Gangrene & Blood Poisoning

The blackness has crossed the joint and the red streaks have gone before it, the poison is in your blood now, and the doctor closes his bag rather than opens it. He speaks softly about laudanum for comfort and asks who should be sent for. The camp starts talking in the past tense when they think you can't hear.

• Bedridden and fading, deathbed scenes, last letters, confessions
• Fever delirium, you speak to the dead like they're in the room
• If you pull through by some grace, 7 days too weak to stand
• /me lies grey and still, breath shallow, fingers plucking at the blanket edge

Recovery Beyond medicine, a deathbed watch, unless a miracle and 7 days of round-the-clock nursing pull you back.·Doctor, urgently

The foot is cold, sweet-smelling, and past saving, and the doctor doesn't dress it up: the leg comes off below the knee or the rot climbs to your heart. Chloroform, the strap, and ninety seconds of the saw, he's fast because fast is mercy. You wake to a bandaged stump and a new arithmetic for every step you'll ever take.

• Below-knee stump, a peg leg once the wound heals, yours for life
• Bedridden 4 days, then crutches, learning them is its own scene
• Phantom pains, you reach to scratch a foot that isn't there
• /me shifts on the crutch, glancing down at the pinned-up trouser leg

Recovery 7 days till the stump can bear a fitting, the peg leg and the limp are forever.·Doctor, urgently

Septicemia, the red streaks reached your armpit before the doctor got his knife in. He opens and drains every pocket, packs the tracks with carbolic gauze, and tells your friends the next two nights decide it. You burn and rave and call out names, and on the third dawn the fever finally stumbles.

• Two nights of raging delirium, secrets, dead friends, old sins, all aired
• Bedridden 5 days, then shaky, no riding or fighting for 7
• Drainage wounds repacked daily, each one a gritted-teeth affair
• /me burns under the blankets, muttering a name nobody at the bedside recognizes

Recovery 7 days of aggressive drainage and nursing, it was two nights from unwinnable.·Doctor, urgently

Dry gangrene took the small toes, black, shriveled, dead as bootheels. The doctor snips them at the joint almost gently, drops them in a specimen jar, and swears the foot itself is saved. You'll walk again, but the balance never comes back quite the same.

• Two toes gone, a rolling hitch in your gait, permanent
• Foot bandaged and booted loose, no running for 5 days
• The jar sits on the doc's shelf with your name on the label

Recovery 5 days till you can walk the stitches quiet, the new gait is yours to keep.·Doctor required

A thin red line was climbing your limb like a fuse when the doctor caught it. He opens the wound wide, drains it to the sound of your best swearing, and marks the streak's high point in grease pencil. By the second day the red is retreating back down its own trail.

• Wound left open to drain for 3 days, dressings pulled and repacked daily
• Fever and swollen glands for 2 days, weak as a colt
• The pencil mark stays on your skin, you check it hourly and let others see

Recovery 5 days with drainage and carbolic, untreated, the streak finishes its climb.·Doctor required

The flesh at the wound's edge has died in a grey-green rim, and the doctor's cure is a knife: he pares away dead meat until every edge bleeds honest red, then douses the crater in carbolic that burns like judgment. Ugly work, but the limb stays yours.

• A crater of a wound dressed twice daily for 4 days
• No hard use of the limb for 4 days
• A broad, dished scar coming, a story trophy for sleeves-up saloon nights
• /me peels back the dressing to show the raw red bowl where the doc carved the rot away

Recovery 6 days of dressing and rest, he cut it clean, so keep it clean.·Doctor required

A rind of black has crept around the wound like frost on a window. Hospital gangrene, the doc calls it, and he fights it the war way: bromine on a glass rod, pressed to every darkened edge. The smell is chemical, the sensation is unforgettable, and it works.

• Bromine treatments daily for 3 days, heard across camp
• The treated edges scab thick and black before lifting clean
• No riding for 3 days while the edges knit

Recovery 5 days of burn-and-bind, the black stops spreading on day one if you hold still for it.·Doctor required

You noticed it before anyone said it: a faint sweetness off the bandage, the smell every soldier and doctor dreads. The doc unwraps, prods, and finds the rot just starting in one pocket. Hot poultices around the clock and carbolic washes catch it at the door.

• Poultice changed every few hours for 2 days, day and night
• You keep sniffing the bandage and can't stop, say so
• Limb rested and raised for 3 days

Recovery 4 days of round-the-clock poulticing, it turned because you moved fast.·Doctor required

The doctor draws a ring around the angry redness in grease pencil and gives you one job: watch the line. Every few hours, by lamplight if need be, the whole camp leans in to see whether the red has crossed it. On the second day, the redness pulls back inside the ring and stays there.

• The pencil ring on your skin for 2 days, camp ritual of checking it aloud
• Hot poultices three times daily
• Low fever the first night, blankets and broth
• /me holds the lamp close to the pencil line, measuring the redness against it with a thumbnail

Recovery 4 days of poultice and watching, the line held.·Doctor advised

The wound does its own surgery: a sheet of grey dead tissue lifts away whole with the dressing, leaving raw, weeping, living pink underneath. It looks like a horror and smells like one too, but the doc grins, that's the body throwing the rot out the door.

• Raw new flesh dressed daily for 3 days, tender to a breath
• The sloughed dressing is the most disgusting thing camp has seen this month
• No heavy work with the limb for 3 days

Recovery 4 days while the pink skins over, it's healing from the bottom up now.·Doctor advised

One evil night. The fever rides you from dusk to dawn and you talk the whole way, names, debts, a thing you buried and never told a soul. By morning the fever breaks with the abscess, which the doc drains before breakfast, and now you get to find out who was sitting up with you.

• Whoever kept watch heard everything, that's a scene owed
• Drained wound dressed daily for 3 days
• Washed-out and trembling for 1 day
• /me wakes hollow-eyed and asks, too casually, who else was in the room last night

Recovery 4 days once it's drained, the secrets take longer.·Doctor required

The glands in your groin and armpit have swollen to walnuts, the body's pickets falling back under fire. The wound itself drains sour but shallow. Hot compresses on the glands, carbolic on the wound, and the swellings stand down over a few days.

• Tender, visible swellings, you walk and reach carefully for 3 days
• Hot compresses twice daily
• Low evening fevers for 2 nights

Recovery 4 days of compresses and clean dressings, the pickets held.·Doctor advised

The foot below the wound went grey and cold and the camp started whispering saw. The doctor unwinds the bandage and finds it wrapped tight as a tourniquet over the swelling, half strangled, not dead. Loosened, poulticed, and raised on a saddle, the color crawls back by evening.

• Pins and needles agony as the blood returns, a loud hour
• Limb raised and rested for 2 days, rewrapped loose
• You check the toes' color obsessively and narrate the findings
• /me presses a thumbnail to the pale foot and waits, counting, for the pink to come back

Recovery 3 days rested and properly wrapped, the wound still wants its washes.·Doctor required

The dark patch by the wound has the camp muttering about gangrene, so the doc jabs it with a pin without warning you first. You yelp loud enough to spook the horses. He nods, satisfied: dead flesh doesn't holler. It's deep bruising and a sulky wound, nothing the poultice won't manage.

• A poultice and clean dressing daily for 2 days
• You owe the doc for the pin trick and say so, often
• Tender to the touch for 2 days

Recovery 3 days of ordinary care, it was never rot, just neglect.·Doctor advised

The black crust that looked like death's calling card lifts at one corner to show clean pink beneath, an eschar, the doc says, a scab with ambition. He trims the loose edge, paints the rim with iodine, and tells you to quit picking at it.

• Keep the crust dry and unpicked for 3 days, visibly difficult
• A dramatic-looking black patch that makes for great saloon viewing
• Mild tightness when the limb flexes

Recovery 3 days and the crust lifts on its own, pink and honest beneath.·No doctor needed

The rot-stink that had you rehearsing goodbyes turns out to be the bread-and-milk poultice itself, gone off in the heat and riper than a dead skunk. The wound beneath is pink, granulating, and healing exactly as it should. The camp votes the old poultice a burial with honors.

• Fresh poultice daily for 2 days, somebody else mixes it this time
• You sniff every dressing before it goes on now
• The story of the poultice funeral follows you

Recovery 2 days of clean dressings, it was healing all along.·No doctor needed

The dark stain spreading from the wound is blood settling along the muscle, a bruise the size of a dinner plate wearing gangrene's colors without its teeth. It's sore, spectacular, and shifting through purple, green, and yellow like a slow sunset.

• A show-stopping bruise for days, exhibit it
• Stiff and sore on that side for 1 day
• The wound itself only needs a daily wipe and wrap

Recovery 2 days sore, then just the colors fading.·No doctor needed

The swollen wound splits open in the night and bleeds bright, living red all over your bedroll, frightening at midnight, wonderful by lamplight. Dead flesh doesn't bleed like that. It drains what it needed to, and the swelling is halved by morning.

• One ruined bedroll and a story about waking in blood
• A clean dressing changed once, then done
• Bragging rights: 'my blood runs too mean to rot'

Recovery A day or two of tidiness, the wound sorted itself.·No doctor needed

The doc studies the black-stained foot by lamplight, licks his thumb, rubs, and comes up with dye. Your soaked boots have been bleeding bootblack and tannin into your sock for two days. He charges you a full dollar for the scare you gave everybody.

• A camp-wide laugh at your expense, wear it well
• The wound itself needs only a wash and 1 day's rest
• You dry your boots by the fire religiously now

Recovery A day, mostly to launder the sock.·No doctor needed

You unwrap the neglected dressing to a nightmare, the wound is crawling with blowfly maggots, but the doctor grabs your arm before you can scrape them out. He's read the war journals: they've eaten only the dead flesh and left the living pink and clean as a surgeon's dream. Days of rot, undone by flies.

• The cleanest wound bed the doc has ever seen, he says so publicly
• One long shudder you're entitled to perform forever
• Heals faster than it has any right to, light dressing for 2 days
• /me stares into the dressing, goes pale, and lets the doc explain why this is good news

Recovery 2 days once the doc rinses his colleagues out, cleaner than any knife could've left it.·No doctor needed