this before?’ I asked him. ‘Because engineer, he say no need to worry, cut heal up in few days,’ the frightened fireman replied. I cursed my engineers for their casualness and did the best I could with the rather unpleasant mess.
“I bathed it in peroxide, opened it, drained and cleaned it, then dusted it with boric acid powder and put a clean bandage on. Although he had gone back to his duties, he was still in pain and I was far from happy about it.
“Reports came that the fireman’s thumb was getting worse. He was almost delirious with pain. Distasteful as the thought of such an operation was, I realized that amputation was now probably the only means of saving his life. I knew that once gangrene set in, it would spread swiftly through the arm tissues and he would only live a few days.
“I opened our tiny surgical case. It contained a couple scalpels but little else of practical use. It still had no instrument with which to cut through bone. The nearest approach was an engine room hacksaw. So, I asked Cuesta to bring me a new one out of his stores. The smallest he could find had an 18-inch blade with a set wide enough to cut through our main mast. It was quite unusable.
“But after a fruitless search for an alternative instrument, I decided it was the hacksaw or nothing. I told Cuesta to get a blade, make it white hot, smooth the edge down with a steel roller, and then to temper it again. He did this and the result, though still far from professional, was a much more likely-looking implement.
“When I removed the vile-smelling bandage I saw at once that the thumb had become dangerously infected and possibly gangrenous. It was blackish yellow, oozing, and swollen to nearly twice normal size. Unless it were amputated quickly it looked as if Savarino hadn’t a chance.
“Savarino winced as the scalpel sunk in. But he made not a murmur. It was very sharp and in a few seconds I could feel hard bone all the way around. There was surprisingly little bleeding. Then I picked up the hacksaw. Miranda took a firm hold of the patient and I began sawing. At the first stroke of steel on bone Savarino screamed, his face twisted in agony and fear, and struggled like a tiger. The ropes holding him down didn’t budge.
“At first I had difficulty making our improvised instrument bite into the bone at all, and when it finally began to make some headway, the clumsy blade drew the flesh with it at each stroke. To Savarino, the sawing must have lasted half an hour. In fact, it was over in less than two minutes. I said to Miranda, ‘For Christ’s sake, give him another shot of whisky.’ But there was no reply. When I looked around I saw that Miranda had gone. He had staggered out onto the deck and fainted. And then I realized Savarino would not need the whisky. He too had fainted and lay slumped over the table, breathing heavily and groaning.”
Captain Ainslie’s account is a real page turner. Grab a copy if you ever get the chance.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for 20 years. He currently resides on the mainland U.S.
BC Cook
