Under the Knife(4)

“Okay.” Receding footsteps. A crisp, artificial click, like someone tugging on the latch of a refrigerator. A puff of warm of air.

… sounds like an operating-room blanket warmer …

Approaching footsteps. “Got some.”

“Dr. Wu?”

A hand was on her shoulder, nudging her toward consciousness. There was a thick, coppery taste in her mouth, as if she’d been sucking on pennies, and a pain in her head, enveloping her left temple and snaking toward her left ear. Without opening her eyes, she perceived that she was lying flat on her back, on a padded surface. Her arms were lying at her sides.

“Dr. Wu?” The hand shaking her shoulder applied more pressure.

Rita opened her eyes. The darkness surrendered itself to blinding brightness. The pain in her head blossomed into an agony—an ice pick driving its way through her left eye and punching its way out the back of her skull.

She gasped. God, how it hurt. The light was a rabid dog clawing at her eyes. She squeezed them shut and groaned. Her stomach lurched, as if the light had reached through her eye sockets, down her throat, and given her gut a good, hard tug.

Oh, God.

“Dr. Wu?” The first voice, which a dim recess of her clouded brain now registered as familiar, sounded worried, but also more insistent. “Are you okay?” Pause. “Can I help you?”

The pain made it difficult for her to concentrate. No, not just the pain. Something else, too. Her brain was a jumbled slurry of inputs and outputs, scrambled up in a way that pain alone could not explain, as if all of her trains of thought had been dumped into a blender at high speed.

Why? some part of her mind asked.

Who cares? another replied.

She let herself slide back toward the void.

“Dr. Wu.” Commanding now, and louder. Unconsciousness, inviting as it was, was no longer an option.

Rita opened her eyes and groaned, squinting against the light.

“Wendy,” said the first voice. “Move the spotlight out of her face.”

“Sure,” said the breathy woman.

The light dimmed and, with it, the pain in her head.

Rita blinked and looked at the anxious face peering into hers. In a more alert state, she might have been surprised. Astounded, even. But all she could muster now was a vague sense of puzzlement.

Lisa Rodriguez, one of her operating-room nurses, was the owner of both the first voice and the hand now resting reassuringly on Rita’s shoulder. Lisa wasn’t, of course, hers in the strict sense of the word. But Rita, like many surgeons, used possessive pronouns to describe people and things in the operating rooms she supervised. Her nurses. Her patients. Her surgical instruments.

Lisa was standing next to her. Or, rather, over her, as if Rita were one of her own patients, stretched out on a table in her operating room, over which she and Lisa traded scalpels and gossip most working days.

What’s going on?

Lisa’s blunt features, framed by a pale blue surgical cap that corralled her curly black hair, registered equal parts astonishment and concern.

Standing behind her, and to one side, was another woman, also an OR nurse—

(Wendy)

—a skinny young woman with a long face. A single tuft of blond hair, glowing with a peroxide lacquer, poked out from underneath her blue cap and tumbled halfway down her forehead. With her puffy, bouffant surgical cap and emaciated frame, she looked like a mop standing on end. She was carrying some folded white blankets, tucked under one of her arms.

Wendy looked just as astonished as Lisa but not nearly as concerned.

In fact, something less seemly seemed to flicker behind Wendy’s eyes (pleasure? glee?), which were as blue as her surgical cap and ringed by turquoise eye shadow. Both women were dressed in dark blue scrubs.

Just like the scrubs we wear in the operating room.

“Lisa?” God, she could barely form the word. Her tongue was concrete.

Where am I?

Without sitting up, Rita turned her head to one side and spotted dark floor tiles lying about three feet below her. She turned her head to the other side and saw the same thing. She concluded, dully, that she was lying on some kind of padded surface suspended off the floor at about waist height.

She started to sit up …

… but something circling her chest, something flat and broad, seized her and yanked her back down again.

“Hey.”

The rear of her head snapped down on the padded mat. Ouch! The impact worsened her headache, and she moved her hands up to cradle her aching forehead.

Or tried to.

But she couldn’t.

Because her arms were pinned to her sides.

“Hey!”

A new emotion. Not panic—her senses were still too blunted to generate panic—but Rita felt an abrupt unease that raised her from one level of semiconsciousness to a slightly-less-semi one; and she perceived, for the first time, that she lacked all control over her current situation. Rita hated not being in control. Ever. She struggled to free her arms.

“Here,” Lisa said. “Let me help you, Dr. Wu.”

She watched as Lisa, in one smooth motion, reached down to Rita’s side and grasped a shiny metallic buckle through which wound a black band. It looked like an enormous seat belt. Lisa lifted the buckle and loosened the black band, which was pinning Rita’s torso and arms to the foam pads she was lying on.