Page 35 - Demo

31Eventually the day for the highlight of the week arrived. We were going to fire 4 torpedoes. However, at this point one of the sailors reported sick. Throughout the week I was shadowing the first officer and as we did not have a doctor onboard, he was responsible for all medical matters. We both went forward to where the sailor was lying moaning on his bunk. The first thing was to take his temperature and so a thermometer was found, I think from the engine area. Anyway, it was extremely long probably about 18 inches and so for the next few minutes, the sailor lay there with this enormous thermometer in his mouth while the first officer consulted his medical book. This contained a series of flow diagrams. We looked at the page probably called stomach pains. There was a diagram of a man lying down and a caption saying press here attached to some part of the abdomen. The officer duly pressed and asked if it hurt. This went on for a while with the areas to be pressed changing depending on the response. Eventually the decision was made that it was an appendicitis and so he would have to go to hospital. The Captain was furious about the delay but we had to land the sailor. We sailed into Plymouth and tied up to a jetty in the port. The sailor was strapped to a stretcher and carried out through the torpedo loading hatch and disappeared to hospital. We now needed to get underway to carry on with the firing exercise. The jetty we were alongside of had heavy oak steps coming down from it and they were between the sonar dome and the sail. I did not see how we got there but the Captain gave very clear instructions to the tug that came to take us out to pull the stern of the submarine out in such a way that the steps did not hit the sonar dome. The tug captain acknowledged all that and then did the opposite such that the dome struck the steps which had probably been there since Drake%u2019s time. The result was one nil to the steps and our already cross captain went apoplectic. The steps had made a hole in the dome. After a certain amount of time arguing between the tug captain and our captain