OKLAHOMA CITY: AFTER THE BOMB : Victims Struggle to Come to Terms With Blast Injuries : Hospitals: The extent of wounds shocks survivors and doctors. Some hurt by glass won’t know for months if they can still see.

A fat patch of gauze covers Stan Rombaun’s right eye. His forearm and left hand, with its two broken fingers, are swathed in bandages. Cuts and stitches have etched much of his body with patterns of angry red and black.

It will be months before he knows if he still has vision in his eye, which was sliced by the glass that showered on him in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. He was told he glistened with glass when brought into the St. Anthony Hospital emergency room.

The 63-year-old state job counselor and Air Force veteran is one of the dozens whose wounds from the bombing will linger in ways yet unknown long after they leave the hospital.

Some are still unconscious. Others have so many different injuries their doctors can barely remember them all. Their shattered and slashed bodies resemble those of battlefield victims more than anything normally seen in this city’s hospitals.

“Many people do not realize the enormity of the injuries of the people who survived,” emphasized Dr. J. Andy Sullivan, who had to amputate the leg of one woman before she could be freed from the rubble. “We tend to look at a death count, and then we say 300 injured. But some of these people’s injuries are of such a serious nature that their lives will never be the same.”

The first Monday after a bomb tore through the federal building, his department’s weekly review of unusual and complex cases was dominated by bombing victims.

“There were some joints that were just totally smashed. Nothing really left to be put back together,” said Sullivan, who heads the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine.

As he looked at the X-rays, Sullivan said, he was struck by “just the sheer destruction and devastation of the human body that I saw.”

From his hospital window, Rombaun has a patch-eyed view of the ravaged federal building a few blocks away. Most of the time he keeps the blinds closed, preferring to look at a spray of flowers.

“The more I stay, the more pissed off I get,” he said on his 11th day in St. Anthony. “I say: ‘What did I do to deserve this? I’m not the government. I’m just a person.’ ”

Of his injuries, his eye worries him the most: “You see in the movies when they unwrap the bandages and say, ‘I can see.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

Rombaun was blown across his fifth-floor office in the federal building and later dragged out of the debris by a couple of co-workers.

“I don’t feel sorry for myself,” added the grandfather of twin boys. “I don’t know what I feel. I’m mad I’m here, but I’m glad I’m alive.”

His budding anger is typical of the injured, said Dr. R. Murali Krishna, a psychiatrist and St. Anthony’s chief of staff. This bombing, more than an earthquake or other natural disaster, can breed a fury in its victims, because it was a willful act of pain and death.

Unexpressed, such anger can take its toll, even accentuating and prolonging a sense of physical pain, Krishna said. Venting helps. He tells of a patient who began stuttering but seems to have stopped now that she’s talked about how furious she is.

Some of the injured have a sense of shock and disbelief. Some are emotionally numb or panicky. One woman in her 20s clings to her mother. Another patient is racked with fears that bombing suspect Timothy J. McVeigh is going to barge into her hospital room and grab her wounded face.

Perhaps more than splintered and crushed bones, it is the slashing cuts from the building’s glass facade that mark many of the victims.

Ophthalmologist Forrest C. Lawrence said they look as if someone fired glass at them from a cannon.

One patient has about 25 gashes all over her body. One of her eyes was ruptured. Her left foot, ankle, hand and some fingers are fractured. One of her lungs collapsed. She has a minor head injury. Her shoulder is separated.

“She has so many different problems that I’m just finding out some of them,” said Thomas P. Janssen, a soft-spoken orthopedic surgeon who is also treating the woman. She is quiet, he says, too consumed by physical pain to yet grasp what has happened to her.

She cannot remember going to work the morning of the blast, and she awoke from heavy sedation last week to find herself in an intensive care unit, her body brutalized and many of her co-workers dead.

“She was looking at the TV six days after it happened,” Janssen recalled. “She’s just come to and she’s looking at the TV and they’re running a list of people by, and she’s saying, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” as she recognizes names.

He said the woman, about 30, will not be able to engage in athletic activity, but she will be able to walk and use her hands. Her biggest problem, he predicted, will be her eye. As in Rombaun’s case, it will be months before the question of whether she can see with it is answered.

“These are unique injuries,” Janssen said of the bombing wounds. “I’ve taken care of patients with lacerations--but never like this.”

The morning of the bombing, Janssen and Lawrence rushed to the emergency room along with many of their colleagues. They worked frantically, but ultimately treated fewer people than they had anticipated.

“We were very disappointed when they didn’t get in,” Janssen said, his voice trailing off in sadness. As he spoke in his office, his family returned from the funeral of one of those who didn’t make it: the father of one of his children’s classmates.

When all the bodies are recovered, the death toll is expected to reach 200--about the same number treated at St. Anthony, which took the largest number of patients because it is so close to the Murrah building.

As was the case at other hospitals, most were treated and sent home the same day. All told, fewer than 100 of the approximately 400 injured were admitted to various hospitals, and the majority have since been discharged.

Their trauma is acknowledged by the scores of children’s letters and handmade cards covering hospital walls. One long banner is decorated with hand signs cut from construction paper, the work of the hearing-impaired preschool children of Lafayette Elementary School in San Diego.

Nearby in Children’s Hospital, a letter from a boy named Chad says: “Dear friend, I’m so sorry this happened to you. Don’t put yourself down if you get out of the hospital with injuries that will seare you for life. Everybody knows that you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Dana Bradley is one of those who will leave seared. She is the 20-year-old woman whose leg was amputated by Sullivan. Her limb was only one of her losses. Her mother and two children--an infant and a toddler--are among the dead and the missing.

She is already hopping around the Oklahoma University Hospital corridors with the help of a walker and a physical therapist. Her surgery and rehabilitation will be free.

But she says little and is emotionally fragile, Sullivan said. “Mrs. Bradley has been severely mentally traumatized. Her rehabilitation will have to take care of her mental as well as her physical well-being.”

Still, Sullivan said, in general the physical recovery of blast victims has “if anything, gone better than we thought.”

There are smaller victories as well. A St. Anthony patient who had barely uttered a word visibly brightened when Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman walked into her room during a round of visits the team made last week.

“Are you here to see me?” she asked, and then began talking.

Krishna also said he has noticed a remarkable revaluation of people’s lives since the bombing, and not just by survivors. Many people are losing their sense of invulnerability--particularly strong in a state where the last major disaster was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s--and acknowledging that life is limited.

“They’re questioning the material values our society gives,” he said.

At the same time, they are honing their sense of identity as Oklahomans, who have reacted to a horrible event with compassion and love.

As one nursing supervisor declared: “We’re proud to be Okies.”