the calm art of suturing// tigs&jimmy

In this moment, you almost wished you had kept your mouth shut when Flynn was showing you around the hospital in six. You could have witnessed a plastic surgery and maybe then you would have seen how one were to properly stitch up a wound.

Not like you did not know how to stitch someone up but no one in the backwoods ever gave a damn or two about precision. You worked with what you had and did the best damn job you could in that moment. There was not a lot of material to go around so you had no other choice to get scrappy and make due.

At the first aid station there were signs posted about giving a step-by-step instruction on the most basic kinds of sutures. Obviously you were familiar with the simple interrupted suture, it was one of the first things you were allowed to do when you started working at the hospital. There were days where you were ushered from one patient to another stitching up wounds whilst the actual doctors attended to the actual medical emergencies. Hospital policy was to get people in and out as quickly as possible. No doubt that you could perform these kind of sutures in your sleep, that however did not mean they were the most perfectly executed.

Without the pressure of the high based makeshift hospital, you had time to really focus on what you were doing. Make sure that the stitches aligned on either side of the wound and that they were each equal lengths apart from each other. You held your breath as you passed the needle through the fake skin provided at the station. In some ways it felt just as real as any wound would but so different. There was no one complaining about pain, or a child scared for their parent’s wellbeing. The calmness of it all almost threw you off, you missed the hectic and uncertainty all.

Most of all you missed the thankful look on those kids’ eyes when they saw their drunken no-good parent would be okay. The ability to make some feel seen just for a second.

Your hands do not shake as you pull the string all the way through after hooking at both sides. Carefully you tie the final knot on the final stitch of the wound.

Far from perfection.

Why did it even matter that much anyway? Afterall you never intended on becoming a surgeon. No, you wanted to heal an entirely different kind of wound, the kind that could not be stitched up with just a needle and a thread. A sigh escapes your lips as you set down the suture kit. Whatever no one would care in the games how the stitches looked like, there would always be something much bigger to worry about. Your damn freaking life.